Sunday slammin'
I got up early Sunday morning and brought my coffee right down to the main ballroom, because I really wanted to sit down at the Ion for a while and understand the whole deal with setting up for busking on it. The term as used here means being able to do fairly spiffy and versatile combinations of looks on the fly with a small handful of sliders, and basically play the lighting rig like an instrument along with whatever's happening on stage. Even now, a few years after its release and several software revisions based on user feedback, the Eos/Ion console family doesn't make that very easy. | |
I had taken a little time before con to download the latest manual and try to study up a little, and the more I wrapped my brain around the nomenclature and workflow the more I kept seeing this as a Hog wanna-be that still got a lot of stuff wrong and added needless complexity. I even asked around on our lighting list, and was pointed toward a nicely done video that Angela had put together a while back -- sort of a novel approach, but likely not compatible with what we had here. As I sat down and tried to work through recording distinctly *separate* fixture parameters into submasters and cuelists, I just got more frustrated. This would have taken ten minutes on a Hog 4. But by working carefully and un-doing some mistakes and remembering what Daniel had hinted at, I eventually got a pretty close approximation of what I wanted and thus felt reasonably ready for the "Puppetry Slam" Masquerade halftime show. | |
So here's a bit of a diversion about my findings, of interest only to folks
familiar with the Eos/Ion family and/or the relevant concepts, which I
suspect most readers will want to simply skip.
That's okay; this is in-depth geek stuff, not discourse on social justice.
The reason for separating parameters to be controlled on different
sliders is so that they can be used in a wide variety of combinations.
For example, having a selection of positions and motion effects for
moving lights on one playback, colors on another, and gobos on a third
allows for many different looks and progressions from just playing
those three sliders.
In my specific case I wanted to separate hue, saturation, and intensity
for the side-stage Lustr LED fixtures.
When you're accessing units in the "live" display, once you start
modifying anything about color, *all* of the HSV fields populate with
something and if submasters are recorded that way, they will invariably
"stomp" each other in unexpected ways when playback is attempted.
Even if they're all supposedly pure HTP subs, which is crazy.
Anyway, after all that I finally had my separated side HSV and a fistful
of other stuff ready to go on an alternate fader page, and the Slam
rehearsal and run went off pretty well overall.
Their "cue sheet" had came to us as a stack of scribbled Post-Its in
someone's notebook, which Abby was kind enough to spread out on a sheet
of paper and go make copies of for us.
Hopefully they've learned how to describe their tech requests a little
more clearly...
The answer that Daniel described, and it still took a bit of messing around to understand it, is to program it all in Blind and note that changes take effect immediately into permanent memory -- this is not a temporary editing space like the Hog "programmer", and there's no concept of "record" to save what you build because it's already done. For cues or submasters, the memory object has to be created first -- which in Blind is a matter of doing something like "Sub 3 [return]", making a new sub with no content [and no indication of whether you're working on something already extant or something new]. Now as units are selected and parameters get changed, they're already memorized in that sub, poof. The way I found to enter individual parameters across multiple selected units is to click the mouse in the top of the parameter column -- the command line updates to say, for example, "channel 5 + 6 Hue" which I think is the only way to reference *only* hue and not anything else. I may very well have that wrong, and there's a less klunky way to enter such values. [Later edit: yes, there is -- I realized later that bringing up the CIA also shows all the fixture parameters on mouseable buttons, where they can be individually selected.] Even spinning the encoders doesn't seem to avoid suddenly updating extra columns like Saturation along with. And for Hue especially, since we're talking about a color-wheel value in degrees, entering 359 instead of 100 will allow the slider to progress across all possible hue values when run up and down. Other parameters may have similar non-0-to-100 ranges. Busking in HSV is kind of interesting because you quickly learn about where to run the resulting Hue slider to for the approximate color you want before pushing intensity up. Blue is awfully close to hot pink, and there's a large range of rather icky greens. Maybe applying a curve would help? If you do wind up