Importing Capture Fixtures into MA2 - This Saves SO Much Time!

in this video I'm going to show you how to take capture fixture data and import it all into ma2 to make your programming life a whole lot easier let's get into it so we can see up on the screen here we have capture we have our alpha beta gamma and project views and I want to take all of this fixture data that I've spent a lot of time organizing and put it into ma too and the easiest way to do that is to first make sure all of your fixtures have a unique channel ID now keep in mind I said channel not fixture ID this is a little backwards and then it's a small little detail that's really important for this process so if you see here and I'll maximize the screen I have all of my fixtures here with individual channel IDs and I'll show you why that's important in a second here and I want to take all my 3d position information here and get it over into MA and this includes the patch it includes actually even the color of your layers so if you import it into ma these colors for each of the fixture types will also be there which can be desirable or undesirable but first to get it into ma first we're going to select all of our fixtures I do this by selecting the first one and then shift selecting the last one you can see all of our fixtures are highlighted now and I will go up to file and we'll go to export fixture data and once we hit export fixture data this screen pops up we want to change our file type to XML and it changes to the file name to capture demo this name is important you're gonna have to remember this name for a little bit of ma command line writing that will have to do in a minute here but for now let's just name the name this capture demo hit save and it'll pop up another screen kind of changes how it formats the XML when it exports it so we make sure we have XML for Grandma to highlighted apparently this also works for hog I don't have any filters applied but if you have any filters or if you just want to like how the ground package exported you can have a filter created for just the ground package and export just that but in this particular instance we're going to use all the fixtures that I've selected and we're gonna do selected objects only yes okay now for layer scheme you want to decide how you personally want to set this up you can set it up as project layers which is how I do it the the layer scheme is kind of how MA organizes fixtures in the patch right you have on the left side of the screen if you'll recall you have layers a list of layers and then on the right side of the screen you'll have all your fixtures within those layers and I'm gonna select project layers just because all of my layers are labeled out by like spot wash beam it'll just make things easier and I will have to label less later so we'll go ahead and hit export and we will get a pop-up which for the most part you can ignore for right now I'll talk a little bit about what this means when we get into ma but this number on the right side is it's designed to be able to match up your fixture types within a show file when you just have a blank show file your default fixture is the dimmer so these will automatically import as dimmer only fixtures and then we can go in and swap them later this is really the only way to do it right now I'll show you why it makes sense to just do it like this so we'll go ahead and hit continue and now if I bring over my Explorer window on my desktop we can see I have my capture demo file and we need to copy this into the fixture layers directory in MA so to do that we'll go to local disk c program data if you don't see this program data folder see how it's kind of like grayed out you can you can see it by going up to view options and under the View tab but there is this show hidden folders and drives option so you'll hit OK on that make sure that is enabled go to program data will scroll to ma lighting technologies grandma and then my installed version is 3.5 your folder might look a little bit different than that and then we'll go into fixture layers now if this folder doesn't exist you can create this blank folder you can just create an empty folder called fixture layers and we're going to copy in capture demo we're gonna move it into that fixture layers folder okay cool so everything we've done in capture now is over we can now move over into ma so I'll open up our screen here this next part can get a little confusing if you haven't dealt a whole lot with the ma command line before but I'm going to show you step-by-step how to do it and also show you a macro that's I've built to kind of automate this process so I've got my blank ma show file here and I click on the yellow ball to get my command line feedback window open and we're going to navigate through the directory to get to that fixture layers folder so to do that we just type in lists and we see we've got a big ol list of our top-level directory here and we'll go ahead and find you'll see it's the number 11 edit set up we need to get into that directory so to do that we do CD for change destination and we'll go CD 11 ok so now we are in that folder how can we prove we're in that folder well we'll just type list again and we can see ok now we have folders within that so we're going to navigate again to our layers folder CD 