VNCScan hits Prime Time

For a while, I’ve been in contact with a person that does the computer playback effects for shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Criminal minds. If there is a scene that involves someone typing at a computer or has a computer screen in the picture, he is the one that makes it happen .. and he makes it happen in part due to my software.

This episode after the Super Bowl is particularly exciting because I wrote a little something special just for one of the scenes and was able to see it work flawlessly on the show.

The tool that I wrote allowed Dauv to hit a key on his master workstation and send that keystroke to a bunch of different computers at the same time. It was very simple how it worked.

There is a listener running on each of the screen computers and a “sender” running on his. He hits a key and the stroke is send over Ethernet using UDP to all of the listeners. When a listener hears the keystroke, it gets a handle on whatever window has the focus on the computer and relays that keystroke to that window.

The scene that this was used on is the one where the psycho guy was monitoring a bunch of people’s webcams and had about 10 monitors with a persons webcam on each one. There was a knock at the door and he looked very concerned. he hit a few keys on his keyboard and all of the monitors went to screen saver at the same time. Success!

Knowing that VNCScan and some of my custom programming is being used like this on the show has turned me onto the show but the quality plots, suspense, and action have me hooked.