MA2 Cloning Process - Jason Giaffo

i can't even think about man i didn't sleep for last night i am living on on death wish coffee right now worst cloning situation let's see the suggestion was made to share my worst uh cloning situation i'd say it was for me at the time probably uh doing what was the name of that festival last year uh stagecoach uh i was just on the matter they had like 15 instance uh bi or 15 30 37 the max instance on that bis to clone into which was one of the experiences that led to uh developing this cloning process a little bit better um just hate dealing with cloning to multi-instance fixtures just because updates tend to be kind of a pain in the ass a lot of the time uh but all right let's uh let's see here we're five after so let's go ahead and get started on this um so anybody who's in here on their computer um there is a dropbox link in the description uh go ahead and open that download the files from that um don't worry too much about what those files are quite yet uh just go ahead and have them on your pc they're just kind of things to follow along with so that you have uh have something you can reference as we're going through this good lord that caffeine is kicking in now i am jittery um let's see so as far as like what we're gonna be talking about today uh basically i'm trying to focus not just on the technical aspect of cloning but on the the the why so not just the how part but the y parts on like you know why would you set it up a certain way the the process of using uh certain aspects um so you can kind of get into how to develop a a process to use that technical knowledge with um to do i'll be covering the topic in a few passes so i'm just going to kind of go in some broad strokes at first and then as we get uh farther along i'm going to kind of get into more of the nitty-gritty of it but i'm going to start it out with just kind of a like a two minute rundown of my entire process so anybody who's just kind of here for the uh for the cliff notes version of it that's all you want you can pick that up and get out so you're not sitting through 30 minutes of information to get the the overarching look at it but then we'll kind of dive deeper into that and then at the end i'm just going to open this up for a q a for any any questions that arise from the process um i've got zack bosserman monitoring the comments for me and kind of keeping track of some stuff um keeping track of comments because i'm not going to be able to watch that and explain this at the same time i'm going to be proud of myself if i can do one at a time so for the process um i'm going to primarily be using um one show file this would be the the show file that i was touring with the end of last year i was a country tour primarily playing smaller clubs and some festivals it is a q stack show so for anybody who is kind of hoping to see like a process for for my like completely more or less lua run uh punt page that's not really what i'm going to be getting into today which is probably good news for the people who are actually wanting to learn how to clone because you don't have to understand uh you know five years worth of code to to grasp it um i will probably eventually do something with my punt page but this is going to be about cloning itself um anyway as far as that show file goes uh this was a a chris lyle design i was programmed by mark mike macario they have given me their permission to share this uh information with the live stream um there will be a second file from a tour earlier last year that was uh programmed and designed and programmed by trevor allstrand um i won't be using it as much one because i opened that file up and uh i i kind of left it in a mess um i didn't really want to clean up some of things uh but also some of the concepts hadn't that i developed during that tour hadn't been applied till i moved on to the next tour i was on uh so it wasn't quite the cleanest but there's some update stuff in it i'll be showing you um one like minorly serious note i am gonna be keeping artists names confidential during this um that's just per conversations i've had with them um just out of respect for them so anybody who is aware of what these tours are i just ask don't blurt it out in the comments because again that is something i'm just trying to respect um before we get deep into it just want to thank a couple people who have been involved in this again thanks to zack bosserman for the graphics on the little graphic design that we had for this as well as for for helping out with the stream right now um to my girlfriend michelle partly just to embarrass the living out of her but also because she has been a uh involuntary sounding board um for a lot of ideas for this thing so i appreciate her patience and listening to me ramble when she didn't probably want to hear me talking about lighting at all anymore um to any of the vendors involved so any i'm going to be using a couple of plots from actual festivals from last year so i've contacted any of the vendors responsible for those plots and just requested their permission they were all super chill about it um so just wanted to thank any of them if you see any of those plots thank any of them for allowing us to use their their ip and uh i think that's it any viewers as we're watching if you guys come up with any um things that you would like to see adjusted to this uh this is kind of going to be the first in a series so i'm going to be explaining my file today um but next week i've got uh three other people lined up um got elliot mount fort mountford uh chris toms and jared paul rarick i hope i got the names his name's in the right order um so we're gonna be lining up for that um so any suggestions about like things that you'd like to see polished up um for future iterations of this uh please feel free to let me know i'm not deep into like live stream world so i don't entirely know what i'm doing right now so i'm very open to suggestions again for anybody who's joining us late go ahead and check out that dropbox link download the contents because they will those files will become relevant as we move into this um so with all of the uh introductory formalities out of the way um perhaps let's go ahead and get into this um so before we dive into the the depths of it um just for anybody who's unaware of what cloning is if we have any like really beginner people in here on on that grounds um cloning is just our process of copying information from fixture a to fixture b right um so