Show Designer Questions

Ok sorry let me see if I understand what you mean, lets say ur in a large room one day and ur show is set for example so ur intels make large/wide pan and tilt movements then you move to a smaller room and want to be able to adjust lets say the pan tilt so its not so widespread because of the smaller space.

So your question is can you easily change the steps to adjust for the the different venues?

Good question...as far as I know, when it comes to like the speed of thw chase/scene etc Im almost positive you can just change the overall speed for the show ur runnign and it changes everythign automatically. Now when it comes to pan/tilt and other features im almost positive that you would actualy have to go into the scene and reprogram each step to the desired way you like. Anyone correct me if I am wrong but as far as i know there isnt a way to lets say have all the steps with beam angle at 180 degrees automatically change to 270 degrees (just an example) but someone correct me if I am wrong because for all i know it is possible. If something like this does exist, great and hopefully someone can elaborate. My suggestion is if it doesnt make lets say 3 different shows, one for a larger room, one for a medium-average size room and one for a small room. That would prob be your best bet if all else fails. Good luck!

-AMP

PS-As for your first question regarding the blackout thing, that doesnt seem right because i have used show designer before and i was able to switch programs while still blacked out as far as i can rememebr. Somehting maybe a litte screwy. Support does thats sound a little "un-kosher" to you?

I have the show designer 2d, and I know that you can use presets to adjust to venues. Say I want a few moving heads to light the lead singner from behind (They are mounted on a truss). I make a preset of just the heads position, then all the scenes that will light the singer, I use this preset to position the lights, then I add color/gobo/etc to the scene. So after setting up at a new venue, I turn the light on, call up the preset and see how its aimed. I can fine tune it and resave it, then all of the scenes that used this preset will be updated to the right position.

I use this also for brightness levels for some flood washes I have. I never know how much power will be left in the wall socket so I tone it down to draw less power by adjusting a few presets. I dont know if the original SD uses presets or not though (couldn't find its PDF). The blackout problem seems like a bug, it should keep the blackout channel on 0 until its turned off. You should be able to call a new scene and have everything call up except for the blackout channel. Do you have the lastest software patch for it? Elation has done a great job releasing fixes/upgrades/new features for that line. There is an add mode for scenes that might cause this to happen as well. For the 2d, you press add + scene to enter it. This might mess up the blackout mode, but I doubt that thats what is wrong. Try elations forms, they have a form dedicated to the show designer series at http://www.elationlighting.com/forum/


--Kevin

Awesome Kev thanks for the info....I had a feeling there had to be a way.

Thanks for the quick replies!

I believe I understand the presets thing, but I'll have to try it to know for sure.

Apparently, the black-out override is normal behavior for the Show Designer. It't kind of a bummer, but I did get some great advice from someone about adding in a short fade time to each scene/chase to allow for the changes to occur "in the dark." (such that the snap before/snap after settings are correct).

My theory about furthering this concept is as follows. If I program a short fade time into each chase/scene, I would use that to my advantage to keep a scene in the dark just long enough, after calling it, to hit the black-out button to hold the scene "in the dark" indefinitely until the exact moment I need it.

I'm working with live music, and I need the scenes at a split-second's notice in order to sync-up and be effective. That's the whole reasoning behind this insanity and retentiveness.

Anyone try this before or have any other ideas?

Thanks!

yeah, I do the exact same thing as kev. Presets are the way to go and then just fine tune everything. on major concerts you'll notice when they place a microphone stand on the stage they'll usually have a stage hand go out there and stand behind it and they'll cue up one of the lights that is supposed to project onto it and they'll fine tune it to light him the best way possible since the position of it is always changing slightly from show to show

Ken on the other board already suggested this, but I would program both scenes w/ and w/out the shutter open. Then you call scene 1 w/ the light, right when you need it to go dark, call it up w/ out the light, then call scene 2 in the dark so the colors/gobos/positions are ready, then call scene 2 w/ the lights on. You might be able to go from scene 1/light to scene 2 w/out light. Depends on your fixtures and how you have them set up in the SD. Also if the fixture has a speed setting, you can get the pan/tilt done quickly between scenes.