with "too much stuff" in the memory, the way to get rid of individual parameters is to reference one and then type "@ [return]" in the command line. This is the standard way to un-set attributes in Eos-ese as a whole. The Hog syntax is "knock out", a bit of a Britishism, but removes exactly what you say to remove. Simply setting a stray parameter to 0 will *not* accomplish the desired thing -- because as soon as the sub or cue runs and asserts, guess what! The value has to simply be *blank* to not have any effect and leave it for other faders to control. I also finally figured out how to make cuelists, which are obscure on the Ion but absolutely foundational on the Hog. To store or build a look into a new cuelist, say, list 7 as I was using for some wiggle-light positions, reference "cue 7/1" which creates the new list and saves cue 1 within it. Once a list exists and cues are written, the list can be bound to a slider as a playback by typing "Cue 7/ [return]" in the command line to get into its context and then doing the both-buttons "load" to a new fader on the wing. A blank fader will get auto-configured as a sub or a playback via this process, depending on what was last referenced. Loading a slider won't work if it already has anything bound to it -- the old slider assignment has to be removed first by holding down "escape" and tapping the relevant bump button, or there's also some unclear rhetoric about "{release}" softkeys in the manual. [They couldn't make "delete" work as one might expect, but instead you "delete" a submaster memory but "escape" its binding off a handle??] Once that's set up, the cuelist will run independently on that slider, yay! Usage is still a little klunky -- the bump button becomes a "go", the relevant auto-marking for non-intensity stuff is done in each cue's time, and the slider can manually control intensity up and down. There doesn't seem to be any "auto-execute" functionality when the slider moves up off 0, but I might have missed something. Each cue completes as the fader reaches 100, and then you have to *hit the button again* for the next cue. The other button will go backwards through the stack. I couldn't figure out how to kill a running cuelist quickly, but bumping the cuelist back far enough to hit its 0 seemed to eventually de-assert it. Maybe "goto cue" "0" and a bump would have done that? Much of this is inscrutable from the manual -- ETC has so twisted up their usage of the words "load", "delete", "escape", "release", "off", "shift", "move", "restore", "go to" and the like that mean very different things on other brands of boards, that you really have to learn a whole new mapping for what the hell they intended. At any rate, I learned a little more about this thing but that doesn't necessarily mean I've gotten to like it any better. To be fair, I don't get a lot of time on these desks so maybe there's a more efficient way to set up this sort of workflow that I just haven't caught onto yet. I didn't find too much of real use by poking around various online forums. |
My next event was lights for Doom, Gloom, and Despondency; a
succession of readings and songs about topics as dark and miserable as
people could come up with but still be deliberately funny.
The game was to see who couldn't resist laughing, and eject them from
the room for a short penalty until they could "regain their composure".
Lighting for this was pretty much listed as a "set-n-forget", but heck,
if I was going to be on duty for the thing, why not actually run with it
and do some subtle changes to follow along?
I popped a couple of different gels into the rig, notably a handful of
steel blues for a more "dead" feel, but kept some reds and whatever other
weird stuff was already in there on tap.
So when an entrant title seemed to involve certain topics, I decided
an overall mood and gently brought that in for their time.
For example, a more blood-red wash for pirate stories.
Quick note about the little gray Lightronics board we had there in second tent: it's a simple two-scene preset, but it *does* have a submaster mode and programming them is dead-simple. Get what you want, Record, bump-button. While Doom was setting up I ran through the channels to figure out what the heck I had where, and wound up with all of 4 sliders to run the show from. The two narrow spots highlighted each entrant, and the rest was various wash combinations. Oh, and if we run those trees with six lights and the two dimmer packs per again -- the easiest way to deal with contiguous channeling, and I think someone figured this out during build, is to address the packs 1 - 4 7 - 10 4 - 7 10 - 13That way you use the first three channels of each pack [and thus no more than 3 lights per feed circuit] and get 12 channels all the way across the rig. |
But now it was time to shoo everyone out of that room and do the
all-hands quick strike and conversion to Masquerade greenroom, as well
as go spiff up Main Tent and get it ready.