one thing that was a hard thing for me to grasp before i like actually started diving into this was that um cloning does not mean that fixture b becomes fixture a it means that you've copied the information from fixture a to fixture b but there's no like active link between them like my the hardest thing for me to grasp at first i was thinking like they become the same light so if you make changes to a they happen to be um maybe i was the only one who who had that impression but that is not how it works it's just a copy process um and anything that holds fixture information can be cloned whether it's uh sequence whether it's just a couple of cues in a sequence whether it's uh an effect uh a group uh a world anything that can hold fixture information can be cloned um so i'm going to go through just a quick quick uh overarch of what my process is again this is kind of going to be like the cliff notes version of it um it might not it's realistically probably won't make total sense but again just to give you kind of like the overall outline of what i do so let's go ahead and switch screens here uh so this is just a view that lives within my groups view i've got what i've kind of termed paged views i don't know if there's like a proper term for them but i've got all my various different uh group views within the same view template so this is my cloning view i don't use the gui and i'll be explaining why as we go along but basically just kind of set up a map here you set up your fixtures that you're going to clone from here at the top the fixtures you're going to clone too here at the bottom and then i've got a couple of macros that uh oh huh oh there it is i thought i was looking at the wrong thing that's interesting my macros seem to be a little bit off in this one i wonder if i loaded an old version let me tweak this real quick please okay um so anyways cloning from cloning2 press a macro we clone between them but before we do that we need to use clone fixture types so we can clone all of our global presets so basically map out what's cloning to what clone their fixture types for global information clone the fixtures themselves and then we go to town with updates that is the super abbreviated version of everything i'm doing um i'm obviously going to expand on that quite a bit as we go along but that's the the general process um so let's take a look at so i've got a mock-up festival rig that actually was taken from a i want to say it was i forgot the name of the festival already let's take a look over here switch screens so i've got in that dropbox we have some plots so main discussion plots uh festival rig tatanka ranch that's the guy so this is the rig i'm gonna be cloning to for this and what i will be cloning from what i've got as my like clone source fixtures is also in here as a plot um there's a quick like 20 minute throw together in vectorworks um don't judge me too hard but anyways this is what we're cloning from this is what we're cloning to uh so if you guys want to get those files open that might be uh of some assistance as we go along during this um so let me go ahead and hop over to that file so we can basically prep to get our fixtures in and assimilate it into this show file i'm just going to kind of go basically top to bottom the process of getting from somebody else's show file their psr file from festival into our file and then cloning into it really going top to bottom on it so let's do that is not how you get to a new show file but let's save this because i don't know what changed in here and let's open up our house rig cool so in the house rig i've already got our 3d position set up i'm going to keep it full screen for the moment but we can see that we have our fixture position set up and again this is going to be a um just a ma3d representation of this rig i just went ahead and put in the 3d positions to make our lives a little bit easier in this case um so this is the rig we're working with and before i even bring anything over i just want to go ahead and check that our fixture ids and our patch don't have any collisions so checking fixture ids i already know just from working with my own show file that i am using the what i'll call the zero thousand series um so i'm just gonna add i was using three thousand something for all of the house fixtures i don't have reasoning why that was i think just the first thousand series that was open so let's renumber these guys real quick so we're going to have them all start a little bit higher up and usually when i'm getting uh a psr file from a festival um one of the things i've done since i built this one it's already done in here but one of the things that i like to do is to go in and name all of the fixtures descriptively and that is entirely for the purposes of as you're pulling up things in a fixture sheet well for two reasons as you're pulling up things in a fixture sheet it just gives you a better idea of like what fixture you're dealing with right so like if i've just got like that default name that it gives it of just like that or like i can't tell what the hell the fixture name is supposed to be um when i'm looking at that in oops that was the wrong side of this thing when i'm looking at that in a fixture sheet i like i don't know what the hell i'm supposed to do with that right like usually it's just such a block of crap that i don't know what to do with it um so again i try to just name it descriptively once so i know what fixture i'm dealing with but two because you can use wildcards to build groups which i will probably get into later but let me fix can i like undo that because that was kind of really stupid to have done um yeah i don't think i can undo a patch move i'm going to reload this file real quick because that was dumb house rig check all load show because i had some actually worthwhile naming in there all right let's do that one more time fix our numbers so again this is just to make sure i don't have fixture number collisions with um with what's in my destination file also i'm gonna be saying um a lot it's just a thing when i'm talking uh sorry okay so there's our fixture numbers all set um before i do anything else i do want to make sure that i'm not going to have patch conflicts as well so i'm just going to go check out my universe pool here and i can see that i'm only using universes one through five right there's nothing else in here and for those who are unaware there is a sheet style button on this guy that you can check out um and so just so