Hey programmers- this video is one that a
lot of people have asked me about. Say you're on the road and you need to
copy your tour programming to that new rig that you're going to get at a
festival. Well, to do that we have to bring the
festival rig into our touring show file and then start cloning.
This is a pretty big cloning operation. Sometimes you're just using cloning for
small stuff like copying sequence information from one fixture to another.
Well no problem- it's all the same concept. If you can follow what we do
here, every other type of cloning is going to be a breeze. If you're new here, Hi, I'm Cat West and I feel like I'm constantly cloning programming from one
rig to another. Today, I want to take you through my
process to do that. As with everything this isn't the only
way to do it- it's just my way to do it. The right way to do it is
whatever works for you. First let's talk about what this isn't.
This is not a fixture swap. Sometimes a quick and dirty fixture swap
is all you need but I prefer cloning. And some people like to
copy all of their fixtures and then swap them to the types that are
in the festival show file, but for me I feel like that's an extra
step. Lastly I'm not going to use the built-in clone menu.
I'm going to use a macro (which i'll show you) to save time.
But if you like the menu it'll definitely get you there.
Okay cloning may not be an exact science but your preparation work does have to
be. We're going to go through my cloning
checklist step by step to make sure that we get this right the first time.
Step one: prep your touring show file and the festival show file (if the festival
sent you one) I recommend backing up both show files
with updated names before you prep. The more backups you make along the way
in this process the easier it'll be if you make a mistake in a step.
In your touring show file make sure that you're always using presets- I can't
stress this enough. It's always important, but with cloning--
it's key. Also I like to make sure that I have a
default preset. There's almost definitely going to be
some parameters in the fixtures you're cloning to that don't exist on the
fixtures that you're cloning from. That means that even if you use a mark
preset at the top of all of your sequences
there may be some parameters that don't have any data in them,
and you may need to update that information so that things don't look
weird. I think that editing a default preset is
faster than going through and editing fixtures, but
your mileage may vary. There are a couple other things that you can do in your
Tour show file that you don't have to do- but these are things that I
try to regularly do just because I know they're going to be
huge time savers when i'm cloning. First I never store the auto created
gobo presets into my cues. I have them and I use them to make
selections, but before I store them into a cue,
I make a new gobo preset that's specific for that song.
Gobos obviously don't clone well because every fixture is going to use a
different set of gobos, and it's a lot faster for me just to go through and
update maybe 10 gobo song presets than it is for me
to go through all of my gobo presets for all of my
fixtures. The other thing I try to do on my
programming is I try to never use the built-in strobe effects on led strobe
units (you know those fixture based macros)
Rather, I build all of those looks with intensity effects.
Those built-in strobe macros are quick, but they usually don't give me what I
want and they definitely do not clone well.
See the onboard strobe effects of one fixture is not going to be at all the
same as the onboard strobe effects of another fixture.
You could write presets for all of those effects and update all of those but it's
time consuming. Intensity channels are fairly universal
so they're going to clone pretty well. Next we've got to get that festival rig
into our touring show file. Now, whether you're bringing in another
MA2 show file or just manually inputting the patch, we've got to make sure
that we don't have any fixture overlaps or address conflicts. I take the
universes of anything from my tour that I'm not bringing to the festival
and I move them up and out of the way. You can unpatch them
but I leave them in so that after my clone, if I see something weird
on the festival rig, I can still compare my tour rig's output in the fixture
window to remind me what it's supposed to look like.
So, Puft is here to remind me that some people might be worried about parameter
calculation. If you are- these higher universes
probably aren't going to bone you on site because, by default,
the MA is going to start calculating from the lowest universe number.
But if you want to be specific about it you can use "request universes" to specify
which universes you want to output. Here's a request universe macro that
tells the session to only output the first 10 universes.
Okay fixture and channel renumbering: Personally I like to leave my tour
fixtures alone and change the festival numbers. To
prevent overlap I'll take the festival numbers and I'll just add
a 1,000 or a 10,000 number before them. So for example: festival fixture 101
might become fixture 9101; festival fixture 201 might become
9201 and so on. This is an easy way to prevent
overlap but it also gives me a quick shorthand so when I'm on site with the
festival I know that I can just subtract that 9
before the numbers if I need to ask the local crew for a fixture reset.
