I’m sure you remember many years ago someone built a fairly nice CasparCG client focused on video playback. This must have been almost a decade ago now so perhaps you actually don’t remember. Either way, I needed something just like that a couple of years ago and threw something together. It’s been sitting on the shelf mostly with myself using it whenever I needed to do playback control over a standalone CasparCG server.
Well, I’ve recently moved on from my last job and have finally had the time to polish it up a bit so here I am sharing with the world. Exciting!
Tapedeck for CasparCG is a web based client that focuses on providing a simple user interface:
Every channel gets it’s own playlist and you just drag media to it from the library. It’s up to 4 channels for now but the limit is kind of arbitrary. Just seemed like a good number for a CasparCG server.
Inside the playlist each item can be edited with in and out points, for convenience there is a context menu where you can play just the last 10 seconds. Useful for rehearsals!
Each player also exposes a special page that has an overlay with the filename and timing information. You can use this in combination with a channel route to create a monitoring output in the multiview.
To sweeten the deal even further the software pretends to be a hyperdeck on the network so you can control it directly from an Atem. It will also be happy to talk to Companion through that.
I’m very curious to hear your thoughts. I have some ideas for things to add still, I can see some use for a more broadcast-y protocol for triggers as after all not everything uses an Atem. It could also be fun to add some support for triggering graphics from timecode, I used to have that but it wasn’t as easy to set up. Could be fun to rebuild in the world of GDD’s and Ograf’s though!
Looks fabulous, really cool!
Will buy and test it out, I get a lot of questions for this.
Does it take OSC? so it can be triggered by, lets say, LiveEdit?
Hey,
this looks so great! I was looking for exactly something like this when I started with CasparCG!
Does it support - or have you considered - GPIO / TCP / RS422 support for Sony switchers, for example?
And I’m sure you can use Hotkeys to connect with different Controller like X-Keys, right?
I really like the simplicity and especially the superimposes timecode and clipname!
I was thinking something along the lines of VDCP or AMP. I’m not sure exactly what flavour would work well with the Sony’s. For protocols that aren’t IP-based I’m not quite sure how to approach them as of now. I have used the Visual Productions iocore2 boxes for gpio previously and those worked quite nice? From what I remember those can already send out osc commands so should be a matter of config then.
There’s also the non-trivial issue of testing a serial protocol that I have no devices for
Not hotkeys yet and I need to give some thought as to how it could work well. You only have 1 spacebar and there can be multiple players for example. Maybe contextual hotkeys could work but I have a feeling that would hamper an XKeys setup. Probably for now I would advise using Companion.
I’m not that fimiliar with GPIO, RS422, … too. Just know that it still play some role in control rooms. I played around with an newer Sony Switcher and found out that you can send TCP/IP command with macros. It worked great with the CasparCG Server directily, to call single clips. So controlling a playlist with this (and maybe playing by Crosspoint change) would be nice
Good point, too
Companion sounds good - I have the feeling that my Playout- Colleagues would not be happy with mouse clicks and I see a lot of X-Keys, “pressing Hotkeys” with this, thats why I asked
