Kirkup_xp

Thats one big touch screen

If you've got a few hours on your hands, why not enjoy a meal at the Fat Frog restaurant? Just 5 miles away from Telford.

To set the speed, you record the steps of the chase as you detailed and then move down away from the Step <n> line. On any of the other lines, you can select the speed by moving the pot. You can also set the speed by altering the "Drive" modifier - Audio Trigger, Manual Trigger or (with Bass and Manual LEDs lit) Tap Twice to Set Speed. In this mode, you press the 'Step' button twice and then chase picks up the speed from your button presses. To save the chase speed, you simply press Finish. I hope this helps. For more detailed information, the Frog manual is well worth a read.

Gel Conversions I borrowed these from another site, and put them on my own for my reference. There are others available, but I dont have the addresses to hand.

www.castlighting.com

I'm pretty sure that with the current software versions this is impossible. Its an 'all or none' save. Would be a nice idea to add it though. P

I'd encourage you not to go for a split mode desk. Adding a seperate programming interface is fine, but please always give us replay (go-button style). Definatly expand on the current blind-edit mode - a way to switch from cue to cue would be good (without having to do the button presses again). As for ignoring fade times - it should be an option, using a 'cut' button, rather than a discreet all or none. Some lamps (5kW fresnels anyone?) don't take kindly to being snapped on and off. Same with scrollers.

Don't think its been mentioned in this thread so far, but Auto Move while dark would be nice. Ideally with selectable fade times and perhaps an option to select how far ahead in the cue stack the fade happens.

PLASA, like NZ said:

Thanks for that, NZ. The features do sound great - I can't wait to see the desk. And ready for PLASA - thats so soon (relatively)... great work as ever from Z88.

Another thought i've had. If you go for the 'definable faders' idea, then perhaps a little multicoloured LED for each fader, which changes colour to tell you what job its doing - off the top of my head Red - Channel Yellow - Submaster Green - Cue etc.

To clarify the idea (now I have a bit more time) - basically what I want on a fader is LTP fading (from previous to the content of the new fader) which instead of being triggered and having a fade time, follows the fader... just thought I should make it a bit clearer as when I read it back through it didn't make much sense to me. Any chance of knowing what else is being considered on Frog II?

Okay, so limit the cue number to 5 figures + 2 points. Realistically that should be mountains too many, but gives the flexability to number however you want - LX cue 1001 > 1500 in act one, 2001 to 2500 in act two, etc. What was mentioned earlier which definatly needs to be in the new desk is some form of proportional scaling of effects or individual attributes by submaster. Basically this means that as you bring up the submaster, the effect gets bigger (small circle to big circle) or the fixtures attribute fades from its current value to its new value, taking its progress through the fade from the position of the fader. This means you can use the fader to move a light in time with a walk, and other useful things Does any of this make sense?

If you had (say) 48 subs, you could provide some sort of facility to patch the subs as 1>1 channels, so sub 1 contains channel1 @ 100%, sub 2 contains channel2 @ 100%, etc. This way, the desk could operate as a 2 preset desk, a 1 preset 'wide mode' desk, or a 48 sub rock and roll desk. There could also be an option to set each fader up as either a channel, a sub, or a cue (a sub with a memory transfered)... that way, if you had one channel for houselights, you could save yourself using a 'sub' memory by just triggering a channel (or combination of channels) - the difference being that a 'sub' can contain intensity profiles, whilst a 'channel' just contains the patch and saves memory space on the desk. These patches should be accessible through a submaster setup screen, and please can we have a default fade time of 0s on submasters... the current 3seconds is annoying. Any chance of giving us some sort of sneak preview of what you're working on, Z88, and then we can suggest improvements?

So the LTP channels would be triggered by the master fader being at the trigger level, rather than the individual sub being at the trigger level. I suppose that could work, but is quite a confusing way of working - I like to see my subs reaction when I raise them. Surely with a complex show like the one you're suggesting, you would be better off recording one sub with a 'look' on it, which combines all the other subs.

I don't think this would be particularly useful, and infact I think it would confuse the duck out of me. Plus, what happens to the LTP attributes if you bring the master down? Another thing you could add to the desks - multi-level LTP, so when you bring down a submaster the fixture returns to whatever it was doing before the sub was raised. This would be really useful for live shows - eg: You have a 'state' set-up, and someone walks up to the CS mike. Raise the sub which points your fixture at CS in open white. Then, when the speaker has finished, simply bring down the sub and the mover returns to its original job, instead of having to re-trigger the original state. Does that make sense?

