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Console Programming Tips, Autumn 2005 by Rob Halliday Moving Information Around The Console In the old days, it seemed so much easier to use lighting consoles. You brought up a bunch of channels to make a pretty look on stage, then you pressed the ‘Record’ key to commit that look to memory. Later, to get that look back you played the cue; sometimes you made some adjustments then recorded again. The arrival of moving lights, scrollers and all of the other current Getting Lights To Look As They Do In Other Cues If you want the look of cue 1 back on stage, that’s easy: run cue 1 either using [CUE][1][GOx1] or [CUE][1][CUTx1] or [GOTO][CUE][1][*] according to taste (though note that there is a subtle difference between the use of GO/CUT and GOTO: when the cue ends up on stage using the first two the channel colours on the live screen - green for channels going down, purple for channels going up - will be relative to whatever was last live; when using GOTO they will be relative to the previous cue in the cue list regardless of what was on stage beforehand; a subtle difference but sometimes an important one, particularly when jumping around a show out of order). But what if you only want to pull back part of the look - perhaps only what channel 1, a moving light, was doing in cue 50? Easy: [1] [@] [CUE] [50] [*] Channel 1 will now be doing ‘live’ exactly what it was doing in cue 50. But perhaps we only wanted to get channel 1 pointing to the right direction in the right colour rather than have it come on: [1] [@] [CUE] [50] {ATTS ONLY} [*] ATTS ONLY means ‘pull back the attributes only, ignore the recorded ‘must haves’ of lighting seem to have made things harder - but only because with them, you want to do more complex things! If you wanted to put channel 1 to the level it was at in cue 1, you used to just look up that level then type ‘1@5’, perhaps followed by a press of the [*] key if working in command line mode. But if 1 is a moving light and you want to put it back to looking as it did in cue 1, that’s harder. Fortunately Strand 300- and 500- series consoles offer lots of ways to intensity’. Equally, we could have wanted just to the set the light to the level it had in cue 50 but leaving it pointing where it was currently pointing - intensity only rather than attributes only: [1] [@] [CUE] [50] {INTS ONLY} [*] INTS ONLY and ATTS ONLY appear as softkeys on the left-hand set of softkeys on 530i and 550i consoles; on 520i and 300 consoles you may have to press the [REC MODE] key to get them to appear on your softkey LCD display; on an off-line editor or xConnect, the ‘J’ key corresponds to REC MODE. It’s possible that we might want to refine things further - to leave the light pointing to where it’s pointing now, but to set it to the colour it was in in cue 50: [1] [@] [CUE] [50] [@ATT] {colour} [*] (where @ATT is called ATTRIB on 300-series consoles) This uses the consoles ‘function filters’ to just pull back the attributes defined as colour attributes . You can combine multiple function filters, so if you wanted to pull back position and colour you could have said [@A TT]{position}{colour}. You can define which attributes are controlled by which function filter (and create your own, if you like) by editing the console’s ATCPAGE screen - see the December 2003 newsletter for more details of doing this, but help - and, surprisingly, some of the f u n c t i o n s that at first seem to be useful only for moving lights turn out to be surprisingly useful additions when dealing with conventional lights, too. note that in current software you can define twelve function filter combinations instead of the six described in that newsletter). You can also pull back particular attributes using the console’s attribute numbers if you need to - so set just the pan of channel 1 to its value from cue 50: [1.3] [@] [CUE] [50] [*]. Note that the console will fill in channel numbers for you, so if you did want to specify pan and tilt in this way rather than using {@ATT} {position} you’d only need to type: [1.3] [+] [.4] [@] [CUE] [50] [*] - the console would fill in the extra ‘1’ for you. Or if you just wanted to pull back the pans for channels 101 and 102 you’d just need to type: [101.3] [+] [NEXT] [@] [CUE] [50] [*] And, of course, you’re not limited to doing this just one light at a time as all of the normal commands you can use for selecting ranges of lights can be used here: [1] [+] [2] [@] [CUE] [50] [*] [1] {THRUON} [100] [@] [CUE] [50] {ATTS ONLY} [*] [GROUP] [800] [@] [CUE] [50] [*] This means that, though useful for moving lights, this is also useful for other blocks of lights - perhaps the LD says ‘make the cyclorama look like it did in cue 50’. If the cyclorama channels are 101-120:
