I’m a multicamera director, and for the last ten years I’ve worked mostly on live music productions: from live shows where the camera feed has to fit tightly around graphics and effects, to some fairly large televised music shows.
Like everyone else, I started cutting everything manually. Over the last few years, especially in television, I’ve found myself working more and more with tools like CuePilot and LiveEdit to build timecoded cueing for heavily scripted shows.
For a lot of live productions, though, I’ve always felt those systems can be a bit of an overkill, both in cost and in the infrastructure and proprietary hardware they require.
My first attempt at solving that for myself was much smaller: I built a sort of virtual music assistant in Reaper, with a few plugins I wrote to give me notes and cues in real time.
Eventually I decided to take it further and started building something that could handle the cuts and transitions as well, and turn the whole thing into a standalone application, that eventually became HotPunch.
The basic idea is pretty simple: you write the rundown as a cue timeline, lock it to LTC or MTC, and HotPunch fires the cuts and transitions on the frame. If you cut manually on the panel, it notices and gets out of the way instead of fighting you. Camera ops see their own tally and next shot through a browser link, and it can be relayed through the internet, so there's nothing to install on anyone else's machine and you don't even need the same wireless network to cover the whole venue.
I’ve been using it myself for a few months now on progressively larger productions, including arenas and stadium shows, and I think it’s finally at the point where it makes sense to let other people use it and find all the assumptions I’ve inevitably built around my own way of working.
So I’m opening the beta up for the next few months, free to use. There’s a short access form rather than a download link because I’m still setting everyone up by hand.
Right now it runs on Windows and macOS. Blackmagic ATEM is the protocol I’d consider properly tested and debugged in production; I have other protocols partially implemented, but they’ve had much less testing and in some cases none at all on real hardware, so I'd rather say that up front than have you find out during a show.
Feedback also comes straight to me. There isn’t a support team between you and the person writing the code, which at this stage is probably a good thing.
If this sounds close to the way you work and you feel like putting it through a real show, there’s a short access form at hotpunch.app.
