Soloing a Submaster or SX resets Chases

[Halo_djk]

We have our strobe set as solo on a SX button on our Mambo Frog. we have found that if you run a chase on another button, modify that chase live either through the fixture controls, or modify the chase prams like bass auto or manual, when you solo the strobe, the other chase that was running (and modified) restart back in their original state after the solo is released.

Ultimately I think when a solo is pressed the other chases and memories should just keep going, and the solo button should just cause all other brightness channels to be pulled down to %0.

 

We also noticed that the chase restarts from step one instead of just pausing, with the brightness channel pulled down. This looks a liitle weird if you flash blinders or a strobe a few times because when the solo is released the scans just sit there motionless at step one every time waiting for step two. This is worse if its a slow chase that has a long step time as the scans look like they have frozen!

[Paul]

I think when a solo is pressed the other chases and memories should just keep going, and the solo button should just cause all other brightness channels to be pulled down to %0.

 

On the face of it, this would seem to be a trivial solution. However, the submaster / SX that you are soloing may contain LTP data. When the submaster / SX flash button is pressed, any LTP data that is programmed in it is sent to the outputs. When the submaster / SX flash button is released, if in Solo mode, the desk re-triggers all the other active submasters / SXs to attempt to restore the LTP outputs to something like they were beforehand. There are 2 potential issues with this:

 

1. The order that the desk re-triggers them may not be the same order that you output them in, hence it may look different afterwards. If you Solo a sub, the subs retrigger in asecnding numerical order of those with the fader above the LTP trigger level. If you Solo a SX, the SX's retrigger in ascending numerical order of those with 'Go' action and LED on.

 

2. Chases re-trigger at step 1 and lose any live overrides.

 

This sort of thing has come up a number of times before, the old "go back to what it was doing before" problem. To sort this out properly requires each output channel to keep a history list of what on the desk is controlling it / has controlled it, so that it can truly go back to what it was doing before. This is a radical restructuring of the internal DMX calculation in the desk, and in all honesty is not something that we're likely to do on the Frog series in the foreseeable future.

 

If you want this sort of functionality, take a look at the Frog2. This is exactly what the "Release" button on the front panel does.

 

Frog Reference 5525 - Solo function should remove all other brightness contributions without stopping chases or retriggering on release.

[ice]

When you playback a tapped memory and alter it by tapping the step button, the speed will change. Now solo another channel by pressing setting flash type to solo and pressing one of the other flash buttons. The output of the chase will be stopped as expected, but when you release the flash button, the speed will also be reset by the original speed as recorded in the memory. In my opinion the speed should remain at the tapped value until the fader is completely lowered again. Solo-ing any other channel should not affect the speed of the running chases.

[ice]

Yeah it is, but I don't really care if the chase restarts or not (preferably it doesn't of course) I just want it to retain the speed I set.

 

If I now alter it to go fast (while it was slow), and solo some other thing, it'll go slow again and I have to set the speed once again. That's the only thing which is bugging me.

[K-Nine]

This is almost certainly a consequence of what happens internally when you solo a submaster, ie all the other submaster faders are (internally)lowered to zero and then returned to their previous level.

 

Lowering a submaster fader to zero will stop the chase, returning it to previous level will then restart the chase using the programmed modifiers (including speed).

[nighteyes]

would it then be possible to make the soloing function lower the other submasters to say 1%?. this would prevent the submasters from retriggering.

[sp]

just a thought, would this not cause problems if a chase were on another submaster, with its LTP trigger set to 0?

 

sp

[ice]

The chases should continue as they were, but the output HTP levels should all be set to 0. So the chase just continues running, only output isn't there.