Fat Frog Saving Memories

[kennyoconnor7]

We have a Fat Frog board and are having a hard time saving memories to disk. All memories are setup as scenes and when the memories are saved, everything in the library is saved to the disk. Everything seems to be considered one show. What am I overlooking? Thanks so much, I appreciate any help!

[PeterV]

It is assumed that the desk is setup for a particular production - patching, fixture allocation, cues (scenes), chases, submasters etc. So when you save these to the floppy disk it is treated as one show file, Each time you save a show it will use a new name unless you override it. However, you can't - for example - load just cue 34 from a show file and add it to what you have setup now.

When you start programming a new show it is normal to clear all the memories and start again, so the showfile for this production will be completely different to the last one.

As far as I am aware, this is how all memory consoles save to disk (floppy or otherwise)?

[kennyoconnor7]

Ok, that makes sense. Thank you! We use our Fat Frog at a church for worship services. We load memories and just keep building the library. We were hoping to be able to save specific memories to disk so that we still have a record of them, but we're not wasting desk memory. It sounds like that isn't possible. It was worth a shot to ask. Thanks so much!

[PeterV]

Kenny - if I assume you are adding the looks you want as cues (1,2,3,4 etc), then every time you save a show file then the latest one plus all the previous ones are saved. The show files are tiny by modern standards. So if you are documenting offline what each cue being added is for/does/looks like, then this would seem to be doing what you want?

 

I am just checking that you are aware that you can load any of the cues to display next. You just set the next cue to say 42 press GO and it will crossfade to cue 42 (and ignore 1-41). You can also say which cue to run next. So after cue 17 you could specify to always run cue 34 next. It sounds like all the things you want to do are possible?

 

Finally - if you attach a keyboard and monitor, you can also name each cue (very short name of which only 12 characters can be seen on the monitor if I remember correctly) to remind you what it was for or the date it was added etc?

 

Does this help?

[kennyoconnor7]

Peter, thanks for all the time you're taking with me, I appreciate it. We have a keyboard and monitor hooked up and sometimes setup chases and use the procedure you described with having it automatically queue a non-sequential memory. We're trying to find a way to have more than the 400 memory limit. I thought that if we could save (as an example) 100 memories to a disk, then that would free up 100 blocks on the desk. If we ever wanted to reinstate those memories, then we could just pull them off the disk. I suppose I should just purge out the lesser used memories and cut my losses.

[PeterV]

Hi Kenny, unless I need new glasses the Fat Frog can hold 999 memories? I can't pretend that at our little theatre we have ever got close to this but that's what the spec says.

 

So I think your best bet is to load up the 400/999 memories with the looks you use most often and save this in a master show file. If you save show files with other scenes in them, you could reload them, extract the details (basically by writing them down), reload master show file then overwrite one of the cues to create a new master show file. It sounds like this is as close as you will get to what you want? Of course, this only really makes sense if your lighting rig is static (which is not the case in the theatre where the rig is different for every show - or should be!).

 

Thank you for an interesting puzzle!