kgallen

Whaaaaaaa.... no outtakes? 😪

Add Selected Fixtures button to Update Options Undo/Redo - even one level would be handy, to restore e.g. a lost position or colour. Simplify/unify GUI behaviour recording (effects) palettes when using Record Options to include I/C/B/P. Improve clarity of messaging by including detail of what is being operated on - for example "Delete Palette <name>?" rather than "Delete Palette 17?" - this example particularly, as the Delete confirmation blanks out the entire screen with this one line message plus ok/cancel buttons - so you (a) have to remember what Palette 17 was (b) know that this was the Palette you intended to delete. Undo would also be useful here. Some means to clarify (maybe documentation) which USB port is "Removable Drive [AB][1-3]" - when multiple USB sticks are inserted, which is which? Usable scrollbars. Usable mouse scroll wheel. Speed/accelerate adjust for mouse move. Preview waveforms in the Effects Waveform editor - to show relative alignment of waveforms - e.g. "Trapezoid" with a 33 offset to "Step 1/4" with a 50 offset. For example I had a requirement to do a green-yellow-cyan colour fade and working out which modulators to use and what the offsets should be needs some head scratching and a pen and paper. More predefined/library effects. The new ones in 7.9.6 are good but the library needs to expand a lot to give quick access to prebuilt effects. More complete/detailed user manual. On FLX plenty of functions/buttons are either not described at all or are given scant description. The documentation needs to be much more complete. I know you're not trying to "teach lighting" but what the heck does "Ballyhoo" actually mean? (and I've been doing stage lighting for 23 years). Effects needs more detail on the base modulators. For example "Trapezoid" - what are the relative dimensions of this geometric figure - is it "in 6 sections" and a 0 offset it's low:up:high:high:down:low so if I offset at 50 then I'm in the middle of the two periods of high?

Your great idea/work David, so the credit goes to you! I just found with your original that the red came out a bit purple on my LEDs as the small amount of blue in your red (R=243,B=11) seemed to have quite a disproportionate effect. Kevin

Here's a more saturated version of David's 2-way picker. R/G/B are primaries.

Oh well done! Shows all done already huh! Early Jan for me...! Lots to do before then including sound effects...

Hi Edward, Thanks that finally worked, I've got myself a "Spell" effect setup. Not what one would call 'intuitive' though is is!

Hi Edward, Umm, ok, but why? The "extras" like Beamshape have just been adjusted by me, so they are tagged, so red stripe should be just fine. So why now the change of heart for a green stripe? It's true that after tapping EFFECT, the Effect soft-button had a red stripe and the other ICBP were "off" so did the desk now think they weren't tagged attributes, so needs a green stripe to force the situation? (Desk is off now, I will have to try tomorrow night.) Thanks, Kevin

OK chaps, I'm back here again with 7.9.7 on the FLX. This still doesn't work for me, I still get just an 'E' palette. I want an EBP palette in this instance. I have 4 movers up in the rig. Select all 4 movers using the mouse from the Output Window and @40 just so I can see them. Set Beamshape attributes as I want. Set Position as I want for the "base position" for the effect. Choose Effect Circle, and set the Size and Speed. Press RECORD and hold it to get Record Options. Press EFFECT - this changes the Record Options to turn off SmartTag and Effect soft-button has the red bar (ok looks promising). I tap Beamshape soft-button and Position soft-button to get the red bar. Intensity and Colour have dark "off" bars. I type 50, so the command line now says RECORD EFFECT 50. I press ENTER. I get Effect palette 50 programmed and it's type E not type EBP as I want (and asked for). I CLEAR-CLEAR. I select the 4 movers. I @40 so I can see them. I tap Effect Palette 50. I get the circle, but the Beamshape is not set (it's Home) and the base position is not set (they are dancing around their Home position). Your syntax recipe doesn't seem to work for me. So what am I STILL doing wrong??? (I just reviewed the updated KB article linked above and other than it being an Effect palette rather than Colour as in the KB example, I’m doing what it says).

Edward - there seems to be an issue with the order in which FLX displays the gobo preview images for the Combi Spot - the fixture definition is correct regards the thumbnails and the palettes are correct when the FLX encoder middle button for "gobo" is pressed, but the Auto-palettes generated under Beam have the gobo pictures shifted by one position - the split circle gobo should be "gobo 1/1" but is pictured for "gobo 1/7". I've factory reset the desk and started from scratch and this is repeatable. Why is this? (ETA same behaviour in 7.9.7 as 7.9.5, fixture is Showtec Shark Combi spot as above, and is the only fixture patched). Photos attached. Palettes created by auto-palette. Note the split circle is 1/7, should be 1/1 and the rest shifted along by 1. See the encoder palettes in the second picture, where the gobo thumbnails are in the correct positions and result in the correct gobo in the fixture.

Spot on!

Here are fixture definitions for: Showtec Shark Wash Showtec Shark Zoom Wash Showtec Shark Combi Spot The ones in the library don't quite match the fixture behaviour (e.g. Combi Spot gobos are incomplete/out of order). showtec_shark.ift

Yea - but you'd take me round the back and get Tyler to beat me up for all of my cheeky/grumpy posts! 😆 Whoa... documentation?! 😈 🤣

Sneaky. Has that always been the case or have you quietly made this work?! That's the one! I was thinking it was that but didn't want to put it in writing! I thought I'd seen you move away from "nudge the encoder" to something more elegant! Cheers Edward! I'm thinking too that now I've a couple of years (=4, console now out of warranty!) of FLX experience under my belt and the training course/software is probably a bit more mature now, I should probably do the course again! 🙂

If I understand you correctly, you want move on dark to prepare them for "that cue" ("that cue" = cue 4 in Edward's example)? If so, there must be position programmed in either cue 2 or cue 3 (using Edward's example) which stops MOD operating. You need to remove this. Something like: - go to cue 2 - select the movers - Update, SmartTag Off, Nudge the pan or tilt encoder (this tags position, there might be a neater way using Home), Remove, OK Do the same in cue 3. Hopefully Edward will correct me in a minute if I missed something - I've historically had user-trouble here too!

