The question came up on Facbook “how can I work with media server thumbnails in Vista when my media server does not support CITP (Resolume)?”
I think I might be able to help:
Firstly, you need to know that Vista looks to a specific folder and file structure for the thumbnails. The Vista application itself does not really care how these were generated, it’s just that the CITP import process creates these folders and thumbnail images automatically for you. Therefore, if you are prepared to do some work and create these images/files yourself there is no reason why you cant see thumbnails within Vista.
Download this file and folder structure
Extract the “Media server” folder and place this within your Vista 3 > Fixtures>Images>MediaServerThumbnails folder.
By default your Vista 3 folder path is “Documents\Vista 3”. If you are unsure where yours is press “help>about Vista”. This will tell you where the folder location is.
If you don’t have a folder called “Images” or “MediaServerThumbnails”, you can create these manually by pressing “new folder”. Make sure you get the capital letters correct though.
It should look something like this:
Within this folder you will see 256 sub folders.(One for each bit of DMX).
Within each of these sub folders is where you will find the thumbnail images. Take a look at “folder_001” as an example.
The three Vista images (001 to 003) are the custom images that I have added, not previously a part of any CITP import.
Therefore, to add your own thumbnails all you need to do is to add them to the correct folders.
The important thing is the names. They file names have to be “000”, “001” and so on.
You also cannot miss numbers. For example, I could not add “005” without first adding a blank image of “004”.
Once you have finished adding all of your thumbnails to the appropriate folders you will be able to select the “media server” folder within Vista’s patch view.
They should then appear in Vista’s custom feature browser window:
The only other thing I need to point out (at least for Resolume layers) is that you may need to duplicate and edit the factory profile.
Vista needs to see BOTH a folder and file structure for a media server. The problem with Resolume is that I don’t believe that they use a folder structure, only files.
Let’s take a look at the “V5 layer” as an example.
To get this to work with our new thumbnails, we need to add a dummy folder channel. To do this; press “add dmx channel”, select media server and media folder as the channel class and set the DMX channel to “none”
Upon saving the fixture, Vista will warn you that it has an undefined DMX channel, but you can ignore this message and press “ok”.
So I would guess that you need to load Resolume thumbnails into folder “Folder_000”