you can see all of your available universes i like using this especially like if i'm trying to check for like rdm turned on or what universe or request or whatever the sheet view of the universe pool is super handy to work with anyways i'm gonna save this guy oh crap now if i can hit the right button save i'm actually gonna say call it psr ready okay so now we're gonna go back into our touring file and that's us we're gonna load the show back up all right so we're back in our tour file and we just want to make sure that we don't have any stuff in the way right now so i'm gonna go check out my universe is here and i've got some stuff what looks to be parked on right now because i think i cleared that patch out so let's just say what is it uh where's our go unpark dmx universe one through five yeah there we go cool so there's nothing in the way uh universes one through five uh i've got my floor package on seven and eight and my clone source universe is way higher up which i'm going to explain here in a little bit uh so we're ready to psr i know this is clear we can go check our patch real quick and see that i'm just kind of skimming down these numbers i don't appear to have any 3000 series in here which means we should be good on fixture numbers so let's go ahead and do that psr which is a partial show read for anybody unfamiliar um this guy i'm going gonna load this guy scroll on down grab all of you we're gonna use them and we'll keep our stage the progress bars don't show when i'm blown up in full screen like this i'll give it a minute here [Music] just reading through some comments yeah uh responding to max yeah the sheet view of the universe pool was a very late discovery for me as well and it kind of changed my life boy i sure do hope this thing is actually running the psr right now and not oh no oh are we about to have this time all right i'm gonna give it about one more minute um that's kind of a bummer if we're having some uh bugs here probably should have built this in version three seven okay well um as a bonus piece of oh oh it worked okay you guys were about to get to see some extra but it it did not die we are all good cool so let's take a look in our patch uh so one thing i do to make psrs easier because i don't know if anybody else does this i use empty layers to keep my patch organized and one thing you'll notice is that if you have a fully empty layer it will get wiped out during a psr so what i do is i keep a completely empty fixture and it's is kind of a it's kind of a weird thing to build basically you put like a dimmer of your own version of a dimmer fixture in there and then you can go in and delete all the parameters which is how it shows up like this um which all that just to say i put some dumbass some dummy fixture in here that just fills up some space so i get to keep my organization layers so if we scroll all the way down here past my dummy fixtures we have all of our house stuff so i'm going to cut that paste it up under house and there's all of our destination fixtures um one thing i'll say if you are working with a festival oftentimes i'll use like the channel id to to use the the house's numbering system just in case i need to communicate with them like there's an issue with this fixture i know what they've called it and i know and it doesn't have to interfere with my own numbering system to keep things organized for me um but anyways so here's all of our lights it looks like they came in it looks like they came in with 3d information so i think we're good to go yeah and cool all right so we've psred we've got the stuff into this file now we need to make some groups out of it that i need to figure out how to organize these screens more easily okay creating some groups uh so here's my groups page um kind of got all of like my tour stuff off on the left here and i keep the right side for house stuff each day i've gone through a bajillion different systems on how to do this i have yet to commit to one um so let's create some groups starting at let's say i don't know let's say eight so uh if anybody does not use this feature the auto create feature it is so wonderful so i'll usually just start with that i'll grab go to auto create groups uh choose layer and i'll grab all of that house stuff start at eight and create our all groups and now we have uh our all groups right here um if i go ahead and pull up ma3d over here oh we need to make a get a session going here yeah yeah it's got ma3d linked in here looks like we're doing that and it's uploading cool so uh i wanted to open up ma3d just so we can go in here and right now i want to hide uh my rig just so the 3d view isn't kind of a mess so for anybody who does not keep their stuff organized in in groups it's super handy for this kind of thing so i can just go to my clone source rig and wipe it out from being visible so that my 3d view is a little easier to work with which apparently it didn't quite hide that uh on the ma side for me but that's okay we'll make that work so first thing i want to do generally is just make a uh make a layout so that i can work with this stuff so let's go into our layout views i've grabbed all that stuff and we're going to store this into our house view i'm going to blow this guy up here oh actually come on let's go into screen two with that layout okay so there's our house rig obviously um doesn't quite look the way we expect it to look so let's go go into setup mode and we're gonna say arrange and arrange by camera from our top view cool all right so now we're at least a little bit closer to uh a realistic setup of this did i ever set up my encoders with this i did wow that was drastic okay cool and usually from here i would also go in and color code them i'm possibly going to skip on that for the time being until it irritates me let's go ahead and actually save a version of this too uh i should have done this already but usually i try to do it i save a version right before doing a psr and right after because it does an autosave so okay we've got our layout built here we want to start making a map of how we are going to basically get our stuff into their stuff and this is where we kind of start getting into maybe more of a philosophical side of it um or i guess less of that but like we're gonna we're gonna depart from the software for a minute how about that um so if i switch over to this guy let's take a look at those plots so included in those downloads was a file called one of these things this docx file clone source