Basic Setup

Overlay Windows and the Blue Preview Frame

Streamers works by rendering visual cues onto any number of transparent overlay windows that float over other windows such as a sequencer's movie window. Since Streamers does not automatically know where to overlay its drawing, you will need to position its window(s) appropriately.

To make this task easier, Streamers starts by default with a blue preview frame that indicates where each overlay window is. Once the preview frame is in position, it can be hidden by pressing "P" or selecting "Show/Hide Preview Frames" from the Display menu. At this point, the streamer window will be completely invisible—but still there—and waiting for a visual event to be triggered.

(For more information on manipulating streamer windows, see Working With Streamer Windows.)

Basic MIDI Setup

When Streamers is launched, it creates a virtual MIDI endpoint which will appear in your sequencer's list of MIDI devices. Streamers will listen to this endpoint, waiting for a predefined MIDI message to trigger a streamer or punch. Alternatively, Streamers can listen to an existing virtual or physical MIDI port, allowing for more complex MIDI setups (and for triggering from external devices such as Auricle). For most situations, however, the virtual MIDI endpoint is sufficient.

Sequencing Events

Every event in Streamers can be triggered by a MIDI note, system exclusive (sysex) message, or both. In the case of punches and clicks, all you need to do is place the appropriate MIDI message in your sequencer at the time that the event needs to be triggered, and make sure that event gets sent to Streamers.

Streamers and ADR beeps require an extra time-shifting step, because they lead up to a hit point rather than being triggered directly at it. For example, since a 3' streamer takes 2 seconds to travel across the screen, it needs to be triggered exactly 2 seconds before the hit point to which it corresponds. Different sequencers have different shifting functions. For example:

• Digital Performer allows you to select any number of MIDI events and shift them all simultaneously. As long as you select the options to shift 2 seconds earlier, all the events will shift by 2 seconds, independent of tempo and meter (which is appropriate for streamers).
• Pro Tools also has a Shift function, but it works differently on sample-based and tick-based tracks. Set your MIDI track to sample-based and the Shift function will work just like DP (correctly for streamer events). If your MIDI track for streamers is tick-based, Pro Tools will instead calculate the number of ticks needed to shift the start of your selection, and will shift all selected events by that number of ticks; since the exact timing of ticks is tempo-dependent, this will not shift all events correctly if you have any tempo changes.
• Logic will happily shift MIDI events in the same way that Pro Tools does on a tick-based track, which will leave some events out of sync if there are tempo changes. However, it does not currently offer an option to shift multiple MIDI events by a certain number of seconds irrespective of tempo. You can either shift each streamer event individually, or use Streamers's built-in pre-processing.

Since not all sequencers provide a reliable method for shifting all events at once, Streamers v3 incorporates a utility that will shift events in a standard MIDI file regardless of what sequencer created the file. See Pre-Processing MIDI Files for more information.