After each show's prep, back up and make sure that you give your
touring show file a new name, because he's about to become a super
show file with both rigs inside. Step two: bring the festival patch into
your touring show file. If the festival has only sent you plot
paperwork, it's a bummer- you gotta manually input
all of the patch and set up the rig in 3D. If the festival sent you an MA2 show file then: great!
You could use PSR or import/export to bring their rig into your show file.
If you don't know how to do this, I've got videos on both processes.
I personally prefer PSR because it means I can also bring in any groups or
layouts that they have as well. Regardless of which way you get the data
in there, we don't want both of our rigs occupying the same 3D space -
so you're going to want to take your festival rig and slide it over
and maybe make a couple of new camera views. If you didn't PSR in any of their
groups or layouts now's a good time to make those too. Once
you're done back up that super show file again and
get ready to do some paperwork. Step 3:
figure out what you're cloning from and what you're cloning to. It's
truly unlikely that you're going to have a one-to-one fixture line up between
your two rigs, so you're going to have to make some
decisions about what fixtures to clone from
and what fixtures to clone to, to best recreate your tour
and you (as lighting director) are going to be the best person to decide that
because you see it every day. This is the first
step in the design portion of our process.
It's partly about mechanics: you know what's the functionality of the lights...
it's partly about their placement in the rig, and it's
partly about feel: you know, what's the purpose of the lights and
which units in the festival are going to be able to match that up the best?
I like to sit down and make all those decisions before I start cloning.
Sometimes it's just me with a pen and paper at the back of the bus.
Sometimes I'm scratching out on their plot about which fixtures I think are
going to be the best. Either way, at the end of the process I
end up with a list of what fixtures I want to clone from
and what fixtures I want to clone to. And pay special attention to multi-instance
fixtures. There may be times when you're cloning
from a unit that has more cells to something that has less cells
or vice versa. In this example, my touring show file has
JDC1s in the full extended mode where I have individual control over every
single cell, but the festival plot has JDC1s in
the super compressed mode. There's parts of the fixture that will
clone correctly but when it comes to things like my color cells,
I only get one in compressed mode, so i'm going to have to make some decisions.
Let's take a look at these JDC1s so that I can explain a little better.
The compressed JDC1 just has one fixture, but my extended mode has 26. The first sub fixture has stuff like tilt, reset functions,
and some built-in strobe macros for the white cells.
The second fixture has more built-in strobe macros for the rgb cells and
overall color, the next 12 are all my individual rgb
cells, and the last 12 are all my individual
white cells. These last two sections are where I do
the bulk of my programming but we also definitely need the tilt
programming, so we got to do what I call the double clone... and right now that just
means selecting the fixtures that I want to use to do this.
I'm going to use the first sub fixture of my JDC1s
to clone to the compressed festival JDC1s so that I can get
all of my tilt information and my control channel presets.
Then I'm going to pick one of each of my JDC color cells-
probably from somewhere in the middle- to clone a second time to the jdc's so that
I can get all of my color effects. This compressed version will never
create the same looks as the expanded version- I'll never get my animations
but we try to get it as close as we can based on what we got.
I'll show you this double clone when we get to step five, but for now
it's Step 4: clone fixture types to update global presets.
Okay we're finally ready to start cloning. Now, there is a clone menu that
you can use but like I said, today we're going to use a macro so
let's talk about it. If you're going to use this, make sure
you understand how it works and take care not to run it accidentally.
It can easily destroy a show if used improperly,
so please don't go to the dark side on this, all right?
Okay here's our macro. You'll notice that a lot of these lines have some similar
information and that's these two groups: number 2461
and 2462. See I like to figure out what I'm cloning from
and store it into group 2461 and I store whatever i'm cloning to
in group 2462. These two group numbers are fairly arbitrary- they can be
whatever you want, but keep them out of the way.
