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After receiving the unit, I spent a few days playing with it and putting
as many features as possible through the paces.
I had immediate questions to direct to Chauvet's technical support staff,
who said they'd welcome any feedback on the operational aspects.
The result was a monster
three-part opus
sent via email, albeit probably kidding myself about any hope of ever
being able to try revised firmware.
Without trying to write the complete "missing manual for the SD50"
from scratch, here are some of the relevant points from that series to
help clarify what the given manual leaves sketchy or leaves out.
Additional motivation for providing this came from finding
this thread
at Controlbooth on the subject, in which a new user worked through
much of his own early-on confusion and even remedied some of mine.
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DMX output:
The 5-pin and 3-pin output XLRs are wired in parallel and there is
no internal
bias or termination
on the transmitter.
This means that the desk can sit in the middle of a network that
runs in two directions away from it, provided that each leg gets
properly terminated at the end.
This may enable some network topology optimizations using a minimum
of hardware.
Also, the desk only sends a short 48-slot DMX frame on the wire, yielding
a rather high overall refresh rate.
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Startup defaults:
The board always powers up in "blackout" mode.
Besides turning that off, some default settings are useful when starting
to build a show -- mixed-chase mode, speed slider on "instant", step time
slid down to "show mode", and both masters at their respective maximum.
Quick mnemonic for master faders is up, down, up, down, down, like in
the first picture.
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Single channel park:
The AUX knobs are about the closest thing to a "park" facility, good for
only one channel apiece.
A channel assigned to them in mode 2 becomes truly isolated, controlled
only by the knob, and doesn't get recorded into scene memories at all.
The blue channel-mimic LED will NOT follow the AUX, however, and will no
longer indicate the channel's true output.
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No useful patching:
The "fader reassignment" mechanism under password 666 isn't really that
useful, as you can't patch to more than 48 DMX addresses anyway.
If you really want to group up channels without writing a scene, go
ahead, but things can work in a somewhat confusing way thereafter
especially when channel-bank switching.
See the Controlbooth thread linked above for hints on how do that
across high/low channel ranges if you need it.
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Nomenclature:
The word "page" is horrifically over-used in the manual, to mean both the
4 groups of scene memories *and* the A/B bank switching between high and
low channels.
I prefer to refer to the channel ranges as "banks", even when the board's
display is sitting there saying "RUNNING PAGE A".
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Record mode:
It's useful to make little paint dots or something next to buttons 1,5,6,8
on the top row, for instant visual location when typing in that silly
record-mode password.
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Scene/memory building:
Always remember to "record" a look into temporary step memory before
saving it to a scene, even for a single static look. Otherwise,
no content gets saved to the scene-slider.
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WARNING:
If you try to run scenes while swapped to bank B, the high channels,
you will run into the bug described in the email and have spurious low
channels coming up.
Always bank-swap back to "RUNNING PAGE A" before attempting anything
like sane playback.
The four *real* pages of scene memory work in a straightforward and
correct way, and scenes will "hold over" on a page change until the
slider is dropped to 0 and brought back up like you'd expect from any
other board.
This means that it's not easy to build scenes from components on multiple
pages if they happen to use the same sliders, but as the board operates in a
straightforward HTP way, spare scene sliders can be creatively used as
temporary accumulators to build into.
Plan your page/scene allocation accordingly.
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Chases can be cue-lists:
Every "scene" is really a chase with one or more steps, all subject to
the global playback fade time. [Should we call it a "chene"?]
With careful planning, a multi-step chase can be run as a manual set of
cues using the STEP button.
Different crossfade times would still have to pre-set with the fade slider
before execution, but once set, the board handles it pretty smoothly.
Chases always restart at their first step when the scene is brought up
off 0, and STEP indexes any chases that happen to be active.
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Editing sucks:
The mechanism for changing channel values inside a scene is klunky, and
it may be easier to just re-record the memory in question.
If it's a multi-step chase you can't tell what step you're in from the
board, you just have to look at the rig and count STEP button presses.
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Chase tempo caveats:
The SPEED slider has to be up away from its "show mode" infinite setting,
even if a manual "tap sync" timing is in effect, before recording a "beat"
tempo to a chase.
Once a speed is recorded, that chase runs completely independently of the
master step-time slider, and can thus run out of sync with other chases.
This is useful for offset-time sequences or building that "fire flicker"
effect across some red and amber lights, where two chases with subtly changing
levels and slightly different timing can run against each other and produce
a nicely randomized output.
The fade-time slider still affects everything running.
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More nomenclature:
The ADD KILL button really should be called SOLO, because that's what
it does when a bump button is pressed -- solos up the item and knocks
out everything else.
This board is remarkably similar to the
Elation Scene Setter,
with virtually the same physical layout but different firmware.
As one might expect, behind it all is a typical sad tale of engineering
staff parting ways with one company and taking all the intellectual
property with them to a competitor or spinoff, and by now they're probably
out of that development cycle entirely.
So the noted problems with the board are not likely to get fixed any time
soon, but we can hope for at least a little better support from Chauvet
on this one.
In the meantime, it is hoped that the info presented here will help owners
of the Stage Designer 50 get the most from their thankfully
modest investment.
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