Learn GrandMA2 EP7 - Groups & Presets

welcome back ladies and gentlemen this is episode number 7 off to learn grandma - and today we're gonna take a look at Boots and presets and those tools are designed to help you program faster but they're not required so far we programmed sequences and effects both without the use of groups of presets but these two tools have the capability to really help you speed up your programming progress that's important to keep in mind though that since these tools are not really necessary sometimes you can actually overuse them both groups of presets they will help you long groups are more essential than presets and we'll see how you can use both of them today so let's take a look at last week's show file you can still see the effects pool with the effects that we create we're just going to delete this window and insert groups for now to help you understand groups let's just make it fairly small like that also keep in mind if you're just starting on this journey and you kind of skipped all the other previous episodes and you're joining in now you can go ahead and download last week's show file from the video description if you need help setting it up just go back to episode number one where I show you how you can download the free software Granum a two on PC and the free visualizer Granum a 3d from the website and set it up alright let's first off into groups and groups actually not that hard to explain all you want to do is go over here to our fixture she'd pick out a group of fixtures that you like and then just like that all right perfect let's draw these in here press assign two times to get the label keyword and then just call it LED bars X because they're in this X trust and also I like to use all caps for names but you can do this however you like this is just a personal preference because I think it looks cool alright and the second thing that we should set up right now in terms of groups let's just take where were they let's use these moving lights over here that are also in the extras and we're going to create some fun stuff with these later on so store assign and rename them VL axe alright perfect and that's groups all you need to know about groups is that they actually preserve the selection order and that can be really handy because as we saw last week there's effects and then there's effects without fixtures selected and that's called a template effect we didn't really cover that but I pointing to you to to grade videos by cat West and Christian Jackson that go more in depth on that and so if you have a template effect and you want to apply selection of fixtures to it you can actually create a group holding the same fixtures only with different selection orders and like that you can actually use this template effect plus a few groups to create different variations of this same effect on the fly so that's something that's really important to keep in mind the selection order is actually stored inside of the group and that's one of the use cases the other use case that were mostly going to do today is just quick access to a certain group of fixtures literally alright um with groups out of the way that was really it let's go ahead and take a look at presets so presets you have all these different kinds of presets and you can see up here that it actually relates to these different parameter groups again these things actually keep coming back which is kind of funny isn't it what we're going to use are two things here we're going to use position presets because that's where presets are most handy because positions are actually almost the hardest thing to program just because most of the time it involves kind of aligning a lot of different moving lights especially if you have a show prepared and then you go to another venue with the same show what you will do is actually have to adjust the the positions because they they might be hung up slightly differently but I mean obviously the color output of pictures won't change geek over geek so these position presets are really a lifesaver also something that we're going to do with just not quite as necessary our color presets and now let me just show you how these are done I want to start with position presets and we're just going to create a preset and then I'm going to show you how you can use it so sort of like how groups are just a selection order of fixtures stored so you can recall them presets are actually a set of attribute values that you can restore and just like effects there are presets that will actually have a selection of fixtures stored inside of them and then there's generic so called global presets that are actually independent of a selection order or just a selection of fixtures in general we're not going to cover these we're just going to use simple selective presets today all right and so let's get started with creating our first preset and for that I want to create a position preset and I want to actually point that at Joel Zimmerman deadmau5 who's not in this stage but he would be standing inside of that cube so let's bring up our fixtures right here our VLX group and let's turn on highlight highlight again is the function that you can toggle which will actually turn on the dimmer channel off all the fixtures that you currently selected now again with highlight you want to be careful because you won't see any of the fixture output while you have highlight activated but for positioning fixtures it's a really great tool now the second thing I want to do before we dive into programming our first position preset is go up here to the options and I want to change the encoder style of these up here and what you want to do is go over to encoder style and toggle this over to rotation and now what's really cool is let's actually turn off highlight so I can show you if you keep your mouse button pressed and just move your mouse around this encoder just like you would in the real life scenario with one of these rotary encoders then I think it's a much nicer experience of using these because the other end coders he just kind of pushed and that's a really not a satisfying way of working with them alright let's turn off the dimmer attribute so let's take it out of the programmer and turn on highlight again and now what we want to do is go over to position and first of all we want to tilt these fixtures out so they actually face the crowd somewhat or rather get ready for facing the cube and what you can see now is that I'm turning like a madman but nothing much is happening that's this field up here you can actually switch the sensitivity of these things and normal most of the time works much better all right now comes the sort of laborious part by clicking next by the way you can step through a selection of fixtures by pressing set you see all the fixtures again and we're going to use this tool now to position all of these fixtures to somewhat point down here and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to tilt this up a little bit alright and now comes the hard part let's take our pan and move it over a bit let's switch this to normal as well alright move it up a bit and now what you want to do is go next to the next fixture and by the way if I said press set now I can already see that I positioned the first one correctly and I'll just go ahead and step through that selection of fixtures and use the pan and the tilt attribute to somewhat have it all position in the middle and this part of the video will actually be fast forwarded from now on [Music] [Music] close enough it's not really a very good preset I think but right now it's somewhat resembles pointing all these moving lights towards the artist in this case Joel huge fan by the way all right now go ahead and store and store this in this position preset let's just call this what the hell let's just call it Joel go unclear and now DoubleTap on this one and you will see all of your fixtures moving in to that position this probably took you a long time because it took me a long time a general there's a lot of tricks that you need to know in order to be efficient when it comes to to pan and tilt programming and I'm actually going to eventually dive deeper into