This is an excerpt from the MacSpotter manual. It is intended as a guide to some of the features that make MacSpotter such a powerful tool for the sound supervisor, ADR editor, or assistant whose job it is to prepare ADR lists for use on the recording stage. This brief guide is not a replacement for the full manual.
If you received this document with a demonstration version of MacSpotter, feel free to try it out to find out how much easier it could make your life. The demonstration version is limited to only six Cues in a list, and only three characters or comments; otherwise it is fully functional, including printing and saving files to disk.
You should also feel free to pass copies onto anyone who may be interested, so long as you also pass on this document, both versions, and any Read Me file that was on the disk.
You may not alter this software in any way.
Instant Expert™
Customizing the Window
You can adjust the Cue List window in a variety of ways, and save those adjustments as the new default appearance for the window. You make these adjustments either directly on the screen, using click and drag; from the menus; or from the MacSpotter Options… dialog box.
Adjusting Column Width Click on the thick bar separating columns in the headers and drag it to adjust the width. These steps change the width of the column to the left of the cursor. The columns can be as wide as you want or as narrow as six pixels, which would basically hide the column.
Setting the Font, Size, and Style; for a given field in all the Cues, and for all Cues added to the list. To do so, double-click on the appropriate header, which will cause the field to be highlighted in all the Cues. Next, select the font, size, and style you want. Each field can have different settings.
Setting the Time Standard to your preferred flavour of SMPTE code or film Feet/Frames from the Layout menu. Simply select your desired format fromt he menu, likewise the video reference if you’re using 24 fps film.
Line Numbers. You can generate them individually or allow the program to generate them for you. When done by the program, the Line Numbers can include the Character abbreviation, the reel number, and a number starting at 001. You can choose which items you want to use in the MacSpotter Options dialog box.
Displaying Hours in SMPTE.When MacSpotter is displaying in SMPTE, you can hide the hours portion of the time fields in the Cue List, though not in the header. You can do so with an option in the MacSpotter Options dialog. This option saves repeated entry of the hours, as well as precious space.
.SMPTE Offset. When MacSpotter is displaying in Feet/Frames, you can set a SMPTE offset via an option in the MacSpotter Options dialog. This option avoids the conversion of 02:00:00:00 to 10800’00.
The .Cues Per Page setting in the MacSpotter Options dialog determines how many Cues the program will try to fit on a page. If a Cue is too big to fit, one less cue will fit on that page. The page breaks will always come between Cues, rather than in the middle.
You can set MacSpotter to show Page breaks on-screen the page boundaries appear as three-pixel-wide lines between columns and rows. The Layout menu provides two selections: Paginate Now; and Paginate Automatically. If you select Paginate Automatically, the boundaries are constantly updated. These calculations can be time-consuming when the list is large. In such cases, turn off Paginate Automatically by selecting it again. When you need to know where the boundaries are, select Paginate Now.
Once you’ve gotten these settings the way you like them, open the MacSpotter Options dialog again and select the All Documents radio button. All new documents will now be created with the same settings as the one you just set up. You can, of course, change any of them at any time, either for one document, or for all new documents.
Picture Changes
MacSpotter makes dealing with Picture changes simple and straightforward.
Adding Time
Specify a time in the reel and how much to add, and that’s it. MacSpotter ripples forward all cues that start after the insertion point by the amount of the addition.
Deleting Time
Specify a time of footage and how much to remove, and, again, that’s it. MacSpotter ripples back all cues that start after the deletion point by the amount of the deletion.
You can save the deleted section as a separate Cue List, which is then just like any other Cue List. Such saving is useful when a scene is lifted from one place in a reel and may later be inserted elsewhere in the reel, or even in a different reel. These lifts can be kept on disk and re-inserted following a future picture change (… in the unlikely event that directors or picture editors might change their minds.)
Inserting a Cue List
Specify an insertion point and choose a Cue List to insert. MacSpotter will add all of the cues from the other list to the current list, with times relative to the insertion point. It will also ripple forward all cues that start after the insertion point by the amount of the addition.
Sharing Information Between Documents
MacSpotter uses Publish; and Subscribe to share information, freeing you from the drudgery of entering the same information again and again. Publish and Subscribe is similar to Copy and Paste, except for one massive difference; once two documents have been linked by Publishing from one and Subscribing from the other, changes made in the first will be reflected in the second with no further action from you, even if the document isn’t open at the time.
Once a connection’s made, it’s always there, unless you choose to remove it.