Console Programming Tips, Autumn 2005 (continued) [101] [THRU] [120] [@] [CUE] [50] [*]. or - and this is a handy way to ‘preheat’ lights from one cue in a previous cue without disturbing the attributes in either cue, how about, while in cue 2: [CUE] [2] [-] [CUE] [1] [@] {INTS ONLY} [0.5] which could become a useful macro: [CUE] [NEXT] [-] [CUE] [LAST] [LAST] [@] (INTS ONLY} [0.5] All of these commands also work in PREVIEW, so as well as setting a light to its look from cue 1 live on stage, you could also go to cue 100 (or sub 1, or an effect) in preview and set the light to its value from cue 1 there. When working in tracking mode then, as with any channel commands, you can add QONLY/TRACK and/or TRACKBACK to specify whether the change just affects one cue or tracks forwards or backwards through the show (TRACKBACK is shift-QONLY/ TRACK; see the Summer 2004 Newsletter). Setting Lights To Values Stored In Groups You can set a light to a ‘reference group’ using similar commands to those above: [1] [@] [GROUP] [50] [*] will set light 1 to ‘reference group 50’ - so, if group 50 contained the values pan 30/tilt 40 light 1 would now be pointing in the direction pan 30/tilt 40 but it would actually say ‘pan: group 50, tilt: group 50’ or, if group 50 was called ‘Down Centre’, it would say ‘pan: Down Centre, tilt: Down Centre’. If you had to fix the position ‘Down Centre’, perhaps because the height of the light changed, you’d merely move the light then update group 50 - all of the cues that had the light set to ‘Down Centre’ would automatically update. There’s more about reference groups, which are invaluable programming tools, in the June 2003 Newsletter. A variant on this command is: [1] [@ATT] {position} [50] [*] which will set light 1’s position to group 50, ignoring any other attributes stored in group 50 - so the same as typing [1] [@] [GROUP] [50] {@ATT} {position}. All of the rules about using function filters, multiple channels or any combination of these things apply when using @GROUP. More importantly, you don’t have to remember a group’s number. To set the light to ‘Down Centre’ you could have typed: [1] [@] [GROUP] [TEXT] [Down Centre] [*] or even just [1] [@] [TEXT] [Down Centre] [*] and, in practice you probably wouldn’t have needed to type all of ‘Down Centre’ since as soon as you’d typed enough to make the group name uniquely recognisable to the console it would show the full name at the bottom of the screen and you could then just press the [*] key. Getting Lights To Look Like Other Lights You’ve set up a great look on one moving light - channel 1. You want channel 2 to look the same. So: [2] [@] {COPYFROM} [1] [*] (copyfrom will appear as a softkey after you press the [@] key) Note that this won’t necessarily make light 2 point to the same place on stage as light 1 - if 1 was just sitting in a position such as pan 40/tilt 40, light 2 would just copy these values and so would now be pointing in the same direction as light 1. However, if you’d had light 1 set to a reference group position such as ‘down centre’, light 2 would be pointing in the direction stored for it in the ‘down centre’ group - another reason why reference groups are useful. The same ‘modifiers’ can be used with COPYFROM as above, so to copy just the colour: [2] [@] (COPYFROM) [1] {@ATT} {colour} [*] or to make lots of lights look the same: [2] [THRU] [20] [@] {COPYFROM} [1] [*] or any combination of these. A quirky, little known, little used, but occasionally invaluable variant on COPYFROM is this: [1] [@] {COPYFROM} [1] [@] {FULL}. It’s a strange syntax, but if light 1 had been set to some reference groups (perhaps ‘down centre’ in ‘red’ and the gobo ‘stars’) it would now look exactly the same on stage but on the consoles would be set to the actual values which were stored in those groups rather than the reference groups themselves (ie. it would say pan 40 tilt 40, colour 1, gobo 1 rather than ‘down centre’, ‘red’, ‘stars’). This might be useful if you’d accidentally stored every attribute for the light into the group ‘down centre’ instead of just the light’s pan and tilt. Copyfrom also works in preview where it has one further use: [CUE] [901] [@] (COPYFROM} [CUE] [1] will make a cue 901 which is a copy of cue 1 including the look of cue 1 but also its structure - the cue timing, cue text and cue parts, if any.
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