Q Lab sound design for show productiona
Music and Sound effects are an important part of any play performance. Sadly, too often it is assumed that simply giving a CD of sound files to the stage manager will do the job. That is indeed step one, but the bulk of the necessary work involves taking those cues and ordering them into a stack and adding fade cues, loops, and autofollows, and translating thst stack into a readable format for the stage manager to follow. For example:
1: Sound cue 4 plays at 0% volume (autofollow next cue)
2: Sound cue 4 volume increases to 80% volume for beginning of song with 10 second fade in
3: Sound cue 4 volume decreases to 50% while actress is singing with a 5 second fade out
4: Sound cue 4 volume increases to 80% as actress starts to dance with a 5 second fade in
5: Sound cue 4 volume decreases to 0% as actress sits in SR chair with a 5 second fade out (auto stop as fade is complete)
See that? Your 25 sound cues just turned into 100+, but with good reason. Everything is perfect and all guesswork is eliminated.
Q Lab is the industry standard forL.A. Theatre and is an essential tool if a show is planning on having sound or projections.
Additionally, most theatres have a projector included in the rental of the space, but many shows never bother to use it. Q lab incorporates sound as well as video projection into a single list of cues and with very little effort a show's production value can increase immensely by using this tool you have at your disposal.
See
Q lab demonstration
Here's an example of different effects I've done with Q-Lab in the past. This is by no means everything that CAN be done, but this should give you a good idea of what can be done with multiple layers of video and still images and the various effects that can be done using Q lab. For the purposes of this video everything has been set to be 100% automatic, but every cue here could potentially be set to a GO button to take a cue whenever needed.
Style needs:
For video cues ProRes 422 Pro are best
If you don't know what that is, mp4s are fine
For still images jpgs or PNGs are best
For sound cues AIFF files are best
Sample cue sheet ----->
This will help to show in detail the best way to describe ypour exact needs for the Q Lab stack. You don't need to bother putting cue NUMBERS in, as they always change. Just a simple order of cues, including when the sound/video starts, the page it happens in the script, the exact cue line/visual cue, and a simple description of what the sound/video is. It is highly preferable for the files to be named for what they are, so instead of a bunch of pictures named "unnamed-1, unnamed-2, unnamed-3, etc" instead have "house.jpg, trainstation.jpg, and flowergarden.jpg" You get the idea.