Extremely difficult suggestion...or is it?

[Detour DJ]

For the simple DJ with a few disco fixtures and maybe some LED color wash cans, this doesn't matter. But to a guy like me with lots of moving heads/scanners (anything with pan/tilt settings), this suggestion could be a HUGE improvement over current thinking.

Among my activities, I'm hired by some bands to provide a relatively big light show when they want to make an impression. I have a somewhat standard way of setting up my lighting rig, then make a few placement adjustments based on the architecture of the venue. Even though the rig is similar in most places, I still need to adjust the aim of my moving heads in many scenes before the show (where they shine on particular musicians or a specific point in the room)...which takes a fair amount of time. All DMX controllers I've seen and used so far deal with Pan (X) and Tilt (Y) parameters directly, adding Pan Fine and Tilt Fine for some fixture profiles. Every scene aiming a head or scanner sets a hard X/Y pair of values. Once you start building up a dozen or more scenes, this becomes tedious to make small corrections to the aims of dozens of fixtures.

How about this: What if the DMX software could be expanded by the addition of a head/scanner "Aim Preset Table" and give the scenes the option to aim heads/scanners by hard X/Y values or a link to a preset "Aim"? Basically, it could be a way to initialize all steerable fixtures to a new setup and have scenes automatically adjust. This could be done by aiming all fixtures at a single point (maybe a guitar player), and call that point "A". Then aim them all at a second point, and call that point "B". The number of "Aims" would be limited by the lighting designer's imagination. Then, when writing scenes, perhaps there could be a third editing sector (adding to the RGB color wheel and pan/tilt "radar screen" in the upper left) that simply lists the "Aim Points" A, B, etc. with corresponding descriptions. By clicking an "Aim", the preset pan/tilt values for that aim and fixture are used to steer the light beam and the scene remembers to reference the Aim, not hard pan/tilt settings.

With this arrangement, a lighting designer could VERY quickly adjust an entire show by simply adjusting the "Aim Preset Table" settings to suit a new rig setup. Any scenes that use an "Aim Preset" will adjust automatically since hard pan/tilt values aren't stored in the scene...just a link to a specific Aim.

[tomrbland]

In effect what you are talking about are what other lighting consoles call pallets. Pallets are a state that can be applied to any fixture and are most often used for position, focus, and specific movements/shapes. "Mover one" can be programmed to have the XY coordinate of "drumkit", whilst "mover two has the position pallet of "centre stage". When setting up the show in a new venue, the operator simply needs to trigger each pallet and adjust each fixture to the new positions/focuses. This does take quite a while with a big rig, but in big shows it is MUCH quicker than going through each cue/scene, of which there way be a few hundred at least, and manually changing each light. With pallets all you have to do is change each light for every pallet.

A fairly complex show may have 20 positions, with a rig of 25 movers then this is 500 small adjustments rather than 10000 (if there were 400 cues) adjustments without pallets - these numbers aren't too unrealistic!

It's interesting to see that this requirement has come up quite allot in the past few months. Unfortunately, I think this is a massive job that would require looking at how the software handles the programming of a light show. It would be storing references to pallets rather than DMX values like it does at the moment.

[Detour DJ]

I know, Tom...it would probably take a redesign of the software architecture. Maybe I dream too big, but it just makes a lot of sense to me. I work a lot with spreadsheets and remember back to my college days and computer science classes. One of the first things they taught way back then was the importance of streamlining your code so that it's lean and quick, and one of the best ways to do that is master data tables. You enter data once, then the software feeds from that table whenever it needs those values. I don't know the base code of ShowX though, so I'm not sure how this idea would or could be implemented.

On the other hand, I've been suggesting to some makers (especially Chauvet) that new fixtures include an "Aim" parameter in their channel set, and provide a simple way to store pan/tilt vectors as an "Aim". A fairly simple method might be by setting pan/tilt as desired, moving the Aim parameter to a desired value and moving a common "Control/Function" parameter to a certain value for 3 seconds or so which stores the pan/tilt values at the chosen Aim value. Then, maybe any time the Aim control is not zero, its value (and corresponding stored pan/tilt values) would override the regular pan/tilt values.

One way or another, I'd love to see "Aim" vectors be given consideration in more ways. In my semi-worthless opinion, I think it's an intelligent way to bring a lot more control to mid-level lighting designers who fill the void between entry-level simple lighting and massive concert rigs.

[tomrbland]

Don't get me wrong I would LOVE the console to operate like this (It would mean that I wouldn't have to use a competitors software for my bigger gigs!). Just as I would love the software to have cue lists with fade times. But these are huge projects. Perhaps Support could look in to how this could be implemented after the fantastic new program "pixels" is up and running?

[support]

We follow all topics talking about "vertical timeline" (we call it so in our company).
We already talk a bit on it inside our company (where to put it, how big is the job to do it, ...).

We presently have to finish a first version of Pixels with two more big functions.
We have also to improve the midi management.

And then we might see the "vertical timeline" more deeply.
But before that, we have hundreds of questions.
Remember that we can start a new project, only when we know the major part of all requirements.

We will open soon a topic for that.

[tlight]

I am not sure this will help, but what I did to combat the tedious repositioning of moving heads for each venue is write seperate scenes for them. I have about 16 scenes that just handle the movements of the fixtures. All other channels are disabled, opposed to being set to 0, in these movement scenes. These scenes contain an average of 12 steps, some as little as 4. I overlap those movement scenes with all the colors, gobos, etc. scenes while using Live. This affords me less steps to manipulate to account for the positioning, as some of my overlapping scenes can reach 400+ steps. Just a thought.

[Detour DJ]

Thanks, tlight! It's a good thought, and how I run my lights too. I was previously using ADJ's MyDMX software, and you can't write layers in that software...just new whole scenes for everything. This is exactly why I switched to ShowXpress. I too have divided up various functions of lights into layers, the movement of heads being one set of layers, and it works very well. My concern is for when you get a good number of movement scene layers written that are perfect for one club, then you go in a totally different club and have to re-aim every light in every movement layer (if you have specific directions you want them to point in).

By using some sort of "Aim Table" and using "Aims" to steer the lights, all you have to do is initialize the position of your lights once before a show, and every scene using an aim value will automatically adjust. As tomrbland noted above, and as I've been saying, this has the potential of saving a ton of re-programming time at every new venue depending on the complexity of your show.

[kahilzinger]

I was thinking about going into mobile lighting since my day job traveling is slowing up. This is something I was worried about as venues and stages change. This would be a very welcome addition. I would really be happy to help in any way I can.

[daniel3]

Thanks for the helpful posts, that's helped me a lot too.

[Pink LD]

Like tlight I do the same things. I also save lighting scenes in various folders, one folder being focus scenes. I only have to go there to set up focus critical looks. It's still tedious in bigger shows but everything we do is a balance of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and how complex we program in and deliver.