Best practice for ML?

[freadZdead]

Hi there,


Just checking what the best way to manage moving lights in LXConsole at this stage - specifically looking at i.e. focus points, zoom and focus to be stored in a way that if repeated several times in a show, these can be changed centrally when bumping into another venue on a tour.

At this stage, my thinking would be to use the G/groups feature for this, but in when dealing with a fixture that has other subchannels i.e. intensity/colour/... would these be overridden in a cue?

i.e., can I store and dynamically recall pan, tilt, focus, beam of an instrument in a group, and at the same time recall other subchannels for the same instrument from what is stored in a cue?

Or is there a better alternative to this way of doing things?


Cheers,

Freddy

[admin]

Groups are included by marking channels. Only channels that are marked in a group are used when the group is re-called.

You can record the state of a moving light from live as a group and then in the groups display mode, unmark those sub channels that you are not interested in. Or, you can start with a blank group and set only those channels/sub-channels that you want recalled.

If a channel is not marked in a group, it is left untouched when you recall the group either through including it in a cue or by the command line.

[freadZdead]

Thanks, that is a good start! Of course it gets a bit tedious when you try to update focal points on a tour;


From other desks/softwares, there seem to be mechanisms that recognize where a value is coming from (i.e. in our case from the group that includes the focal point info, and not i.e. the intensity), so that when you do an update, it updates only the focal point info in the group (without recording other things that are coming from the cue or from live).

Is this something that would be possible in LXConsole?

The desired scenario i.e:

1) you set a ML with intensity up, and pan and tilt and maybe zoom and iris
2) you record that into a group x
3) you unmark the unwanted subchannels (i.e. intensity) as suggested.
4) you include this group x dynamically into a cue.
5) in that cue, you then record intensity, colour, etc.

Up to this point, I understand this is already possible in LX Console. Now, what would be amazing would be:

6) you change whatever you like, including some of the subchannels coming from the dynamic group x.
7) you execute a command to update group x. This will then update and include only the levels of the subchannels in group x that were previously marked in group x. All other info that has been set in live or recalled from a cue would not end up in group x.

Obviously, if you wanted to include more information in a group, you could instead still use the record group x command, which effectively overwrites the group entirely with whatever is up in live.

This would make the use of groups as dynamic presets not only for focus points but also colour mixes etc much more usable and fast and efficient for touring.

[admin]

The latest build of LXConsole 3.5.3 (7631A) includes an added "Update group:" for the command line. The shortcut is capital "U". This will copy levels from the current cue into marked channels in the group being updated.

An alternative to groups for the purposes of saving a set of related sub-channel levels is the favorites function in the channel controls window. If you save a favorite for pan/tilt, the favorite will include pan, fine pan, tilt and fine tilt when it is recalled.

[freadZdead]

That is truly amazing, thank you!