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cheers ice, thats what we came up with, but its v reassuring to here it from someone else to! Thanks

Guys, really need an answer for this as we've got a show tomorrow, how do i program a submaster that when triggered won't affect the fixtures, ie. if i have smoke on a submaster normally it will cause the fixtures to change position to what they were when i programmed the submaster, i do not want this to happen as my fixtures will obviously be programmed doing other things during the show. Hope this makes sense, i know this has probably been answered somewhere else but i cant find it! Thanks

Not really a biggy, but thought i'd mention it. I've just been doing some late night programming on the offline editor, and i've noticed it crashes at midnight, and this has happened several times now. Does this mean the actual desks crash too if it reaches midnight and they are on?

We've experienced this problem several times, we think we've cracked what was causing it, well our problem anyway... If you hold down the position button a menu will appear on the fixture panel, edit mode, from here you can scroll through various modes; absolute, relative etc. Try changing this to absolute, or any of the others, and see if it sorts it out. Hope that helps, we think this was what was causing our problems anyway.

First of all, as a school we would need the desk for both live and theatre use, we currently have a Fat Frog and use it for theatre, and live concerts etc where we run the shows off subs. Taking away one aspect of the desk will lose you buyers guaranteed, the Strand 500 series of desks are designed for both live and theatre use and thats what makes them the most widely used desks in the west end. Motorised faders - we don't really see a need for them on this type of desk, if you want motorised faders then surely it would be better to go for a MaXXyZ or something. We think the idea of programming generic channels from a keypad is good, it would give more scope for expansion and then the room on the desk used currently for generic faders could be used for more submasters. The use of a keypad for calling up memories and entering fade times etc would also be very useful and would save alot of time during programming. We also like the idea of having some sort of lcd screen for labelling submasters, but the current lcd screen on the frogs which is used instead of a monitor is a bit of a waste of time as everyone seems to have a monitor now. But keep the lcd display for the fixture information we use that and is very useful. One of the most important features though, would be to increase the power of the desk so it is able to control more generic channels and fixtures. Another feature we'd personally like to see is the use of attributes, like on the 500 series so the desk will remember things like scrollers and their colours, this way your not having to use channels to run your scrollers etc. The 500 also reads the next memory, and will preset things like colours in scrollers ready for the next memory. A second monitor would also be useful for viewing combinations of screens at one time, ie memory screen and preview screen or whatever you want. Some software for PC's to be able to read saved shows and be able to print off copies of channel values for each memory etc would also be helpful. Just some ideas for you. Thanks again, The guys from Hemel Hempstead Performing Arts College, in association with AB Lighting and Special Effects

Thankyou for your quick response, as for smoke machines in our experience most smoke machines only have 1 channel. We generally use JEM ZR 12 and the JEM ZR 22, both of which use 1 DMX channel, the 1 channel being the output of the smoke machine. We have created our own fixture for the smoke machines, but obviously if you could create one it would be a lot better than ours. What we would like to know is if you could create a smoke machine fixture that could control multiple smoke machines using the wheel group button and wheels, that way for example 3 smoke machines and 3 haze machines could be controlled from 1 fixture using the wheels and the wheel group button, the only thing users would need to be aware of is that the first smoke/haze machine must be set to the first channel of the fixture and the other smoke/haze machines must follow in sequence. Thankyou for your advice on our little moving light and generic chase problem, we think its probably just our programming :oops:! But we had this idea of maybe being able to select a sub and let it take presidence over other subs that are running or even memories that are being played back. So could there be a way of selecting a sub moving state to take presidence over a playback/sub moving state? Perhaps by holding the flash button under the sub as you fade it up for it to take presidence? This would probably be a pretty big software update, and i don't know if anyone else would find it useful but it could be used in a variety of different situations and applications. Sorry if that doesn't quite make sense, ask any questions and i'll try and explain lol. As for the topset idea, we would love this to be developed and introduced to the frog range, I know we would find it very useful, if anyone else thinks so please post a reply or something so maybe we can try and push and get that on the next update. But we do love the frog range of desks, they're perfect for teaching students on how to use them, they're much better than the Sirius and XLS Series desks that we used to have, and being computer based they fit in perfectly with our curriculum. If there is ever any other equipment we could demo etc it would be perfect for demonstrating the students about a wider range of equipment and technology, it's good seeing how the students adapt to the different desks and equipment and we could get lots of feedback from that and pass that on to you. If there is anything, information, feedback that you would like please don't hesitate to ask or contact us. Just a thought could we have a nice female voice instead of that bleep when we make stupid mistakes, it would be much more sympathetic , or even a fully voice activated frog with a nice husky female voice? Thanks again The guys from Hemel Hempstead Performing Arts College, in association with AB Lighting and Special Effects

OK, just added the new update for our fat frog (ver 9) and we've been wondering why it is that the F3 key works from the keyboard but none of the other "F" keys do. Also we want to know if it would be at all possible to be able to pull out a channel from a memory when running a show, but without affecting the saved memory, we figured you could do this with the flash "off" button and then holding the desired flash button down and manually moving the faders ourselves to adjust the output for that particular channel. For example this could be really useful when taking out a special because a performer has missed a cue etc. We have also noticed that when a moving light chase is running on a submaster and a generic chase from a submaster is added in, sometimes the moving light chase can be affected as if the generic chase is taking priority, not to sure if this is a bug or whether it was "dodgy" programming on our part. We have also and experimented and used smoke machines as fixtures, we made our own fixture for it but it might be worthwhile if you could create a fixture control for smoke machines. Is there anyway of changing fade up and down times in groups rather than individually, for example changing the fade up/down times in a snap sequence would take a long time to go through each individual memory but if multiple memories could be selected and adjusted at the same time this would save a lot of time whilst programming. Maybe pressing an "F" key like a shift key so multiple memories can be selected and their values edited at the same time. Also the fixture groups gave me an idea of creating pages of fixtures, like pages of submasters, I know this kind of defeats the idea of having a bigger expensive desk for more fixtures but you could still put more pages on the bigger desks, its just that when you start putting in scrollers etc you rapidly begin to run out of fixtures and pages of fixtures could be an option. And please, please, get the backspace to work when naming items! That can be so annoying. But overall we use the fat frog everyday and for every show, production and event there is at school and we think its great, so keep up the fantastic work and if you ever have a new product or update that needs a vigorous testing don't be afraid to send it our way and we'll put it through its paces! Thank you for your time Yours Sincerely Hemel Hempstead Performing Arts School and AB Lighting and special Effects [/code]