Movement Effects

[Pinspot]

The fat frog can do four movement effects Ellipse, Quadrilateral, Triangle and Figure eight. Im having trouble in programming those movement effects with some Trackspots. Are those effects made up of more then one cue or can they be programmed in one cue? The manual doesn't really give much on how to do movement effects.

Thanks

[ice]

U can use a movement effect instead of complicated chases in your fixture position. Setting up is rather simple; select the effect (for instance an ellips). The X and Y size determine the width and height of the figure. The speed controls the movement speed, rotation rotates the figure (so a normal 8 becomes one lying down like an infinity symbol at 90 degrees rotation). The offset can be used to set the starting point of a fixture in the movement. So a offset of 50 percent makes it start at the other side of the ellips for instance.

 

Etc. Etc... programming is done by just programming in the scene in a memory, the effect doesn't need more than that!

 

I found out that it helps when you picture yourself the figure it should be making, and then applying rotation etc. A figure 8 running on a movinghead will turn out differently from one running on a scan!

[Haytech]

Im having trouble in programming those movement effects with some Trackspots.

Hi ice is very right as he usual is, however I have a idea of possible reason why your trackspots didn´t do the movement´s proper. I remember that Trackspots inverting the mirrorspeed value that means that you put the speed to 255 to reduce the speed lower the value.

 

kind regards

[ice]

hmmm, that could cause some problems

 

So; what exactly is your problem with the tracks then? If this is true, the file in the fixture library should be altered so that the default value on the speed channel is set at 255.

[Pinspot]

The mirror on the Trackspot does move the fastest at the 255 setting and the mirror moves the slowest at the 1 setting. I guest Im having trouble getting a full figure 8 effect. I have try setting all the values of what size and speed I want the figure 8 to be but I have only been able to get a Trackspot to move about a quarter of the way doing a figure 8 and then the movement stops. I just may need to invest some more time in finding out where Im going wrong.

[Paul]

Bear in mind that the movement effect Speed parameter on the desk is a bit over-powerful! Most moving mirrors can't keep up with it being greater than about +/-30 (although it depends on the size of the effect too). Start off at about +/-10, and you should see something sensible.

[ice]

That's a good point you've got there, are there fixtures which do need the great speed? I sure know I never use values greater than 15 cause my heads won't keep up with that. Which fixtures do? Otherwise it could be altered so the range of speeds (now 15) becomes a bit finer to tune.

[Paul]

You could call it future-proofing, for the lightning-fast fixtures we hope somebody will invent one day :wink:

 

Alternatively...

 

Frog Reference 5406 - Movement Effect Speed parameter - needs to be scaled down as anything much above 15 (moving heads) or 30 (scanners) - the fixtures cannot keep up !!

[Pipo]

Sometimes I get a rather nice effect when putting the speed into overdrive.

[ice]

Can't imagine that... what happens??? If I turn up the speed too high the heads won't follow and start breaking off the moves at somewhat random points, they'll try to make it to the next point but will arrive too late etc. etc.

Apart from the not-so neat effect the motors of our Kryptons certainly don't like me when I do that.

Other solution would be to insert this kind of information into the fixture file. That way you could set up a maximum speed for the fixture (heads at 15 and scanners at 30?) and use the console to alter the speeds from 0-100% of the maximum. Guess thats not a feature to implement in one day, but maybe a nice idea for the future.

[K-Nine]

Scaling the movement effect speed parameter to be a more sensible value as already suggested is a much simpler and quicker solution.

 

Any additional data added to fixtures in the fixture library is not a trivial task AND the desk software has to be updated as well 8O

[ice]

Hmm, additional so aditional data won't just be ignored? I guess that means updating the entire series of consoles, since there's only one fixture file format?

 

Oh well; scaling the value down is just as good!