"I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"
100% of the computer graphics at these events came from PCs and Macs with their default video output. Some even came from the HDMI output on a Raspberry Pi.
I worked a lot with the production companies behind these shows and it seemed to be SOP to use a regular Macbook with Powerpoint to drive the displays.
Maybe at the super bowl, or the opening of the olympics, or at some major pop stars tour where everything is time coded and planned and is the same production every night, sure.
But at festivals? Clubs? Whatever NYE party you go to this year? No.
That being said, I just don't believe you. A 7-figure budget with semi trucks full of equipment that couldn't afford (or didn't think to afford) a video display device is unbelievable if you want to suggest that a small dot makes this unusable.
All of those things can be controlled though, unlike this new dot. I've had my personal laptop hooked up to one of these huge screens with a live audience of 20,000. Yes, you better be careful to close out your messaging and Gmail and everything else. But also, since it's running as an extended display and the program is running in full-screen mode, the OS generally will not show the things you mentioned anyway, in my experience.
An orange dot would not have been tolerated in this environment. "Unusable" may not be the right word, but the people who set up these kinds of things are very particular about how things look, and so is the client who is paying millions of dollars.
In the cases I've been involved with, the computers generating the displays came from the clients, though the production company also used Macs with Powerpoint for creating lower-thirds for IMAG. The client-provided computers were running a custom software application designed for displaying data on a secondary screen. I'm not even sure if Decklink can even do that as the software just expects to output to a secondary display (it does not know anything about Decklink).
Here is a picture of one such event: https://media.beam.usnews.com/7e/1e/aecd818e4128ab6759358307...
If the computers came from the clients, then the clients didn't care whether something might pop-up on accident. There's literally no way for someone on the production side to prevent that with a computer that they don't know the ins-and-outs of so it cannot be an issue so that's not the type of situation that I'm talking about.
I'm only talking about the people who are saying that this dot makes a Macbook "unusable" for the purpose of display. That's 100% not true and anyone that needs that level of precision, as a professional, uses dedicated I/O hardware to keep exactly that from happening.
I don't know what else to say. I work with people who put on live shows for 20,000+, they use PCs and Macs to drive the display WITHOUT Decklink or similar, and they would be upset if there was a persistent orange dot on the screen. If you want to split hairs about whether or not that makes the new macOS "unusable" in these situations, then fine, but in the environment I'm familiar with it would not be tolerated. They would replace the Mac device with a PC which doesn't have this issue because they would deem it unusable, even though it can technically still display images on a screen.
And despite your repeated comments on this article, it IS possible to configure a PC to not show any notifications for use in a live show, between a combination of changing OS settings, closing unneeded programs, and using the fullscreen APIs of the OS. This is something that can be done ahead of time and tested. I've written software that shows fullscreen on secondary displays on large projectors for presentation-like purposes and I have never had an OS notification pop up over the fullscreen software on a secondary display, even on other people's machines where they didn't take care to shut down programs and turn off notifications. Other commenters here seem to have similar experiences.
notifications = low probability
orange dot = 100%
The risk of an embarrassing notification got traded for the certainty of the orange dot.
For what its worth, from someone who doesn't work in this space, there's something really confusing to me:
This thread is about professionals who:
1. Are displaying visuals at venues with million dollar A/V hardware budgets.
2. For which an orange dot (or anything other than pixel-perfect outputs) is a complete showstopper.
3. Who can't afford a $100 dongle mentioned upthread to output pixel-perfect graphics from their Macs.
I'm with you right up until point #3, but I'm really struggling with the last bit. $100 doesn't even sound like "prosumer" money to me. If $100 is really a show stopper for your million dollar business, you need to charge more.
Furthermore, while I'm not an expert on these $100 dongles, my understanding is that they do not present as just another monitor (since that would defeat the purpose). Thus, you cannot just show anything on their outputs that you could otherwise show on a monitor, right? My understanding is the application has to be written specifically to output to the Decklink (but I may very well be wrong on this) - if that's the case then the $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot of things that get presented may not support it.
Apparently not because the OS has always been able to do this. They're just not happy because the OS has now chosen something that they disagree with. Ignorance of the limitations is not the same as being "happy with the way it was" even if ignorance is bliss.
>written specifically to output to the Decklink
With the DeckLink specifically, yes. That's a choice made by Blackmagic, though. There are other I/O devices that let you output any window's content (like OBS does with its virtual cameras).
Sure, but this is a classic case of shifting the externalities of your industry onto the rest of the rest of the public. People who operate coal power plants were happy with generating tons and tons of smoke (but they do see the value of less smoke for the communities around the power plant).
You're asking everyone else to accept being a little less secure so that it can be easier for you to make money.
> if that's the case then the $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot of things that get presented may not support it.
The most annoying part of this entire thread is how the goal posts keep shifting. The use-case that the $100 doesn't fix is one that has all of these constraints:
1. Must use audio input on the same computer that is generating the visuals (so you get an orange dot)
2. Is generating the visuals from software (that can't be modified) that can only draw to plain old monitors
3. Is doing all the above in a professional environment with XX,000 people in attendance, where not looking professional (having an orange dot) is a show-stopper.
4. The venue and/or AV professionals have no facilities to crop / letterbox / pillarbox real-time video streams
If a customer hands you a mac with a PowerPoint deck, you break condition #1. If the use-case is an artist who wrote a custom sound->viz app, you break #2. If this is a church group or a VJ in an underground club, you break condition #3. I'm having trouble imagining situation where #3 and #4 are not mutually exclusive.
If a customer hands you a laptop at the event with custom audio->viz software that doesn't work with the dongle and this is a professional event with XX,000 attendees and you don't have a way to letterbox, I believe correct answer is "We're the AV team not tech support. Your equipment is creating the orange dot. We're just projecting what you provide".
In other words, I'll stipulate that the $100 doesn't cover literally all use-cases, but the cases it doesn't cover are the nichyest of niche cases and ones where the customer has unrealistic expectations.
If you're expecting Apple to turn off a feature that is useful (and wanted) by millions of users just to help a number of users who can be counted on one hand... well, those handful of users better be buying a lot of Mac Pros.