Had a thought about the way that scrollers work when assigned to brightness channels. Rather than using a fixture profile with two channels, as happens at the moment, would it be possible to 'associate' a scroller with a generic channel, thus not losing valuable fixture channels. Obviously this depends on the architecture of the new desk, but my guess would be that it could work very much in the way of scrollers on the Strand Genius desks (5x0 and 300). Basically you address the scroller from the desk as xx.2 (.2 being the colour attribute), and you can select the frame number (as defined in the patch). Assuming the new desk works with a keypad, this wouldn't be a significant change and would increase the flexability of the desk. If the desk remains a two preset style desk, you could add a setting to the flash buttons to 'select colour' and this would then allow you to use the fixture wheels (or whatever you give us) to change the attribute. Does any of that make sense? And please can we have macros of some sort! Trying to turn the lamp-on on Robo Color Pro 400s just isn't pretty without them - 95% = lamp off, 98% = lamp on... so you wheel the strobe channel down after lamping on and turn the lamp off In the end I had to plot 3 cues to turn the lamp on... not an ideal situation. You could store the lamp-on/reset/lamp-off commands as a fixture-macro, and have an associated keypress to perform each of those macros to the selected fixtures. Perhaps a few 'user-definable' macros would be good too - these could be set using a fixture profile editor, and imported to the desk with the fixture files. I don't know how the new desk will store its attribute information - as 'real' values, or as DMX values, but either way can we have some way of transporting the information from one fixture to another - even if the fixtures have to be the same type. Eg: I have one Mac500 and I set it to random iris macro, then I decide I want to to do the same to my other Mac500 - instead of having to wheel the channel up to that certain value, perhaps I just tell it to do Fixture2 Iris @ Fixture1. The same could be true of referencing information from previous cues - eg Fixture2@Cue204. This started off as a quick post. Sorry for the essay.

You could always put some clever audio processing on the signal which goes into the desk, in the form of a delay with a dry signal passing through also. This would give in effect two beats where there is one, giving an 'on/off' for every real beat. Bit of a long way around though.

I consider myself to be well versed in the world of frog, but had never seen or even heard of the Fixture Outputs screen until now... Thanks K9. 8O

Suppose its more likely to make it if I call it a feature for a new desk?

I was thinking about the generics selectable for control by the wheel feature the other day. Would it be possible to add generic fixtures into Fixture Groups. It would work something like this: Define the group, as normal, by selecting the required Fixtures, and <somehow> tagging the required generics. I would suggest F4 plus the flash button, but IIRC this already has a function defined. Once your group is defined, you can select the group as normal and the Brightness attribute controls both the generics and fixtures as defined in the group. Pressing any of the fixture buttons would detag the generics (leaving them at their defined level). I appreciate this adds another level of HTP scanning for the Generic channels, but it could prove useful in a live situation. I suppose its half way between a work around and a new feature.

Thanks for explainng the problems, K9. I appreciate that its not an easy thing to impliment, but there must be something that can be implemented to show how far through the cue you are.

I suppose you could have an indicator for all 3. Or maybe it could use whichever is the longest, thus giving you the reading relative to 'completion' of the cue.

We've been working through a tech this week and an issue has come up with long crossfades. We're using a lot of 2/3 minute crossfades, and even with the override wheel set to full they still take a good 30 seconds to run through. Would it be possible to impliment a keypress to 'cut' to a cue. Perhaps F4 + Go? Basically that would activate the cue in a time of 0s, with all attributes snapping to their values. It would be REALLY useful during tech-rehearsals when we quite often have to re-run sequences. My suggestion for the user interface side of things would be to use the normal method of selecting a cue, and then pressing F4 + Go. If you're already running into a cue, all you'd have to do would be select that cue again in the cue stack and press F4 + Go to finish it. Another useful thing which I know has been mentioned before but really would have helped would be a way of seeing the progress of the Playback X fade times. Is there any way we could have a little counter, on the bottom of the memories screen - "Current Fade: xx%" Thanks Peter

Why? USB2.0 is backwards compatable.