Frog 2 Patch revision bugs

[bmr-design]

I have a Frog 2 on UK tour with www.noiseensemble.com

 

We are into date 7 of a 30 date UK tour and thus far the desk has behaved nicely for playback - BUT I have a few patch and palette issues we have encoutered on the road....

The show tours with all stage lighting and moving heads etc but we use local front of house conventional washes and local dimming for our toured onstage conventionals..

 

1) All the fixtures have unique fixture numbers and are patched across 3 universes. Universe 3© holds the local dimmer patch. In each venue I unpatch all of universe 3 (unpatch 3 ENTER) I then proceed to patch the fixtures by unit number back in with local dimmer numbers - however as I use the FOH washes effectivly as groups I simply have 4 fixtures - 1 for each of the colour washes and patch each fixture multiple times to the universe - eg. 201 @ 3/1, 201 @ 3/33 etc etc When I do this the fixtures do not always appear in the patch even when at times they have been patched and as such if I mis-patch and have to undo it can be difficult to fault find as not all the patch is displayed..... Is this bug?

 

1a) Is there a quick way to patch a fixture to multiple address and to unpatch by ficture number NOT by DMX address?

 

2) On one gig two units where mis-hung (a genuine mistake) so I needed to move thier addresses in the patch as it was impractical to get to the fixtures in the roof to re-address them locally. However the fixtures where consecutive in the patch eg:

 

Fixture 1 @ 1/33

Fixture 2 @ 1/47

 

so I entered the following:

 

2 @ 1/33 and was asked if I wishes to overpatch on the address as it was in use - this I did and then

 

1 @ 1/47 - again a question and again I accepted.

 

I did the position edits but had problems with one fixture thinking it was the other and vice versa, this also occured in playback - this was irriating and messy - can this be fixed? - I assume that the desk unpatches the fixture and then loses attributes etc but it's weird that it doesn't fully forget all details.....

 

and finally - and my biggest gripe:

 

The show has about 60 position pallettes which I have split across the different fixture types. This takes about an hour to update in each venue - but there seems to be some inconsistancy as to how the desk updates pallettes - I am used to the Hog 2 which has a MERGE function on palettes and thus updates only the edited (tagged) attributes leaving all other pallette information as before. The Frog 2 seems to have merged tagged information one day (IE a tilt edit only) and leave the pan intact and on other occastions I have had to manually tag both pan and tilt data on all fixtures in the position pallette before REPLACING the pallette....

 

Please clarify how the desk deals with this information as it's becoming what feels like a dice spin everytime we put the show in and with 400 lighting cues for a 90 minute show it's quite busy and needs to be precise!

 

Cheers

 

Ben

[Kirkup_xp]

Hi Ben

 

First of all, thanks for taking the time to feedback on the desk - it would be very useful if you could let us know the desk software version you're running, as some of the things you've described have been fixed in recent beta-releases.

 

With regards unpatching fixtures, the interface is:

GROUP n ENTER <fixture selection> UNPATCH - unpatches all instances of the selected fixture within the current universe (Outputs view, or Channel view)

 

GROUP n ENTER <fixture selection> UNPATCH - unpatches all instances of the selected fixture across all universes (Fixtures view)

 

GROUP N ENTER <fixture no> @ <address> UNPATCH - unpatches the specified fixture on the currently selected universe (Outputs/Channel view)

 

GROUP N ENTER <fixture no> @ <address> UNPATCH - unpatches the specified fixture at the address specified on all universes. (Fixtures view)

 

Do any of the above help, or are you asking for something else?

 

 

 

The issue with repatching fixtures to already used addresses has been addressed in recent beta releases. A new release is due out shortly which will be available to all, and should fix this issue.

 

Again, we've done some work on the merge functionality in the next release of the software. If you note something which behaves oddly with this new release, please let us know and we'll try to explain it or fix it.

 

Best of luck with the rest of the tour - if you have any photographs of the gigs, we'd love to see them

 

 

 

Peter