Tony Mueller's dashboard

Does anyone use a stand alone fade to black device in their setup? We have just a standard matrix router rather than amore expensive master control switcher so we can't fade to black between sources. Unfortunately the boss wants to fade between sources.

The only devices I found are the ESE ES-233 Video Fader and the Burst Electronics VMF-2 two channel video mixer/fader with fade to black. It looks like both can be controlled via GPI trigger, but I've never used GPI and without dragging out the manual, I don't know if my Tightrope server has GPI outputs (Cablecast PRO-VOD).

I'd love some suggestions for a solution under $500, but any suggestions are welcome.

Back-Story: I have two Carousel CG250s. One plays video psas and the other has static bulletin board pages. The PSA machine is the default input for our channel and it works well, even though some PSAs get cut off. The problem is that when I tried to add a manual run to take the bulletin board CG I get this error and it won't send autopilot.

An unexpected error has occurred.

Please note the following information for tech support:

Exception:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Details...

Type:

System.NullReferenceException

Thrown at:

ASP.autopilot_sendevents_aspx - CreateManualEvent

Stack Trace:

at TRMS.Web.Cablecast.EventTable.CreateManualEvent(RunReel reel, Int32 ChannelID) in d:\src\cablecast\Web\Cablecast\Classes\Autopilot.EventTable.cs:line 699
at TRMS.Web.Cablecast.Autopilot.CreateEventTable() in d:\src\cablecast\Web\Cablecast\Classes\AutoPilot.cs:line 834
at TRMS.Web.Cablecast.Autopilot_SendEvents.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in d:\src\cablecast\Web\Cablecast\Autopilot.SendEvents.aspx.cs:line 120