a few questions about networking...

so... reading thru the nifty stuff in the users group here, makes me want to panic even more.

right now it is monday night, we set up a show wednesday night, have a tech rehersal on thursday, can't be in the room friday, and the show is saturday. The throw is about 275 there will be 3 computers. a cable run will be absurd, 400+ and 500+ feet.

I'm gettin in way over my head here, but I've got an IT buddy that might help with the networking part of this.

We were wondering about things like:

:confused: Is there a lag accross the network, or is frame acurate synchronization the same as 2 or 3 cards in one machine?

:confused: Does the Operating System matter? thinking 2 machines with 98se and one with XP will be used.

:confused: Can PC #1 receive timecode and PC #2 and #3 will sync also?

:confused: Can I go to PC #2 and play with the on-screen programming of PC #1 that I can't see because it is located backstage in a completely useless position?

Any hints? or should I start soldering connectors?
:)
-chuck
:D

yes yes, I'm sure this stuff is in the helpfile...
 
Hi Chuck,

To answer your questions:

No, there is no perceptibale lag across the network, especially wired networks. There may be one, but it is on the order of 1 millisecond or so... Wireless networks have a slight lag, but it is generally very small too.

No, you generally don't have to worry about operating systems. We use a variety of operating systems around here -- everything from Win95 to XP and it's all good. If you want to do something exotic like Hugo does (power user) it is nice if all computers have XP...

Only one PC can receive timecode and this is generally the master, which may or may not have a QM2000 (best if it does, but not strictly necessary). Also this "master" is the computer that will be running LD and Showtime. The others are merely slaves.

You might be able to use the other PCs (i.e. PC #2 and PC#3) to do "things" like alighnment patterns and such, but this would be sort of "outside" of the realm of the network. You can do this, and it will work, but when it comes time to run the show, it will be running with the standard LD2000 network configuration where you have one PC running LD and/or Showtime, and the rest acting as slaves.

And yes, some of this is aluded to in help files... but anyway if you want specific information, you might talk directly to Hugo or Glenn Turner, both of whom have lots of real-world network info...

It may be obvious by now, but you can rest assured that that we worked very hard to make Pangolin network appear as easy to use and "transparent". It is just a distributed way to run your LD2000 system. Everything network-related has been made transparent by our efforts.

Bill

[ May 06, 2003, 11:34 PM: Message edited by: Pangolin ]
 
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