If there are fixtures in these groups and someone hits that macro (even
accidentally), programming will be changed. It also
means that if you're cloning a lot of lights,
then when you're making a new selection to store in these groups-
make sure that you overwrite what's in their groups. Otherwise you could
accidentally reclone and clone to the wrong fixtures and it would basically be
a disaster Also when I'm done cloning I make sure
to empty out these groups - I never delete them,
and I go the extra step of locking them as well.
If I'm handing my show off to an operator, I don't want them to
accidentally destroy a bunch of my work. Some people prefer to reference names of
groups in their macros rather than numbers and some people like to have
pop-ups where they input the fixture numbers-
that's all personal preference. Back in the macro,
these first few lines are to clone all of my presets.
Always clone your presets first then your effects and then finally your
sequences. Presets are stored in pools with every
pool having a number... for example the all pool is zero, so my
first line says that i'll be cloning from my all pool,
starting at number one. I've said "thru" with no second number,
so that tells the console to do all of the presets in the pool.
I've then put in two options that answer the questions in the pop-up menu so I
don't have to keep hitting the screen for each of these lines:
"merge" so that we only add data and "nc" which means no confirm, which actually
finishes the syntax, Again eliminating me from having to
click on the screen If you want to have the prompt option,
just change these. All of the rest of these preset lines
are for all the other preset pools like color and position,
and then this line works the same way but it clones all of my effects.
Lastly this line clones all of my sequence programming.
You'll notice that i'm not cloning groups or worlds. For me,
in what we're doing, it doesn't make sense because I want to keep those
things separate. So we've got the macro and the
first thing we're going to use it for is to clone global presets. Do you have
global presets in your show file that you want to stay global?
Well then to do that we have to clone fixture type to fixture type
before we clone individual fixtures. See an individual fixture clone will result
in selective presets. The only way to keep a
preset global is to clone from fixture type to fixture
type. If you don't have any global presets in your show file, then I guess
you could skip this step, but I bet that you do, so let's take a
look at one. I've got a BMFL spot fixture (type 3)
in my touring show file that i'm going to clone to the festival Vipers
(fixture type 136) so I'll store fixture type 3 in my "clone
from" group and fixture type 136 in my "clone to" group.
Before I hit that macro I always, always always clear out
and double check that the right fixtures are inside each of the groups.
I want to get this right the first time. I'll run the macro:
see how it needs to send my items to the network? Well if you can,
drop out of this session while you're cloning- it'll just save you a little bit
of time Let's select the new Vipers and take a
look at some colors. Yup, these work! All right, next I'm going
to repeat the process for the rest of my fixture types- remembering that each time
that I store those groups I need to overwrite ,and again I always double
check before i run that macro. Once we have all that done, guess what
I'm gonna do: yep, I'm making a backup. Step 5: clone
fixture to fixture This is the bulk of our clone, so we're
gonna need that list of fixtures we're cloning from and two from Step three.
Whether that list is something that you have written down or maybe you've
already built groups into your show file, now is the time that we have to get
the right units into the right cloning groups.
I like to do these in chunks. If you've got a couple of small rigs,
you could absolutely put all of your "from" fixtures into the "from" group and
all of your "to" into the "to" group, but you need to make
sure - absolutely sure- that both fixture selections are in the
right order. Because selection order is everything
and because of how multi-instance cloning can work, I can't
do that. Maybe I have a strip light with 20 cells
that I need to clone to another strip light that has
40 cells. Well, that's not going to be a one-to-one clone, so
doing the whole rig in one go is not going to work.
It's also not going to work for those compressed JDC1s
that I have to do the double clone to. One thing you've got to consider before
you clone fixture to fixture is those global presets that you already cloned
with fixture types. Since cloning fixture to fixture makes
clone information selective, you could end up with presets that are a
combination of global and selective. The presets will still work- but because
it defeats the purpose of the work we did cloning those presets globally...
it basically sucks. We can get around this by editing our clone macros
so we don't include these global presets in our
fixture to fixture clone... but yeah- it's a workaround that can add
extra time to the whole process. I want to clone my tour BMFL spots to the
festival Vipers So first I'm going to select the upstage
BMFLs I'm going to store them to my "from" group
(remember to choose overwrite) and clear out.