For the presets, position is probably the best use for them, but you can put anything in there, like gobo patterns or color schemes. So you can save 10 different positions, and 10 different color schemes (like yellow & purple or something) and then combind them to make your scene. So something that is used a lot can be repeated to save memory and probably time as well. You can also mix them, so you can use preset 1 for fixture 1 & 3's position, then preset 2 for fixture 2&4's position. Remember that its fixture specific, so if you position fixture 1 in a preset (and no other fixtures), then call it back, fixture 2 will not move to the presets position, so its not just a pan/tilt value being stored, but a pan/tilt/channel. So if you wanted fixtures 1-4 to all point to the same place, you need to have all of them active when you make the preset. Another use that I use them for is for brightness for cans. I have 4 color washes that Im running in a 2 channel mode (color & brightness). For the brightness, I have 6 presests: Front Low, Front Med, Front High, and Rear Low, Rear Med and Rear High. Some venues wont have enough power to use all 4 at 255 brightness, so I can scale the rear lights to 50% or something for high if I need to and this affects every scene/show/chase on the board.

Let me know if I've made it more confusing rather than helping, also if you think of a cool use I'd love to hear it as well.

--Kev

kev shoot me a pm some time i'd love to talk to you about lighting...

It makes perfect sense. I've experimented with the dual scene idea for setting scenes in the dark with other controllers before. I was just wondering if I could do the same without requiring 2 scenes for 1. But that will still give me 8 scenes per page, as opposed to 16.

The presets make great sense. I just have to figure out what fixtures I would like in each preset, but thats just up to my designing to figure the requirements.

Thanks for all the help. I'll try some things out real soon, and I'll let you know the outcomes as well as any other ideas or tricks I come up with.

Just bought a used show designer to go with my mighty scans. The selling point for me was the flexibility of presets.

One question: When I tell the controller to make a circle or spiral with the factory presets, the scanners only make the movement in a slow, choppy manner. I have tried to manipulate fade time as well as the actual speed channel for the scanners. I just cant make circle movements look nice.

Any tips gentlemen???

thanks

Hi Tuckersound,

Sounds like your enjoying yur new toy. I'm glad you like it. How are the programs I left you?

To make the circles smooth I think it depends on the number of steps and the crossfade time.

Here is what the manual says:

The chase speed is the default speed for the entire chase. This means that when you first call the chase this is the speed that it will run. You can change the speed while it is running and the new speed can be recorded with a scene. This allows you to use the same chase in many scenes but run it at different speeds for each scene.

The fade value is displayed as a percentage and is for every step in the chase. You cannot set a separate fade time for each step. This will be the amount of fade time between steps. If set to 100% the crossfade time will be equal to the time between steps giving a smooth continuous motion between steps. If set to 0% the steps will move with no fade in between. Any settings between 0 and 100 will give varying amounts of fade time depending on the speed of the chase. As with speed, this is only the default value. It can be changed when recording a scene.


Good luck with it.

Frank

I've noticed the same thing with my system. I believe problem lies in the way the chase was programmed in the first place. After experimenting with programming with different fixture speeds, fade times, etc., I've come to the conclusion that the reason for the jumpiness lies in the fact that the factory chases were most likely programmed with the speed of each fixture (channel 3), set at the maximum value. Then on top of it, there is a high fade percentage with a low beat value. This combination causes the jumpiness because the fixtures want to move quickly, but the controller adds the fade and beat information onto the speed, rather than incorporating the data. If the beat of the chase is too low the jumpiness is really noticeable. The problem is though, if you up the speed, the circles are way to small/tight to notice and it just looks like the lights are twitching.

