Two odd things

[ice]

After last nights show I noticed 3 potential bugs...

 

- The reference pallet given in the fixture LCD doesn't seem to match all the time. I programmed a scene with a position pallet and saved it. When I edited the scene it was telling me P09 in the position parameters, though that wasn't the pallet I recorded... I pressed P09 and the position of the heads changed; so that definitely wasn't right! Unfortunately I changed that one and didn't save the wrong file, can't reproduce it I'm affraid.

- The effects generator always sets the shape to Figure8 when you record a position pallet. Though it's playing the right shape; editing the shape always sets you beginning at figure8, don't know why. To reproduce; press home, set a position and record it to a pallet. Now load the pallet and turn the shape wheel: it'll go to figure8.

- When you're playing a position pallet and record it into another one, the shape generator is ignored completely, it seems to take the position parameters at that point and lose the effect parameters. In my opinion it shouldn't do that.

 

Also it's still a bit annoying that you can't alter the effects engine parameter when you're running an effect from a scene. The pan/tilt values keep on changing and the effects engine says it's not doing anything though you did program the movement as an effect.

 

And again I've been waiting quite a bit while the console was saving / loading the show. I thought that was just the desk being a bit slow, but loading my show into Phantom Frog also takes a while, but saving it is done in a few milliseconds; why does the loading take that long?

[pscandrett]

I've noticed the latter two (fig8 and shape generator being dropped) before but assumed it was just me being stupid...

 

In the latter case, if you have a recorded shape generated wibble on a submaster, it'll run quite happily but looking at the LCD screen whilst it's going says 0 for everything - with the net result that if you try to save that state somewhere else it doesn't remember the shape movement at all.

 

Peter

 

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[Paul]

The reference pallet given in the fixture LCD doesn't seem to match all the time. I programmed a scene with a position pallet and saved it. When I edited the scene it was telling me P09 in the position parameters, though that wasn't the pallet I recorded... I pressed P09 and the position of the heads changed; so that definitely wasn't right! Unfortunately I changed that one and didn't save the wrong file, can't reproduce it I'm affraid

There is a known bug in replaying palettes, in that all selected fixtures are auto-tagged, instead of just those which are actually recorded in the palette. This can lead to confusion as to what is recorded in the palette, and is I believe the root cause of Frog Reference 5509 (CLICK HERE), although if anyone can prove otherwise I'd be interested to hear.

 

The effects generator always sets the shape to Figure8 when you record a position pallet. Though it's playing the right shape; editing the shape always sets you beginning at figure8, don't know why. To reproduce; press home, set a position and record it to a pallet. Now load the pallet and turn the shape wheel: it'll go to figure8.

 

Yep, genuine bug this one. When the wheels are showing "Pxx" (where xx is the palette number), moving the wheels should 'pick-up' the value in the palette for editing. However this doesn't currently work for the Movement Effect (Shape), Size X, Size Y, Offset, and Rotation parameters. You get silly numbers instead.

 

Frog Reference 5513 - When using the wheels to edit Movement effects from palettes, the values should begin at the values in the palette

 

When you're playing a position pallet and record it into another one, the shape generator is ignored completely, it seems to take the position parameters at that point and lose the effect parameters. In my opinion it shouldn't do that.

 

Also it's still a bit annoying that you can't alter the effects engine parameter when you're running an effect from a scene. The pan/tilt values keep on changing and the effects engine says it's not doing anything though you did program the movement as an effect.

 

Frog Reference 5505 - When a movement effect is running on a fixture this is not reflected in the movement effect parameters on the wheel LCD - they show No effect , size = 0 etc.

 

And again I've been waiting quite a bit while the console was saving / loading the show. I thought that was just the desk being a bit slow, but loading my show into Phantom Frog also takes a while, but saving it is done in a few milliseconds; why does the loading take that long?

The desk has to do much more thinking when loading the show than when saving it. It has all sorts of internal tables to build up from the data in the showfile. This affects both the real Frogs and the Phantom Frog. The Phantom Frog is much quicker at saving the show though, since it doesn't have to write to internal Flash memory like the desk does.

[ice]

Still the console takes more time saving then loading. The show I'm currently working with is now 270kb in size and takes almost a minute to save, that also applies to the autosaves / RAM-flushes now and then; no need to mention how annoying that is []. Isn't there a way to discard the autosaves, by flushing the RAM whenever the CPU isn't doing anything else?

[Paul]

Wouldn't really work, the CPU trying to guess when the console is idle. You could be just about to hit the 'Go' button, or play back a submaster/SX/palette, when the desk does the autosave! Besides, if you've just edited something, and the battery backed RAM has filled up, the desk needs somewhere to put the changes, so it has to flush the battery backed RAM to FLASH at that point.

 

The time taken to load/save a show is a combination of the time required to access the data and the time taken to process it. For accessing the data, the loading is faster than the saving. Conversely for processing the data, the saving is faster than the loading. On Phantom Frog, the processing performance will depend on the spec of your PC. The accessing performance will be significantly quicker than the desk as you have a hard disk rather than Flash memory. However we chose not to use hard disks in the desk because of noise/reliability/cost issues.

 

I'm sure if we didn't have the battery backed RAM buffering changes, and relied on the user to manually write the changes from the DRAM to FLASH, then there'd be an awful lot of annoyed people on the phone to us grumbling they'd lost hours of programming because someone else dropped the power just before they'd saved the changes. We think the way it works now is the best compromise.

 

Just out of interest - what sort of Show file sizes are other users regularly coming up with on the different desks for different show types? Would be interesting to know, just to allow us to size the amount of storage we provide in desks of the future. Might be a bit off-topic here, I risk K-Nine splitting the thread at this point I know... 8)