Creating a Trick Chase with fixtures

[hansdev]

Good morning all.

Last night, I was trying to create a trick chase, and got the chase to partially do what i wanted, but the travel distance was cut short everytime.

I'm using three High End Studio colors. (Dimmer is always 100%, and fixtures are all on a thruss in the ceilling)

 

1. All three fixtures have a dimmer=100%, shutter=0, position on floor

2. Center fixture, shutter=255, floor

3. Center fixture, shutter=255, move from floor to wall with mspeed of 213=7.2 seconds

4. Left fixture, shutter=255, on floor, center fixture Shutter=0, back to floor

5. Left fixture move to wall with Mspeed=213, shutter=255

6. Left fixture shutter=0, back to floor, Right fixture shutter=255

7. right fixture shutter=255, moves to wall with Mspeed=213

8. right fixture shutter=0, moves back to floor

 

Now, what I have, is the center fixture turning on -> moves to wall -> turn off as left fixture turns ON on the floor -> left fixture moves to the wall -> left fixture turn off as it returns to the floor, and the right fixture turns on -> right fixture goes to the wall -> right goes off and back to the floor.

The on and off sequence seems to work well, but as the fixture travel to their destinations, they turn off well before they get to their designated spot on the wall. Seems that they are all on for about 1 sec or so. The Mspeed of 213 equals to a 7.2 sec travel time. My travel will be put to about 3 seconds in the final version.

Can anybody explain as to what I did wrong on this trick chase. Thanks.

 

Cheers,

 

Hans

[K-Nine]

A bit of a stab in the dark this (excuse the pun)

 

I've never really used mspeeds to determine how long it takes for a fixture to move from one position to another. Maybe this is conflicting with the natural speed of the chase itself (ie how often it triggers the next step). The chase may be sending out the data for the next step before the fixture has completed its movement.

 

Perhaps you could ignore the mspeed parameter and get the fixture to track the actual dmx output from the desk for the pan/tilt parameters. By setting the Position action to fade the movement should be fairly smooth between chase steps.

 

I don't think I've used these particular fixtures, so I'm only guessing that this may be possible 8O

[ice]

Using the desk-fade for movement isn't going to be as smooth as the movement speed. Why? Simple; when fading DMX values the fixture will receive minor changes in position parameters, and therefore move slow. But When this is really slow the small "steps" will result in unsmooth movement. When you snap the parameter the fixture will use the movement speed to calculate the best route to its destination, and therefore moving very smooth. At least that's what I found out with out MACs; using the movement speed was a lot smoother (but when you consider what's happening that's kind of figures).

I guess (to answer your question) you should play with the movement speed parameter a little bit. I think the actual speed-rate is at top speed... the fixture needs time to gain speed and slow down again, so maybe that's the problem?? When you snap the position with the movement speed set; the fixture will continue moving to its end-destination; if it receives a dimmer=0 value in the meantime; the shutter will close! So I guess your timing is off somewhere, try to figure out where that is and your problem is solved I think.

[K-Nine]

Cheers Ice, I wasn't sure how the mspeed parameter worked on some of these fixtures :oops:

 

So presumably, you send it a new pan/tilt dmx value and an mspeed value and the fixture makes the transition as smoothly as possible in the required time 8)

[ice]

Yeah that's the idea, you can snap the parameter and the fixture does the rest. Just a matter of splitting up tasks; because the fixture knows its own details it's far better in calculating a suitable movement. I guess that parameter was thought of because there's no way of knowing whether the desk is outputting a slow transition, or highspeed movement. Without that parameter all movement would be considered fast, using motors at highest possible speed. Above problems (unsmooth movement) will occur in those cases

[hansdev]

Looking at steps 1-8, how differently would you set the chase from the one I set up.

[ice]

You could try this:

step 1 = position 1, with a slow movement speed

step 2 = position 2, with a slow movement speed (position = snap)

step 3 = home with the fastest movement speed (position = snap).

 

This way you can easily time your movement; when the head moves to slowly, it won't reach its final destination, and therefore snap to home somewhere in between.

When you've figured out what time / speed setting you want to use, u can implement this in your final program.

I'd also recommend to use the memories stack for this; you can change the individual fadeup/down/dwell/LTP fade etc for each step. Use the auto-function to step through the memories; and everything can be timed exactly the way you want! When you understand all of the parameters the creation of this chase should be easy using memories.

Good luck!

[hansdev]

Well, I was playing again last night on creating the chase, and I got it working. First, it appears that I had to set the chase modifier to the slowest speed that I could and set the C/B/P to snap. Once those two are set, you can now play with the Mspeed for the light. What I also had to do was set the MSpeed from point A to point B, and no MSpeed to bring it home. The sequence look pretty good. Thanks all for the different sugestions.