For a complete explanation of Publish and Subscribe, see your System 7 documentation, or any of the many splendid books on the subject.
There are three types of information that can be shared: Characters, Comments, and Line Counts.
You can use Line Counts to share the number of lines each character has in a reel with a Master List, which keeps a running total. In order for the Line Counts in the Master List to work properly, all the individual Cue Lists must share the list of characters, using Publish and Subscribe.
Publishing a Character List, place the cursor in the Character field of a Cue and select Create Publisher… from the Edit menu. You’ll be presented with a dialog box much like the standard Save dialog box, and asked to name a file and decide where to store it on the disk. Completing these steps creates a file called an Edition file, which is a small file used to link Publishers and Subscribers.
Subscribing to a Character List, place the cursor in the Character field of a Cue and select Subscribe To… from the Edit menu. You’ll be presented with a dialog much like the standard Open dialog box, and asked to find an existing Edition file. In the interests of potential convenience, the last Edition file used will be pre-selected. Find the file you want and select Open. The entries Published from another list will now show up in the Character list in the current list.
Comment Lists work in exactly the same way as Character lists.
Publishing a Line Count, select the Line Count field in the header of the window and select Create Publisher… from the Edit menu. This task works just as described above.
Subscribing to a Line Count, open a Master List, or create a new Master list by selecting New Master List from the File menu. With the Master List window in front, select Subscribe To … from the Edit menu and choose a Line Count that had been published previously. The information now appears in the grid in the window. Just like the Characters above, this link is dynamic; any time you add or delete a line from the list, the count in the Master List is updated automatically. You can subscribe to as many Line Counts as you wish from the Master List.
A Sample Working Set-up
Our mythical project has ten reels. Each reel will be a separate Cue List. First, open a new Cue List, which we’ll call Reel 1. Open the Characters… dialog and add the characters that show up in more than one reel. You can do so before you have any Cues in the list. Then, click the Character field of a Cue. Since this information can be shared, Create Publisher… is now enabled. Select it and proceed as described above, naming the Edition file, let’s say, “Battleship Potempkin II Characters.”
You can now use the same procedure to publish the list of Comments, naming it, “Battleship Potempkin II Comments.”
Next, use the mouse to select the line count, which now says 1. Again, select Create Publisher…, this time saving the Edition file as “Battleship Potempkin II Lines Reel 1.”
You can either continue working on Reel 1, or go ahead and create another Cue List for another reel; for this example, we’ll create a new Cue List for Reel 2. Notice that the new Cue List has the Production and Editor fields automatically filled in to match those from Reel 1, assuming that you’ve previously filled those in. With the new empty Cue List window in front, click the mouse in the Character field of the empty first Cue, then select Subscribe To… and choose the file “Battleship Potempkin II Characters.” As if by magic, the characters that you entered for Reel 1 are now available for Reel 2. The really useful part is that if you add a character to the list for Reel 1, that character will also show up in Reel 2. Even if you change the spelling of a character’s name in Reel 1, the change will show up in Reel 2, whether the two lists are open simultaneously or not.
If there are characters who will show up in one reel only, you can add them to the Cue List for that reel.
Now, still using the list for Reel 2, Publish the Line Count, just as we did for Reel 1, this time calling it “Battleship Potempkin II Lines Reel 2.”
Continue working, creating lists for each reel, subscribing to the Character list from Reel 1 and Publishing the Line Count from each reel.
Create a Master List by selecting New Master List from the File menu. With the Master List window in front, select Subscribe To… from the Edit menu and select one of the Line Counts that you published earlier. As you Subscribe to each Line Count, the grid expands and the totals for each character are updated. Remember that this link is dynamic; once you’ve set it up, you can save the Master List as “Battleship Potempkin II Line Counts” and open it only when you need it. Whenever you open it, the Master List will reflect the counts for each reel, as of the last time that you saved that reel’s Cue List.
This seems more complex than it is in practice. Don’t be put off; it only takes seconds to set up all the Publishers and Subscribers, and think how impressed your friends will be.
Printing the Cue List
Whatever you print will look almost exactly like what you see onscreen. The one difference is that the Arrows for the popup menus won’t print. Use the Select Characters… entry from the Layout menu to select which characters you want to show on the list.
You can set the column widths differently for different printouts. For example, the printout for the talent doesn’t need the Scribble panel with the track numbers, so you can make that column so narrow that it won’t show; in a similar vein, you could make all the dialogue in large type.
MacSpotter, Instant Expert, and the BKMS logo are trademarks of BKMS.
Macintosh is registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.
