u/XtianAudio

About a year ago we installed an Extron system for a client. DMP128 flex plus, IN1608XI and some NETPA amps. Controlled from a TLP Pro 1025M with LinkLicense.

System all good - Uses Shure's Microflex NeXt which has been solid.

Client brings in external SI supplier for translation. This wasn't on the brief, but we setup a program out from the flexplus (analogue audio out to an XLR at the rack), with "recorder" labelled on it. Just a little extra as we thought it would come up at some point.

Sure enough - the SI translation reared it's head and they were able to just plug in and get up & running. I was on site for that first test and all worked fine.

Since then, they have had x3 occasions when SI has plugged in, and the system has restarted. I've not seen it happen but sounds like it's a system restart that occurs.

My immediate thought was jack connection on SI box, or phantom from a desk. It seems like both have happened at some point, but the most recent setup in which it happened was:

Analogue out from 128 > SI Active DI box > SI QU16 desk.

It seems they are using the active DI box to reduce it to mic level, and using phantom from that desk to power the active DI.

Phantom should be no problem. They are using Klark Teknik or BSS DI's - so should be transformer isolated.

I can't confirm if earth lift was lifted during setup. In theory it \*shouldn't\* matter.

My thoughts are:

1. SI tech has forgotten to put the DI box inline. Sent phantom to the 128.

2. DI is inline, but earth is not lifted. System is plugged in, desk turned on, and some spurious current spike down earth which has caused the 128 to go into protect mode which has caused a system reset.

3. Earth was lifted during setup, which leaves me to think the only fix is to shutdown the 128 when patching. Not ideal.

Points 1 & 2 could be fixed by me installing a transformer isolated and having the earth permanently lifted on that feed. So i'm really hoping it's one of those!

I'm having a site visit next week and will take along a transformer isolator and a few cables to get that patched in without having to hack up the cabling too much.

So essentially looking for any other tips & tricks from installers that have had a similar issue before!

I’ve had spates of enjoying running over the years. Usually I’ll run for a few months, then have a long break.

I always enjoyed it, but life just got in the way most of the time. I did the same thing with all sorts of exercise - gym, squash, etc.

The last 5 years, I’ve committed to boxing, training & sparring weekly. One of my sparring partners told me he’s running regular 5ks, so I decided I’d lace up the trainers again.

I dug out my 12 year old asics, did 3 warm up runs over the past 10 days, and yesterday did my 4th where I beat my 5k PR! Haven’t ran in 4 years (did a bit when I first started boxing, again in them same old asics), so it was quite surprising. 23:57. Nothing blistering but after 4 years of no running it felt great to hit that.

As a reward (actually, mostly a reward for 5 years of not giving up boxing which I guess has kept me fit enough), I’ve bought myself a pair of Asics NovaBlast 5.

A sad farewell to the old trainers.

And no, I won’t try to get over a decade out of these 😅

Hey! I've just received my skylight calendar and currently trying to get things synced up.

I've added my apple icloud calendar and set it up fully as 2 way.

When I add the calendar, everything syncs immediately.

When I then add a calendar entry on my phone, it does not appear in skylight. Even after 10 minutes.

When I add an entry through the skylight, it pushes to my phone immediately, and also syncs everything else I had added to my phone.

I've then tried deleting the entry made via skylight (to my apple calendar), and nothing happens on the skylight. If I then do anything on the skylight again (i.e. add or delete a calendar entry), it once again seems to force an update and the entries I deleted on my phone all disappear as they should've done.

I've just tried making an entry on my phone again, and I will leave it for an hour and come back to check. If it's not updating at least every hour, i'm going to have to send back and just get a cheap model. Otherwise what's the benefit of getting a skylight?

This is the first time I’ve ever posted about something like this, or even really talked about or considered it.

I’ve been with my fiancée for 11 years, engaged for 4. We have an almost 4 year old daughter.

Over the years I’ve constantly battled with (without realising) constantly trying to achieve something with my life that feels significant.

I was in a band (when we met), and got signed, had a year of full time, had some decent success and eventually it fell apart (for reasons outside of my control).

During that time, she supported me, she encouraged me.

After, I felt a bit lost and carried on with my job of freelance technician in the events industry. I then did a bit of full time and then back to freelance.

At this point my life became about earning enough money to buy a house. My focus in life was getting out of the renters rat race. But as you can imagine, once out of that, it was now get out of the mortgage owners rat race.

Almost once a year, we have the conversation of me being too focused on work and not enough on us.

I know I have that problem. I know I feel like my self worth comes from my personal achievements. That people that don’t work at 110% capacity are just not doing enough and therefore shouldn’t complain about anything because they could do more.

I know I see value in just getting things done. Buy a house. Do the house up. Do it all myself.

I feel like I constantly need to keep pushing. Like if I stop for a moment other than our summer holiday, somehow the wheels will fall off. If I don’t say yes to every single piece of work, something terrible will happen.

This has been compounded by the fact I joined a friends business this year. He is like me. Incredibly hard worker, at the detriment to relationships.

I got to the point where I was earning circa £80k. We have a modest end of terrace house just outside of London, and those of you in a similar situation know that, realistically that doesn’t go anywhere near as far as you’d think when you start earning it. Including the fact that i was clearing my student loan until this year.

The business I’ve joined was a great deal for me. Basically zero buy in. 50%. We’re likely to turnover £1m in the calendar year (I joined in Jan).

But we’ve done this from just thrashing ourselves.

This year, it’s come to a head again. Usually, for a couple of months in better at communicating my work schedule, we do more things, and then it slips back into our lives revolving around my job.