4 if we hit list see we just have that layer 1 auto created that we saw earlier now the other important thing to make sure that you have done is to go to your backup menu and make sure that your internal drive is selected if you have a flash drive plugged in it could populate on this screen or older software versions anyways we just made sure that we're in there you can also type in SD 1 for select drive 1 and that will always go to your internal drive now all we need to do is say import and remember the name of our XML file from earlier do you remember what it is I barely remember what it is it's I think it's capture demo but we can't just say import capture demo we have to give it a destination so we're gonna say at one and there we go I remembered the name properly and we can see that it says six objects from captured demo XML import and now we're not done with the command line yet you can see we are still in this directory so to get out of this we just do CD slash and that takes us all the way out and if we hit setup go to patch and fixtures schedule we can see we have the names the fixture IDs and the patch of all of our fixtures that we had in capture that saves that saves so much time I can't tell you how annoyed I was with myself when I figured out how to do this method it's annoying because you spend so much time doing doing it one way and then discovering that you could have been saving a whole lot of time but at the same time you know now that you have this information going forward it's not so bad and it's it's pretty cool tool so we're not quite done yet you'll notice that our fixture type is still set to dimmer so I'm going to exit out of edit setup I'm going to switch my screen to screen two so we can get a better look here go into passion fixture schedule this first one is my beam layer I'll rename my layer to beam and then I just switched my fixture type for each of these ones that are set as dimmer so go axiom boom this is the color forces I'll name is layer CF 72 72 mode 3 import and then invite for performance 16-bit normal and call that Viper performance I wish it did automate the layer naming I guess it doesn't maybe that can be a future improvement capture if you're listening let's make these changes and we got a viper profile in extended mode for all of these profile coming up to the end here JDC ones in 62 channel mode my favorite channel mode JDC 162 channel ok JC 1 and then quantum wash we're almost there kontin wash basic mode import okay and now if we hit save and we exit the patch we have our entire patch loaded in but we're almost not quite done yet is one other thing remember how I said it changes the the layer color so if I were to go and make a layout view with these fixtures they would have this color in the layout view which could be cool for you but I like to see the colors that they are outputting in my programming so my last step here is to change all of our layer colors back to white I'm clicking on the header of the column to select the entire column of data hitting reset to white boom our last one boom cool so now what can we do from here well it's pretty awesome you can just create a view of a stage and look there it is there's our stage a ground package all three sections yeah there it is and from here you can make selections you can create worlds you can do this just speeds up your programming so much so that's that's my little tip for you guys today yeah so I hope you enjoyed this video if it was useful to you make sure to hit that like button leave a comment down below what sort of things you maybe want to learn about capture ma2 or production in general and big thank you to all of my supporters over on patreon they are the sponsors for this video they're the ones who allow me to have the time to be able to make these videos and I'm really grateful for them if you would like to become a patron link is down below in the description you'll get access to this show file my show file that I use on all the shows that that you see on this channel as well as some other behind-the-scenes perks videos all that sort of fun stuff we have a good time over there so once again thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Christian Jackson

Views: 33,659

Keywords: MA2, Event Production, Lighting Design

Id: 3Fime6ygySk

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/christianjackson]

Oh shit Reddit gold wtf

[u/Dannykb16]

Dang it is Christian himself here on Reddit. If you read this please know that you are my biggest inspiration for the MA workspace.

Thursday a week ago I got to run with a MA3 Light, I was STOKED!

Greetings and much respect from the Netherlands

[u/Tmarkcha117]

u/christianjackson any chance you could do an AMA on this subreddit? Been curious as to how to start getting into lighting design

[u/-Wandering-]

Whats up Christian! Currently interning at A.C.T. and the MA3s are a blast, can't wait to see more content on them, the possibilities are endless!

[u/B-Rad_The_Beast]

My boi who taught me everything I know about MA is on reddit? Today is a great day!

[u/geo-desik]

Do you use capture as your visualizer too? I've heard it can look way nicer than ma3d.

Also would like to thank you for all you do in RL and the internets. Much appreciated. <3

[u/Dkal2003]

Thanks! This is so helpful.