kgallen

I got this tonight when I turned on the desk for the Dress Rehearsal. Frightened the life out of me! What does it mean?

Thanks Edward! As an extra ask it would be useful if it showed the last ‘n’ previous cues at the bottom where n is fixed to your choosing but at least 1, ideally 2 say. At the moment if you move around the cue stack, the current (green) can be on the bottom line - say this is cue ‘m’, but the lines above are not ‘m-1’ and ‘m-2’ etc so when you scroll with the arrow keys the cue list jumps about.

Similar here. Dress Rehearsal tonight. Using 7.11. I used the new colour temperature adjustment and lots of the Lee filters colour palettes. As discussed elsewhere the cue stack behaviour is really annoying when programming. Any chance we could have a Setup option to stop it keep jumping back to Cue 1 when working at the end of the cue stack? We could use this during programming but turn it off during shows where looping back to cue 1 is useful. We’re doing the musical ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’.

I copied a cue from earlier in my show (lets say Q16) to a later cue number as I wanted essentially the same lighting state again. Actually what I wanted was that state minus the FOH fixtures (as an on-stage preset) as one cue (lets say Q42), followed by that same state plus FOH for the next cue (Q43) [because it was the start of Act 2] So I copied Q16 to Q42, then selected and set to 0 the FOH fixtures. I copied the same Q16 to Q43 for the "whole stage" state. I found that Q43 contained lots of "blocked" values, shown in white in the Output Window. I didn't like this (I wanted Q43 to track from Q42), so I deleted Q43, copied Q42 to Q43 then went back to Q16 and wrote down all of the FOH values and then added them back in to Q43. Clearly this is the wrong way to do this! What would be the right way - or a better way? Did I miss something on the Copy window that would have tracked rather than blocked the pasted cue? The desk is in tracking on, and Smart Tag would have been on (as I never turned it off during a Record or Update). Reading the manual now, I can see I can Unblock the whole playback, but could I have just unblocked Q43 so it tracked from Q42? Whilst I didn't knowingly have any blocked values in the rest of my show, I wasn't fully sure, so did not want to trigger an Unblock on the entire (master) playback. Advice please! Thanks! Kevin

Are there internal memory DIMMs that maybe need re-seating?

Not sure how RCBOs, even on the mains side of the triacs, will play with dimming. I realise you might be talking about the hot power sockets but the MCB is common on the channel. I doubt Zero88 would support this modification to their product (if nothing else it would invalidate the formal product qualification they have to do for CE/UKCA marking).

...and it's worth adding (although this post might get deleted!), that if you are in the UK south west or South Wales area, Keith can be very obliging if you're not looking for a whole-board rebuild, even outside of the warranty period... Sorry if I overstepped the mark there, but I think it's highly commendable that Zero88 hardware support doesn't actually stop at the 3 year anniversary if you ask nicely. I have personal experience of this excellent service (thanks Keith and Edward!) - my FLX will be '7' this year. (Hopefully the big bosses aren't reading...)

Hi Derek! That’s a shame you had to replace the fader. Did you feel at risk of lifting the pads or tracks when you did this? Is there any feedback to give to Zero88 regards the robustness of the pads and traces in respect of service operations like this? I.e. is there enough (but not too much) pad and track mass on the PCB design around the fader pins?

"Launched in the next month or two" said Jon. Ah, we're back to the old project plan 🤣 So there's time there to sneak in some other stuff to keep the rest of us quiet while he deals with the new requests from the Signify suits upstairs. And anyway we've 7.11 to play with for a while - Jon cunningly slipped that one out in double-quick time to keep us occupied whilst he was tinkering on the 7.12 stuff! 😝👍

Does that mean if we voted for that option we get a substitute vote to allocate to one of the remaining options?

Thanks Edward! The key for me is the sound source is designed to be controlled/triggered (like a dimmer or luminaire) whereas the lighting desk (FLX) is designed to be a controllER. So being able to generate control actions from the FLX (by outputting MIDI rather than just receiving MIDI) makes network topology sense to me. FLX doesn’t have any other ‘auxiliary’ control outputs.

I have this underlying requirement too (or maybe I like tinkering!) where I would like to trigger my sound cues from lighting cues. At the moment I too press Go on my FLX and Play on one of my Sony MDS-E12 minidisc decks. My solution is to build a DMX interface to ‘contact closure’ (or possibly RS232 commands if I want to get fancy), but it would be nice to take MIDI from the FLX instead 🙂 Need to tick the appropriate box in the ‘new features’ list for FLX in the General Discussion section!

Which I prefer since a "magic sheet" set up on the internal screen is organised the same on the external screen. For the few ZerOS versions where the Groups pane was double width, it was a real "pane" (sic.)...

There is no comparison to FLX-S. Maybe you need to play with the desk a bit more and adapt your programming style from fader-per-channel mindset to using for example the colour palettes and mood boards, groups and layered playbacks? Good luck! Yes I'm still learning too!

https://www.zero88.com/manuals/zeros/cues-playbacks/playing-back-cues/rgb-colour-mixing-on-playbacks Make sure you follow the instructions exactly. If you accidentally adjust something you didn't mean to then that parameter will get "tagged" and what you record to the playback won't be what you intend and won't work properly for what you require. If you mess up the sequence, easiest to delete the playback and start again.

I agree. I’ve been asking about this for some years. I have the same frustration when programming a sequential (theatre) stack.

Ditto, no networking on mine either. My FLX is only ever attached to a USB keyboard and mouse, touchscreen monitor (USB+DVI-D) and lighting network via DMX outputs. And a USB stick and desk light.

I have certainly had my (full size) FLX freeze both in a show and after having sat idle for a while. This was on earlier ZOS versions (and all were reported here). I don’t have enough hours experience in the last couple of years and ZOS versions to know if this is still the situation. I had concerns at the time that there was an underlying hardware issue (signal timing or signal integrity), since my FLX is a very early build, but if this phenomena is also seen on the FLX S range then maybe the pendulum swings to more of a software problem than hardware.

Colour fade time in the cue is non zero. It defaults to 3 seconds.

Sounds like dimmer preheat slightly too high assuming it’s tungsten lamps you’re seeing? If LED, you can confirm on the DMX Output window (under the Z key) that the desk is outputting 0 on the intensity channels.

Basically Keith means you have too much information programmed into each of the two playbacks. i.e. you have fixture information recorded in Playback 21 that overrides something in Playback 22 and vise versa. It sounds like you have some fixture data recorded in each that does not show with that playback activated alone. My suggestion would be to delete both playbacks, clear the programmer (Clear-Clear) then set the fixtures for Playback 21 and record to 21, then Clear-Clear again, set the fixtures required then record Playback 22. In each case after the clear-clear you should only modify the attributes you want to record, so set the intensity and set the colour. Don't fiddle with anything else not required otherwise you will tag other attributes that will thus get recorded and your recording won't be "clean" which sounds like the issue you originally had. This is assuming you're using Smart Tag. If you are not then you can be more clinical by ensuring you only manually Tag the attributes you require in each Playback. Hope that makes sense. I think if you read Keith's reply a few times it will make some sense, but in order to repair the mal-formed Playbacks in this situtation, it's probably easier to delete them and start again.

That seems quite a high resistance for a cable. Also that the differential pair on pins 2 and 3 have very different resistances looks very suspicious. A thorough check of the cable and connectors/termination is needed.

Eric - battery on FLX : only for the real time clock I understand, not for show data.

This is a double post (maybe it wasn’t deliberate, but please don’t 😉).

It will by default if you’re using Smart Tag. The house lights question has come up on the forum a few times recently, I’m not sure it should be a big issue.