She has always wanted to support me in my targets. I have always asked her opinion on what I should do as I wouldn’t want to do something she doesn’t agree with, but realistically she would say yes because she doesn’t really believe I wouldn’t just go ahead with it anyway.

It’s got to a breaking point. She’s numb to my emotionally unavailability. I’ve become numb to my own emotions.

I want to reconnect with myself and my true values before I can even think about fixing the relationship, and I can’t see how I can do that alone. I’ve tried it. I’ve always gone back to my old ways of being so work focused.

I’ve decided I need to have a third party (therapist/councillor) if I’m ever to change for good.

It might be too late. I have to accept that. But whatever happens I need to fix myself.

I’ve not let it come in the way of my relationship with my daughter. I do lots with her, I try extremely hard and our daughter is incredibly happy, healthy and stable. But away from her view I’m ruining my partner and mine’s relationship, which will inevitably end up having a huge effect on her.

So after that huge rambling, I just want some help in guiding me to the right type of professional that I need to speak with to start working on myself, properly.

I've been making PowerPoint presentations for years, but now I run a production company, so only work on a handful of PowerPoint content creation jobs a year, and usually just awards shows (as they tend to be shorter jobs with less back and forth).

I don't think I've ever shared my work, so thought why not. I've had to redact pretty much everything. Most of it doesn't really matter (in fact, only the winner really), but just for the sake of privacy I've covered or blurred anything related to the event.

Would love to hear feedback - I work pretty siloed so my only feedback is from clients!

Generally my work flow is:

• Speak to client, look at their other event artwork or theming (which is sometimes in depth, sometimes nothing more than a colour!).
• I design a background in illustrator, then work it into a title/holding slide in PowerPoint and bounce ideas back and forth until the overall creative is nailed for that one scene. Usually this holding slide shows the sponsors.
• During this process I often spice up their logo a bit. One of my favourite ways is to import their logo into After Effects, and use Element 3D to extrude it and add texture, reflection etc. I then render out a high res transparent PNG of this for use in PowerPoint.
• I then discuss how the awards flow. For awards shows with only a handful of sponsors, I usually build these onto one slide. For shows with more, I'll do something like the below - Build them all individually, and then do a reveal to hold on. I have also done versions where they start large and centre, and then move into their respective position all on one slide. Also works great, but a bit more work!
• Once I know that, it's a case of designing a frame for both the image & the name. I try to stick with circles & rectangles, unless there is a theme shape, such as a hexagon. Often I get a REAL mix of images, so I drop them all into Photoshop with a circular overlay to make it square and check it works size wise. If it doesn't, I'll often duplicate a version of it, scale it to fill the frame, blur it, and then lay the smaller image over the top. All of these get exported as the same size, square image. That way it's just a case of right click the oval, change image from file and repeat that process.
• For the name frame, it's just a case of matching the design of the slides. Sometimes these will be made in illustrator and brought in as images, other times I will keep it within PowerPoint.
• The last piece of the puzzle is the award winners slide. PowerPoint has some decent features for doing basic motion graphics, but lacks the blend modes and effects that can be achieved in software such as after effects. So I'll bring in a PNG of the background, animate some whizz bang fancy stuff, spit out an MP4 and drop that into my PowerPoint as a background video. To the viewer, it just looks like the PowerPoint background has some great effects, but in fact that work has been done outside of PowerPoint, and then the winner animations are put over the top once it's back in PowerPoint.

Everything is designed with the live event in mind. Things automate where they should automate, and stay in a hold state where there's any potential to need to hold. Almost everything is on click, as the pace is dictated by the on stage host of the event (and I don't usually go to site to run the event, so the PPTs need to be somewhat easy to understand the flow of).

I'd love to hear your thoughts, or things you'd do differently/would want to try out. I do sometimes feel it gets a bit stale going through the same workflows, but... they work. Clients are happy and it is efficient doing what you know.

https://reddit.com/link/1tkqkdq/video/vynmmeas5q2h1/player

Here's one I can't find an answer to, so i'm hoping somebody else has seen this and might be able to help!

Built a PC a few years ago:

• Dark base Pro 900 orange Rev 2 midi
• MSI Mag X570 Tomahawk
• Ryzen 9 5950x AM4
• Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X
• 128 gig of Corsair Vengeance Pro SL DDR4 3200
• Couple of 1TB 980 pro V-Nand and 2TB 870 EVO

Overall it's been a beast, and still smashes out great work for MoGraph, 3d rendering etc.

One thing that bugs me to this day, is the graphics card glitch when I open things. When I open either:

Certain web pages that have video adverts:

I use https://percentagecalculator.net/ a lot for profit calcs on jobs, and this causes it.

Spotify desktop app - Basically when ever you chance track it opens up a little side car that shows a totally pointless music video of the track.

Plus other websites that have video ads embedded,

One of the outputs glitches out, has diagonal tearing, often the screen goes black for a few seconds (didn't happen this time when I opened the app in the attached video). Happens about 80% of the time when going on these websites/opening Spotify. After a while it stabilises, or in the case of Spotify when I close that side car it doesn't happen again.

It must be a hardware issue, as OBS screen capture does NOT record the artefacts. Screen capture record is clean.

https://reddit.com/link/1thpqkg/video/xzxwc6od042h1/player

I think maybe it's something to do with HDCP. I've tried swapping monitors (follows the output, not the screen). Swapping cables (again, does it on different cables). Different outputs (happens on both DP and HDMI on the GFX Card).

I've updated the GFX card drivers, it's followed from Windows 10 to Windows 11. So all I can think is it's some fundamental mismatch between whatever codec plays those types of heavily compressed videos and the PC/GFX card specifically!

Would love to hear if anybody else has experienced this before.