I think No Effect needs to be tapped before you hit Update. One of the nice thing about ZerOS is you can switch between programming styles (tracking, cue only etc) without upsetting the desk or corrupting the programming.

Give Keith Rogers a call at Zero88 on +44 (0)1633 833101

I think Edward mentions this - use of Cue Only, or Snapshot (Blocking) cues will stop Move on Dark from operating and it sounds like what I said above in my second post is happening - the No Effect you've applied Cue Only so in the cue after, the desk has put them back to "Effect" position. So: Cue n - Movers are doing the audience search Cue (n+1) - Movers are stopped by No Effect applied, but this was applied "Cue Only", so only applies to Cue (n+1). Cue (n+2) - Movers go back to Cue n because the change in Cue (n+1) doesn't track because of Cue Only, so the desk reverts the Cue (n+1) change so the rest of the stack behaves as before you made the Cue (n+1) Cue Only change (because that is what using Cue Only does - applies the change to Cue (n+1) Only.). I think the whole Move on Dark problem is because the desk is being used Cue Only (or Snapshot). Fixtures need to be untagged in a cue to allow MOD to operate. I used to make all of my DBO cues Snapshot/Blocking (in an attempt to avoid any updates that tracked from breaking the DBO or tracking into the following scene), but I don't do this these days as it stops MOD preparing the movers for the next scene. It's a shame MOD works like this but I guess it has to - it's implicit in what's recorded - if the cue has position data, even if it's the same position data as the previous cue, then MOD can't operate because say you manually lit that mover as a "busk", you'd be annoyed the MOD had already prepped it even though your cue say "I want you here, even if you are currently dark". Hope that helps and I've not misunderstood your scenario! Kevin

Apologies for the thread grab. Hi Edward, This dialogue box of course comes up during cue stack programming when using Update. In principle it could be very useful, the console presenting the most likely targets it thinks you might want to update - I like the idea behind it. There are at least a couple of usability issues in my experience: (1) probably 50:50 the default target is not what I'm wanting to update, which is most probably the current live cue rather than a palette etc (2) when the console presents a smorgasbord of possible targets the text is unreadable and the buttons unreachable on the touch screen sizes I suspect many users have - which is the 17" Iiyama model. Sometimes that second (or third line) is just a couple of pixel lines. This means that I almost always end up typing the cue number because I don't "trust" the desk. I think this is also an example where the sizing of the dialogue box is really not sensible and this is not an isolated example. Why not adjust by the few more pixel lines to present at least the whole second line of targets - the screen behind is pretty much ruined anyway because these boxes aren't resizable or movable, so why not make them display the information it wants to without scrollbars - let the user get the job done so the window can be closed.. I realise the software is trying to dynamically support different screen resolutions and dialogue box sizes but I think it really ought to try and present an integer number of lines of buttons etc because as I've mentioned many times, the scrollbar provision really doesn't work at all well for me - and mouse wheel scroll is still unusable where that works (scrolls about 1 pixel line at a time per wheel "flick", useless). This is the same "annoyance" I have with the playback stack list having a "2/3 line" at the bottom which really jars when programming/previewing at the end of the stack with the current/next bars hopping about. I'm surprised you don't observe this yourself - maybe you do more busking than lengthy cue stack program and playback. Thanks, Kevin

That looks like a reduced set of options - is your desk in "Basic" or "Tracking Off" mode? (Don't ask me at this point how to find that, but it's in Setup somewhere!). Whilst we're here, on a completely different topic (sorry!!!). Edward - see that list of updateable targets: Cue 0/4, Cue 0/5 etc. Well sometimes I have that situation "on acid", where the desk is trying to show me 2 or 3 lines of these targets - and the text is absolutely tiny. You can see above that the second line (Effect Palette 11) is only partially displayed (and the scrollbar on the right is unusable without accidentally triggering some other button). Can this be improved please! This is one example of something we see in "real use" that you guys probably don't see during limited software testing (otherwise I'm sure you'd improve it!).

You might not want to have Cue Only selected when you do this Update, otherwise your movers might start their dance again on the cue after the Update for No Effect! Let me know how you get on - I'm going to be in pretty much the same situation plotting our panto in a couple of weeks! Edward will be here in a minute to put us right!

Select your movers, select No Effect. Press Update. Turn off Smart Tag. Ok With Smart Tag, it won’t update the fixture if the intensity is 0, so your No Effect setting doesn’t get recorded. Gets me every time too. For this particular operation (No Effect), Smart Tag is a bit annoying.

Don’t get me started on this one, it annoys the heck out of me. I’ve had the same this weekend but on 7.9.5. You will either have to: - use Snapshot (top left button on that screen) but that will record IBCPE - record to a playback instead This is an ‘issue’ on 7.9.5 (and probably earlier too) as Zero88 don’t see it as a bug for some unknown reason - apparently it’s ‘expected behaviour’. Search me. My gripe is here: Edward's ‘workaround’ here:

I’ve had a similar experience when no mouse is attached. I think Edward says the View button does the trick.

The file should be in the top directory of the usb stick - not in a folder.

...anyway this is all very informative and that, but the real question is, how good are the OUTTAKES!!!! 😈