Grab the upstage Vipers, store them to my clone "to" group
(again overwrite) then I'm going to clear out, and I want to double check
each one. Then and only then will I hit the macro.
Then, I'll repeat the process for the rest of the units in my rig,
giving special attention to multi-instance units like those JDC1s.
Let's take a look at cloning my tour's top row of JDC1s to the festival's
downstage row of JDC1s. Again, I like to do these in smaller
chunks. Remember, I need to clone the first
instance of my tour JDCs to the compressed adcs,
and then I need to clone one of my color cells to the compressed jdcs.
So I'm storing the first instance selections in my "from" group
(selecting overwrite) and then storing the compressed JDCs in my "to" group
(overwrite). Again I double check each, then I hit the macro. Next I want to
select the color cells from my top row of tour JDC's
and store (overwrite) them to the "from" group.
I'm keeping the same destination fixtures in my "to" group because this is
the second part of the clone. So, quick double check and we clone. That's it, next I just
repeat the process for the other rows. There might be some
fixtures in the festival plot that don't need a full clone.
For example, perhaps there's some perimeter lighting in the festival rig
that I don't necessarily want to sync up with
my cues, and I don't know what I want to do with them just yet...
so I might use a copy of my cloning macro that copies everything except for
sequences. That way when I get on site, I have a lot
of preset options to choose from. When I'm done with all of my cloning I
make sure to empty out those cloning groups, I also lock
them, and of course- I make a backup. Step 6: update our programming. Now we
gotta go through and update all those presets and effects.
For presets, we gotta look at focuses, colors, those song gobos... most everything
that's in a preset is probably gonna need to be
touched. Cloning will get us close but I want this to look really good.
After the presets, we got to check out all of our effects. You might notice that
some are running a little weird, and that's because when we clone, the
console tries to do the math to line up the effects and that results in what
they call individuals. Sometimes the math works and sometimes it really just doesn't. If you have a strange looking effect,
edit it and you'll see that some of these cells are in pink because of those
individuals. At the bottom, click "remove individuals"
that'll clear those out, and then try your effect again. The other
thing you'll need to update are any bitmap effects that you have in
your show file Bitmaps reference layouts of fixtures
and because now you have new fixtures with new layouts, you can
either re-record your bitmap layouts or update your bitmap presets to point to
your new festival layouts. All done updating presets, effects and
bitmaps? Cool. Back it up. Step 7:
test your cues. Always try out your cues. Again you're gonna know best what the
looks and feels of the songs are. Maybe something cloned and it's
technically perfect but it just doesn't feel right.
Well, if you have time :change it. I also find it helpful at this point to use
worlds that will break up the rigs between my tour and the festival.
Sometimes being in a festival only world just helps me focus on my editing,
especially when i'm working with large amounts of data in the tracking or
fixture sheet. Let's play a few cues.
Obviously there's some focuses that need to be refined- but that's easy.
Now here's a problem: in my layout I'm not seeing any of my compressed JDC1s
doing anything. In the tracking sheet I can see that
they're running the programming, it's just that there's another update we
need to do. The compressed JDCs have a second
dimmer that our expanded JDC1s didn't have because we had all that individual
control. Because we didn't have it, nothing got
cloned to that second dimmer channel, and there's no value for it in any of my
cues: this is where that default preset is going to come in handy.
I'm going to put that second dimmer channel at full and
update that preset. And hey - now I can see them. This is just
one example of something that can happen when you're cloning led strobes,
there might be other channels you need to play with, like maybe duration.
When you're happy with your cues, do one more backup and then proceed to STEP 8, which is: have a great show!
So we got our
show all cloned. Feel free to build and use that same
macro if you like, but remember to take care that you don't
accidentally run it, except in times when you mean to. Any
cloning, if done improperly could seriously destroy a show.
But if you're making backups constantly, then you've got a safety net.
That was a long one but it was a good one. If you like this and you want some
more, please subscribe. Thanks for watching and happy programming.
