SubMasters On Frog

[Ian_SDC]

Can anyone tell me if you can assign DMX channels to the submasters on a Frog. I am doing pantomime and need another two channels (50 in all) for the LED cans

[kgallen]

This is well after the event for Ian, but I thought I'd have a go at working this through in case anyone else has this issue. I suspect this topic has already been covered somewhere else on the forum so I may be regurgitating existing ideas.

 

So assuming Ian just wants more channels of conventional dimmers, he could get up to 12 more channels on a Fat Frog by creating a dimmer-only "moving" fixture. In the standard fixture list there is a Lamp+Scroller, but you could create a new fixture using the off-line Fixture Editor that just has a dimmer. Using the 10.10 Off-line editor for Fat Frog I was able to allocate the standard Lamp+Scroller to two fixtures and with the DMX patch, allocate Ch49 and Ch50 to the "lamp" section of the fixture (I didn't need to allocate a channel to the scroller). Since the dimmer part of a fixture uses HTP rather than LTP then the submaster should be able to control the brightness. It will be necessary to program a memory stack location beyond the end of the show's cue stack (maybe add a Jump to Q1 at the end of your show) for each of the fixtures, one at a time, with dimmer at full (select the fixture so the yellow LED is on then first finger wheel to dimmer 100%). Then the submaster will need to point to that memory entry with "Transfer No Time". When programming the memory make sure the Ch49 lamp is the only one that's on so that's all the memory contains, and after programming, wheel the fixture dimmer back down to zero otherwise that channel will remain at 100%. The Outputs screen is useful to see this.

 

I tried this using the off-line editor with a cue "onstage" and the submaster had the desired control over the fixture. When building a show cue stack the submaster will have control of the channel just as if it was a Preset A/B fader and can be programmed into the show. I tried this with a show loaded and programmed the Ch49 into the cue using the submaster and it played back as desired, fading in and out with the rest of the cue. This can be seen on the Outputs screen under the Fixture Brightness Outputs banner.

 

So you've got 48+12=60 generic channels to play with.

 

Probably cleaner to use the Fixture editor to create a "Lamp" fixture type with just a dimmer attribute. Maybe Peter will do that for us for the next Fixture release

 

If Ian's LED lamp was RGB then there is a fixture type specifically for these luminaires and I believe "virtual brightness" concept is supported on the Fat Frog to handle these RGB LED units.

[kgallen]

As an addendum to my posting, users may wish to set the Fat Frog into "Full" mode (Desk Setup->Program Mode) rather than "Partial" mode so that the console does not do tracking with the extra generics (if you don't know what tracking is then definately set the desk to "Full" mode!). Users experienced enough to use Partial mode and tracking or those with movers in their rig can make up their own mind which setting to use!

[kgallen]

I've just had a play with the desk (s/w v10.12) and you don't need to program the memories. Just set the fixture dimmer at 100%, select Submasters screen, select the required submaster and click Program. The Fixtures library already contains a single dimmer fixture under <CONVENTIONALS> DIMMER, so this can be used to assign to fixtures the extra number of generic channels required.