Triggering images as MIDI events?

[Andre]

Hi,

Apologies in advance if this has been asked 50 times before - the search engine only returned error messages ...

I was curious to know if there were plans to facilitate MIDI event triggers?

Live inter-active example: an entire presentation could be mapped to MIDI, where individual MIDI notes could fire off different sequences of images. This would allow you to "perform" any image in any order, straight off a MIDI controller.

[A variation of this live trigger mode could be mapped to a regular QWERTY keyboard, I guess. But you'd be limited to approx 40 events.]

Another example would be be simply synching a MIDI track to the presentation and letting it run. Then it would be case of assigning just one note to trigger each slide advance.

As I said, please point me to any previous threads if this has been hammered out before.

Thanks!

Andre

[Ken Cox]

Andre

Welcome to the forum

neat but

when one converts to dvd, vcd,svcd the midi's will no longer work -- midi is computer generated music

so suggest you use small wav or mp3 files and i think it could be done as the program stands

but will take a lot of diddlin'

ken

[LumenLux]

Welcom Andre to the forum.

Ken is of course correct regarding PTE as it stands. And I think Midi has never come up in the context you are thinking about. I for one would like to hear more of your thoughts in that direction. I guess you are thinking of a "new use" for PTE. What comes to my mind is an audio visual presentation based on methods apparently used in rock concerts? What would you see as "advantages" of combining PTE with Midi? Would Igor have to write a PTE module to run in a midi instruction channel or do you envision PTE could contain a midi method for some benefit?

[Andre]

Thanks for the welcome.

OK, I guess I'm curious about different methods of triggering individual images within a sequence. This means in any order at any time.The question is: how could you tag each image? Would MIDI be possible? Could it be done with a QWERTY keyboard?

I'm going to call this capability "Live Play Mode".

Let's start with MIDI.

Obviously you'd build a sequence of images without sound and simply use MIDI to trigger the image event as well as the sound event. (i.e. the same MIDI info goes to a software sound module / synth / sampler etc, so you use MIDI to play both the PTE sequence and whatever sound modules you choose.). As I said, this means you could play the images live, using a MIDI controller.

You’d have a lot a fexibility in how you could present the one sequence of images. That's one creative possibility.

I've thought about it - it could be quite a lot of work for Igor to implement. Unless of course Igor is already familar with MIDI and can see a way of introducing a MIDI event timeline that would sit under the exisiting timeline. Or better, he might find a third party software module that he could use to translate PTE events into MIDI and vice versa. So from his perspective I'd imagine it's a matter of priorities as well as enthusiasm from PTE users.

That said, a simpler option is that "Live Play Mode" could be handled on a QWERTY keyboard using the exisitng keys and a well chosen modifier (a bit more than the 40 approx events I suggested earlier). These keys I’ll call “Hot Keys”.

Here is an example to illustrate. Lets say you've made a presentation about heritage architecture in Freedonia, using whatver effects - pan / zoom / overlays etc. During question time someone asks to see such and such image again.

Because you've tagged each transition sequence within the presentation, you can simply hit a Hot Key and recall that image with or without the transition sequence. (i.e use Page Break to pause it, use the same key to replay it, perhaps this time with pan and zoom or whatever transition effects you have pre-programmed etc).

So this might be easier. All the flags used on the PTE timeline (to trigger image advance) could be programmed as Hot Key events.

All up, you can access any image on the timeline directly, performing everything from a keyboard, without the need to go to a on-screen menu.

I hope this makes some sort of sense!

Andre