We got a bit of respite in terms of space, as an extra line of temporary
gear storage was allowed to form on the other side of the depot door path,
so it wasn't quite the black-hole-dense tetris job like last year.
We do have an awful lot of *stuff*, needed to serve a 4000-person
tech-heavy convention...
The actual Masq run crew was off getting dinner during this; we've decided that it's a good idea to relieve them and have a whole different crew swap in for halftime and in the case of camera ops, finish out the event. Many of us used to stay and run the entire evening for these things, not to mention being in rehearsals for many hours beforehand, and unless one has superhuman amounts of enthusiasm, that can be a real grind. |
Some people saw the Masq mostly through tiny little boxes atop the cameras they were running. |
This one's cue entry said "no light", and here's why -- a shadow puppet screen, rendering such old favorites as "monkeys jumping on the bed" and "little bunny fu-fu". In this variant, Fu-Fu's arsenal escalated through billyclubs, morning-star maces, and finally a gun. Which could actually shoot visible holes through shadow field mice, in perfect time with the sound effects -- that was pretty impressive. I didn't get a chance to examine the gear to see how it was done. |
I'd done the usual run of intercom cables over the very front edge of the door woodwork, tagged gently back with tape; it all flipped right off from the ground as expected. Well, almost; a couple of them hung up on the screen, but were easy to flip the rest of the way down. | ||
At least three people got tutelage or refreshers on flip-coiling and cable management over the course of the weekend, including one of the fellows from the local barefoot hiking group who had also gotten interested in generally helping at Arisia -- with us on the tech crew or elsewhere. He had actually studied my ancient tutorial on over/under winding and was already doing it with his own cables at home. |
While the main rig was coming down, I set myself to packing up the
intercom and the rest of my gack.
People were being really good about bringing stuff over to my pile,
and coiling up the headset wires
and for the most part tying them right -- thanks for that, it saved a
lot of time!
Amusingly, one came back wrapped in a white tape label with this
written on it:
Returned from Main Stage "Works OK but muff is very uncomfortable"Well, yeah, some of the ear padding is on the old side, and getting a few new muffs has been on the to-do list for a while now. So, noted. The more fundamental problem is that those fixed-boom SMH210 headsets aren't very adjustable and are a bit of a brain-squeezer after a long shift, and there's not much to be done about it in principle except spring $$$ for a bunch of different headset types. Whoever that was could have come and asked for a different one; we had one or two extras. So I was ready to load out pretty early in the game. Once things calmed down a little in the ballrooms and I realized that Arisia TV had shut down and didn't need the big UPS anymore, I figured I'd test the in/out parking privileges supposedly granted by the Aloft and bring the car over to load up. They'd given me a printed QR code which supposedly would open the gate, but this was a total fail in both directions. For a whole stream of people, apparently -- from what I could tell, everyone had to punch the "help" button and talk to the parking headquarters, give a name and room number, and receive manual intervention. The parking facility blamed the weather; it's apparently been a problem ever since they put that system in. Once in a while someone seemed able to get it work with their phone displaying the QR code; I can't imagine why that would be any better than a nice crisp black-n-white paper copy with no folds in it. Maybe we'll see next year; at $25 a day [in 2018] it's a little more than the Channelside but nowhere near what you'd pay under the Westin, and still with a high convenience factor. I got loaded up and re-parked, and then switched fully back to Logistics as truck loading continued and Storage runs started. A lot of Tech gear could go back, and once Dan and I found that Art Show was loaded he was ready to fire up and take it home. So off we went, with me riding shotgun, figuring we'd just tandem this delivery in with the same crew that we figured was already over there. Apparently this took Lisa by surprise; when Dan and I showed up at Storage, everyone else was gone! A call or two later, Lisa and Mark headed back over to help us offload. Before they got there Dan and I started simply shoving stuff out of the truck and up the elevator, which went surpringly fast with just the two of us. I was in the 'vator just kicking carts out into the hall and going right back down, and that flowed nicely until we started getting to the smaller stuff. Meanwhile, more help arrived. |