So the solution to this you ask? Program your own chases . The key to making good circles is to think of a square. As crazy as it sounds, it works. Program a chase with 4 steps (each corner of a square). Slow the fixture speeds down drastically. Now, set a beat speed that will 'interrupt' the light's trip to each point of the square. So basically, the beam never 'makes it' to the corners of the square because the beat interrupts the trip to each point and sends the beam onto the next step of the chase (which is the next corner of the square), to the next, etc. This way, you can use the fade (ONLY if needed) to refine the over look and performance, but you may not need it at all.

The larger the square you program in the first place allows you to create faster and larger circles, since the speed of the fixture can be increased just enough to still keep the beam from reaching the point on the square. The faster the beat of the chase, the tighter the circle will be, and vice versa. Just remember, for circles think squares.

It just takes some practice to understand how to 'interrupt' the light's path in a chase to achieve non-linear designs. It's really all about timing things just right. Again, it takes practice and patience.

Hope this helps somewhat.

Im experiencing this as well. Here's what I think is happening: the circle is made up of points that the show designer advances you though, and if your scanner/moving head is set to move at a fast rate of speed, it will jump from point to point. If you have a speed setting for your fixture, slow it down so that it just reaches/almost reaches the point before it is advanced to the next point and it should be smooth and continuous rather than jerky from one point to the next. Now after saying that, Im having a problem with my fixtures listening to my fixture speed channel. I havent narrowed down what Im doing wrong or if its something w/ the board. Even fades from scene to scene it seems to ignore and fly to the next position eventhough I have told it to have a very low speed in both the scene it came from and the scene its going to. Im going to trouble shoot it a bit tonight I hope.

--Kevin

Your fixture speeds aren't defined in presets are they? If the speed of the scenes is in there, then I'd check the presets to make alterations.

If not, make sure you at least move the fixture speed fader a little bit (maybe just a wiggle) to ensure that the fixture speed data has been identified when recording the scene/chase. Sometimes if you're doing a lot of programming and switching modes, fixtures on/off, etc., you just need to be a little redundant in making sure each channel is set the exact way you're expecting it to record.


---

I hear that lightech... I used to go so fast programming and for a while i couldn't figure out why nothing was coming out the way i programmed it, until i realized i needed to just "bump" the channel faders to get them to recognize a new fixture etc.

Yea the ShowDesigner is a bit different in the sense that you set up whatever you want, then save a scene and EVERYTHING gets saved. Humm, sounds like every DMX board there. Let me explain what Im seeing... I have a default scene (not a preset) that I set 2 fixtures (lasers) channel 1 to 255 (cause that = off for some insane reason). I called this ONCE when I turned the unit on, then I programmed the rest of the night and saved/backed up everything. I went back and checked, every scene I saved had a value of 255 for those 2 fixtures. Most DMX boards I've used the value for those 2 fixtures would have gone to 0 the first scene I called that didnt have a value for them. Im still not sure why it does this. Its probably beause I didnt call any previously saved scenes (only the ones I saved after calling that first scene), so that value was never overwritten. Bet thats it. The SD has whats called an ADD mode where scenes just pile up ontop of each other (the new scene overwrites whatever is going on, but turns nothing off unless the new scene has the setting saved in it to do so). This mode is useful too. You can store all of you par can color schemes in the top row, second row will be colors for your moving heads, third row is positions for the heads, 4th row is the gobo pattern. Then on the fly you combind them to make whatever scene you feel like. However you cant save the result, but its great for working live (the preview function lets you choose whats next and its fade time, then hit go and it fires it up). Pretty cool huh?

I want to play with my new controller but I am quite distracted....

....what can keep a cool guy like myself away from lighting you ask???


....I'm friggin getting married on Saturday. Going on a honeymoon, no drawing light plots, no budgeting, no cell phone.

The DJ is not bringing any lights to my wedding at my request. I am way too picky.

I look forward to contiuning talk about this controller. Have a great week.