preset programming for pan and tilt or position presets truth to be told all of the professional lighting people that have seen so far they actually spend a majority of their time at the venue just preparing all the different positions so that's that seems to be a huge huge time factor in preparing a good show and also most of them actually get really really perfectionist about it which is a good thing but still so this part if that took you a long time well it seems to take everybody a ton of time alright perfect so that's our first position preset you know what we're just going to create a second preset that's just gonna be super easy to make this a little faster let's just go here and tilt all of these fixtures out like so alright uh sort a sign out let's just call that alright now here comes the fun part you can use these presets now in your sequences and effects and that already in itself will dramatically speed up your programming time because especially position presets as you just saw are really really hard to do right and so if you were to recreate these positions anytime that you had to create a new sequence in that same manner so to speak or in effect then that will take you way too long so let's create a sequence shall we let's go over here let's just double click on out and that already sets the position in the programmer now what we want to do is turn off highlight go at at I'm going to add a few nice things here let's go over to beam will focus give this a narrow focus let's go over to color yeah mix color would actually be nice but no let's take now let's go ahead let's leave this open makes a color special dialog cool like that and then gobo let's take out a nice one nope way too dark don't like it nope wait so dark don't like it come on all right I don't I don't like these gobos all right no goals for this one they suck wait all right no gobo because I don't like him so let's go ahead and store our first sequence and then watch how easily we can use the second preset wait let's go ahead and position this on Joel create store create second sequence and then chew Joel and back and I'm sorry that I'm calling him a Joe we never spoke I don't know him he doesn't know me well we actually chatted on Twitter a few times but I just like to call people on their name not necessarily by their artist name especially if I'm programming a virtual light show for them you know so now we can see beautiful this actually looks pretty sick doesn't it nice so we got our nice little sequence perfect and you can imagine we can also do this for an effect so let's just turn this off all right now let's go ahead and create an effect so first of all let's select our fixtures again I just brought up the effects pool by the way let's call it Joel and back let's add dimmer but also position hit confirm double tap on the effect to get it going go back into it and you can already see that their positioning is sort of going crazy a little bit right now so let's just take this down a notch rate 0.1 all right now this is just a generic you know weird effect what we can do now is we can actually use our presets in here so select for pan and tilt select the low value and then right click on it and you can see here that we can use our presets all right now it's still looking really funky and that's because we haven't set up the high value yet so also go ahead and select those two cells and then just press out again nice and now you can see that these fixtures go in and out of these positions obviously we can dial down the face just make it all one uniform motion now let's do it like that I don't know come on a little Christian Jackson trick here yeah looks good enough whatever go assign and assign this to this executor and now we can see we can toggle this on and off perfect now the cool thing here is that we can actually change these presets now and that will automatically change this effect and this sequence where we use them so let's just make sure that everything is off press off two times and then just click on all the items that you see there so let's edit this preset if we go edit and then click on this one you can see that the programmer already loaded up all the values that were stored inside of that preset so let's just decrease the tilt to something like that so I just want the fixtures to kind of go out and then back in and now just like in sequences we can hit update it's going to ask shall we really update this yes please and now watch what happens when we turn off on this effect right they don't go up anymore they just move in sideways let's talk of this and let's bring up our sequence same thing isn't that nice and that's the beauty of presets and again if you take a look at this preset pool there's a ton of stuff that you can store in presets some make more sense than others but in general every fixture setting that takes you more than two minutes to recreate it probably makes sense to stored in a preset because that's you know if you're going to use this preset five times that has already saved you ten minutes and that's groups and presets for you now one thing that's really important to remember is that you do not need both of these tools and I caught myself spending too much time just creating all of these I think in terms of groups it does make sense just try to sort of arrange them in a way or organize them in a way that it doesn't take you long to know which group helps you select which fixtures if it takes you longer to identify the right group to choose then to just select the correct fixtures from this fixture sheet or maybe better yet if you're the type of person to remember numbers very well it might actually be faster on a physical console to just type out the fixture ID ranges and just be like okay my blinder is for example fixture ID one through ten so you might be faster by going one through ten at at and then go ahead and program that way instead of trying to find the right group and tapping on it so with both of these tools groups and presets there's trade-offs for it because it adds a layer of complexity on top of this whole system where you don't really need it you can totally program effects and sequences without using these two tools and so use caution when using these things and only use them if it really saves you time in terms of presets what we saw earlier is that especially with position presets it makes a lot of sense to never directly program them into the sequences or the effects because it's going to be a hard to do every time that you want to create a new look so it might make a lot of sense to create position presets just for programming looks so it does make a lot of sense to create position presets ahead of time just for being very efficient when it comes to creating the effects and sequences based on that but then also if you're running a show that might run in multiple venues with the same artist and roughly similar setup then position presets also are really going to be a lifesaver because you're gonna have presets like singer or drummer or some like that and all you need to do in the end is just update these presets and all of your content will be updated automatically and that's it for groups and presets thank you so much for watching if you like this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up if you didn't like it let me know why in the comments feedback is always welcome I love feedback I love being able to progress and so if there's anything that you would like to see or anything that you would like to see change then please leave me a comment down below also as a youtuber it's always a really warm and fuzzy feeling when people subscribe so consider doing that and also turn on your notifications if you like because new episodes are coming every Wednesday when that being said if you have any trouble whatsoever following along please go ahead and join our Facebook group and that's it for the ultra [Music]

Channel: aGuyNamedJonas

Views: 8,714

Keywords: MA2, GrandMA2, weekly, free, Tutorials, tutorial, lighting design, lighting, professional lighting, lighting console, dmx, showfile, download, 🤘🏻

Id: eVSVQyCMb_M

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018