iChat Theatre Preview
 

I have a client coming in tomorrow with a nasty cold or worse. I have great incentive to use
iChat Theatre Preview for this project.

I've upgraded to FCP 7 on my Mac Pro, and things seems stable, but I've never done much with any kind of chat, and I've tried for quite a while now to get a video connection working between my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. The OS on both is current. I can get a text conversation work, but when I try to invite the laptop for a FCP 7 iChat Theatre Preview session, the invite doesn't go through.

Any ideas?

Anyone actually got this feature working?

Thanks....

I haven't used it but would like to know the answer myself! What type of account are you trying to make this connection through? For example, are the two accounts AIM, Bonjour, or @Me.com??

Again, I do not know for sure but I am assuming that you have to have two users with @Me.com accounts...

I also found this when searching around...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2834

I have a Goggle Talk account and my client has a .mac account. The iChat is set up as a Jabber account. As I said, I haven't done anything with any chat programs before, so I'm really hunting around here.

John

I've used it successfully in a test between my Mac Pro and my wife's iMac. No problem getting connected, we each have .mac accounts. I don't have a camera, but the imac does, and I could hear my wife's comments as she watched the piece. Presuming you've set the client up as a "Buddy" and watched the Apple video on setup Apple - Final Cut Studio - Whats New, not sure why the laptop isn't responding; ichat will take any make mac, it just needs Leopard.

Once you're connected, you'll need a half-decent connection. At first, the xdcam hd sequence I was playing was total garbage, but when I switched (via an AC unit) to wired, the sequence played without a hitch. Upload difference was between 100kbps vs 400kbps.

Thanks for the reply.

I did get it working between my Mac Pro (as player) and MacBook Pro. Had to open 2 AIM accounts, and that worked. The laptop sees playback very well on my fairly slow DSL connection ... in a couple of weeks I'm getting ATT Uverse set up here and that should be a minimum of 6 times faster.

No camera on the Mac Pro, so no video window shows on it at all. I'm thinking I should get a cheap camera and see if that makes all the features work.

Just in time for flu season!

EDIT: I lied about the video window. I just realized it was hidden under FCP. I don't see the return camera on the macbook, so that's the next thing to figure out.

EDIT: I turned the camera and mic on and restarted the session and everything is now working. (I SAID I was a complete novice at chat....)

Well thats good to hear! I am glad to know that you can use this feature using two AIM accounts on iChat. I plan to use the hell out of this feature when I finally upgrade to FCP 7, because I can only see this save me a lot of time and money in the long run. In a recent project it would have saved me A LOT of time.

And I just ran out and got a cheap Best Buy Rocketfish camera for the Mac Pro, so now I can send at least audio.

I have used iChat Theater in FCP 7. It will play either your viewer or canvas window 7 show the video on your client's Mac, however if you want to show the timeline itself or show a college how to do something in the program, its best to do & a screen share from within iChat. With Google talk, we were able to do a video chat, but so far have been unable to get a video conference going between Google Talk & iChat. I have used a camcorder in the past as a video source for a video iChat.

If you need someone to help you troubleshoot getting iChat Theater working let me know & I'll see if I can get it working for you.

All the best.

Dave

dhardy@mac.com

Dave,

Thanks. The problem now, as it turns out, is that I could get everything working fine when the client was here, going to his macbook pro. When he got home, however, we could text chat but not video chat, either with FCP 7 or not. We got a communication error message. Any ideas on that would be appreciated.

John,

One of you may have got a corrupted IChat plist. You may find when you go into try home/library/preferences, that you have more than one ichat plist. If that's the case,
try one at a time & then see if iChat will do the video chat. Also you could each try connecting with someone else to see which system was causing the problem.

Dave

Dave,

Thanks for the help. I really have no idea what to try next, as I don't know what to do with the plists and I don't know how to reprogram my netgear switch / my wireless modem. I can restate this, that my client and I were able to work this perfectly here, on my network but through the internet. My mac pro tower is hardwired and his macbook pro was on my wireless connection. I expect the problem is in someone's firewall or router, at least.

I hope to try this with someone else on another network today or tomorrow and see if we can connect. If so, then the problem at least gets narrowed down, I guess, to his connection.

Please let me know your ideas, but please know that despite being fairly proficient using computers, this is pretty far outside my comfort range.

Another thought I had is to get a mobile wireless card with unlimited usage. Get that working, and then theoretically I could give that to a given client on an as needed basis and circumvent this whole issue, at least for a while, and buy time to work out these issues.

John,

Are you sure that your client has a high speed internet connection at home. If he brought his Macbook to your place & then tried to later connect with the same computer at home & could could only manage a text chat, then I would suspect the speed of his internet connection or that he has internet sharing turned on. Have you tried having a video iChat with someone else to verify that everything is fine on your end? Then at least you could determine that the problem originates with his set up.

Dave

Dave,

I did try it with another client, too, and still didn't work. I've been advised that part of the problem is almost certainly my connection ... I'm switching over to ATT Uverse over the next couple or three weeks and I finally decided to wait and troubleshoot then, when I have a new setup.

My client has DSL, but it doesn't work very well for him, plus he has Vonage, which also doesn't help the situation. So, basically, it's on hold for a bit, but thanks.

Ken Stone's site just did a review of iChat Theater.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...ter_stone.html

Lot's of great FCP reviews/tutorials on the site.

I just read the Ken Stone info and it's pretty much what we did. Again, everything worked beautifully when we were in my office, using my hard-wired mac pro and his macbook pro running off my wireless. It was when he went home that problems started, evidently a combination of his DSL & my DSL setups.

Now, I did notice that the tutorial said you have to be running Macs ... in reading Apple's material it seemed that a mac was not necessarily required on the other end, only on the host. I hope that's the case, anyway, as I have several clients I can't see running out and buying macs so we can use this.