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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/21/2023 in all areas

  1. Well, I survived! First night was yesterday. With very little time in the venue and no tech run (gotta love amateur theatre), I'm glad I prepared myself by getting help from you guys If anyone's interested, here's some thoughts: I was using a FLX without a monitor. A few things were annoying because of that: having to use shift+view to get the output window, as opposed to having it as one of the things that View will cycle through. (I constantly wanted to swap between the cue list and the output window, and I pretty much never cared about the fader display -- LX tape was sufficient to label my faders!). I didn't like how you had to press and hold record or update to get the record options, and when you did, you couldn't see the command line. I frequently wanted to issue the command "record cue N", where N was the number of an existing cue I was replacing, and to also specify tracking mode or some other record options. I wish that the current and next cue numbers were persistently displayed somehow, even when e.g. looking at the outputs window or a set of palettes. Maybe they could go on one end of the command line? I wasn't so keen on how the command line just fills up with multiple unrelated things. For those that don't know Eos, it clears the command line after each command is finished -- Eos maintains selection separately to the command line, so clearing the command line doesn't lose your selection. This wasn't too big a deal, I did get used to it. I really really really missed having a Time key. On Eos, to edit the time of the cue you're in, you can just type "Time 3 <enter>", or for a different cue, "Cue 6 time 3 <enter>". Time entry by navigating with the arrow keys on the cue list was probably my biggest slowdown. I loved the auto colour and gobo palettes feature. They saved loads of time. I did record a few "everything" palettes (e.g. having intensity, colour, position etc in just one palette, aka Eos Presets). They worked fine -- I put them under Colour, fairly arbitrarily. I think it'd be more understandable having a separate home for them, but this was fine. Am I correct that the desk only holds one show file at once, and auto-saves? I was very confused about whether the Save option through Setup, and the save option through the Z key, did the same thing as each other and whether they always saved to USB. Is there an Undo? I couldn't find one. Would have helped a lot when i replaced colour palette 8 instead of position palette 8! Is there a way to swap the encoders from fine to coarse mode? They were scrolling very slowly for me. Probably a small thing, but I missed Eos's "expanded" output tile view, where every parameter of every light was visible. (I'd want it as an option, since it would drastically increase scrolling!) I liked how Zeros displayed the fixture types above the output window items (And that I could name my dimmers and those names would appear there.) The Update button: It was great to show all the possible things that could be updated, but the tap targets were very small! It wasn't immediately clear to me what "also update references" did -- was it so that if I changed a palette it would update the cues that referred to the palette? If so, when would you ever _not_ want that? I think I mostly grokked how to remove things from cues (via update->remove), but I still wasn't perfectly clear. There was a toggle for Smart Tag in the update dialog, but I wish there was also the toggles for selected vs tagged, and all params vs tagged params. I wasn't sure how to specify "remove this entire fixture" vs "remove this parameter of this fixture", and I didn't grok what smart tag remove would even do. I know you guys explained it to me, it just hasn't quite sunk in! I still miss the Eos Blind Spreadsheet though. The ability to see precisely which move instructions are in any [cue, palette, preset, submaster, etc], with blank spaces where no instructions are found… and an easy press of "at enter" once you targetted the thing you don't want, and you get instant feedback by seeing the number go away… Minor nitpick, but I kept wanting the Groups key to be near the Color/Pos/Beam/etc keys. I'm not actually sure why, since on Eos they're nowhere near each other either. Playbacks were pretty intuitive. I managed to set one up that did LTP mixing of intensity params, and it worked fine. Clear-clear to remove manual values was fine. I wish there was an option to remove them with a fade, aka Eos "Sneak"… if there had been, I'd have used syntax to modify lights during the live show, knowing that I could put them back when I wanted without the audience noticing. Patching was fine. I liked the <channel> <at> <address> syntax for updating DMX addresses. I wish that if you typed that into the patch window for a non-existent channel, it'd get created automatically. As you've probably guessed, I'm very syntax focussed (I see faders etc as shortcuts, not as my primary interface to the console). My personal preference would be for ZerOS to allow all consoles to use all bits of syntax, even ones they don't have hard keys for (e.g. the Time button, which apparently existed on an earlier console!). Then, there could be a way (shortcut button, dedicated key on future hardware, reprogrammed UDK etc) to put a "complete" keypad onto the touchscreen, just like Eos does when running in Nomad. This would also have the benefit that Phantom ZerOS could have a console independent mode, that didn't show a facepanel, just the equivalent of one or two monitors, and this Keypad button got you access to all the inputs you need! It should also be obvious that I'd like to see a future ZerOS console that had an even more expanded syntax keypad than the FLX. I missed the Eos "%+" and "%-" buttons. I liked having easy access to make a bunch of lights brighter/dimmer all at once. (I didn't try using an intensity encoder on ZerOS though -- I know you can lock that on if you want, but I didn't get time to see if it would have been an intuitive workflow for me.) We ran into an odd bug where the grand master was down but the desk ignored the fact. Once we moved it to the top, it started working normally again. I didn't quite get the logic of when the "pause" button would immediately do a "back" action, vs which situations pressing it once would cause it to flash and you had to press it a second time to go back. I would have expected the latter to only happen during a fade… but actually it happened _most_ of the time, but not all -- sometimes a single press of pause _did_ go back. I was bitten a couple of times by the fact that bringing the master fader down released the cue list and reset it to cue 1. I was trying to edit some moving light positions, and I went to the relevant cue, then brought the master fader down so as to see what I was doing (with manual values in the movers in question)… but it released the cue and I had to start over. I solved my issue by only bringing it down to 10%… How do you "clear" (aka release/sneak) just _some_ manual values? I know you could do it by manipulating the command line, but suppose my command line was ages long. This was definitely a workflow I missed -- often, I'd bring intensities down on some other lights while I was editing the ones I cared about, then I wanted to clear that intensity reduction but keep my other changes ready to update into the current cue. I miss my "@ enter"!
    2 points
  2. This is really important feedback @Amy Worrall, thanks for taking the time to capture it all!
    1 point
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