fixture purposes so when i walked into this tour uh the the rig that i was cloning from the virtual rig built in to clone into house rick's from uh was a bit different than basically what i turned it into um also this is probably the first crystal i was hearing about this so i hope i'm not pissing anybody off um but i changed but so when i started with it it was originally i'm not entirely i don't it's been a while but i want to say it was pretty much just like a truss of spots and a couple of locations of washes and strobes and blinders um there were no beams because the of the idea that there are a lot of houses we're going to go into most houses aren't going to have beams um which totally understandable um as i was going through we hit one festival and i kind of started with that festival rig and parsed it down which might explain some of the decisions here like the way the washes are arranged downstage i could have i could have adjusted a little bit more but meh it worked um so i i kind of reprogrammed a little bit in a way that i could like give dedicated purposes to certain groups of lights so originally we had the upstage spots which were both responsible for aerial positions as well as for some key light moments uh and then we had kind of washers just lighting up the stage um so one of the issues uh that i was i was running into with that is that when we would go into houses that did have beams uh i would usually end up having to like either clone just from the beams or i might like clone like i might clone from the um sorry my beams from my spots first and then clone again just color information for my watch it washes uh just to get something a little bit different going on in the beams um because some of the issues i was having though were one beams in most houses especially in smaller clubs uh are not going to have color mixing they're going to have fixed uh color buttons uh oh um a stopped from fixed color buttons fixed color uh wheels trying to read things at the same time um so trying to deal with that like you know set the wheel to snap it doesn't quite look right so what i did is i went in and i added in some programming started cloning from the spots and then reprogrammed a little bit so that the beams are doing something that is different from the spots but also they're never doing anything that is uh critical to the show which is to say that like if the beams are missing the show still works but if beams are present it adds to it that way you know we're not relying on something that we don't know is going to be there every day from there i guess i could have this sheet open this would i've made this sheet for a kind of a handover to to zach because he was filling in for me for a weekend um to explain kind of what some of these purposes were so let's go top to bottom instead here uh washes are pretty straightforward downstage washes are lighting people's faces mid and up stage washes are lighting people's bodies their backs they're putting them in color um nothing super fancy about the way that was set up spots we started from having just our upstage stuff then i cloned into a midstage set of spots which we have over here um which do pretty much the same thing except i removed any information where they do specials where they do key light positions that way if i had a larger rig that i was going into in a given day i would be able to decide which lights are going to be responsible for doing just aerial things and which are also going to be lighting people so i know that if i'm cloning from my mid-stage spots that all of those key light moments have been removed from there so spots that might be a little too far down stage for what i wanted for that uh that would assist in that situation basically it allows me to not have to go back and clean up okay well i only want a couple of spots and this one i only want a couple of spots in this one i already know that i've taken care of that uh in the source programming instead and then there were the downstage spots which were also originally cloned from upstage um they also do plenty of aerials they're primarily aerial stuff um and they do some specials where lighting their faces was acceptable for that moment there were some where you only wanted like the really moody uh backlight spot on them and in those situations i removed those moments from the down stage spots but if it was something where lighting them up from the front was also good then i added that in so that way again it's just understanding the purposes of what your rig is doing like i really feel like this is kind of the biggest part of cloning and i felt kind of stupid about how long it took me to start to really grasp that um but it really is about knowing not just like cloning spots to spots and washes to washes but knowing what each of those fixtures is doing specifically and if you see here i've got a note like if fixtures need to be cut cut from the center first i don't know if if i tweaked programming to make sure that was valid but basically i was keeping track of okay when specials are happening which spots are doing them because some days you'll walk into a rig you're not gonna have even eight spots and you need to know okay which ones are the most expendable and which ones are gonna do me the most uh use from the original programming without me having to tweak things again i've already explained the beams they were cloned from the spots i changed some colors up got rid of any color snap issues and they're they're purely supplemental to the original programming just to make sure that something unique can be done with the spots atomics cupix blinders they're pretty straightforward they're not doing any fancy directional stuff and there are a couple of parkan rigs so basically anytime i would walk into a house that it was using like a 120k rig um i would go ahead and store that into the patch you might have seen i had like a 5000 and 6000 series then those were just a couple of park and rigs and basically i kept them around so that the next time i would walk into one i would if i had something close enough to start with i could pull from those and then modify i'm not going to get into that because that was a lot closer to just kind of really reprogramming a show than anything um and i don't think is as much relevant to this so again i can't stress enough how important i feel it is to really know what parts of your rig are doing and depending on the style of show you're doing this is going to change a lot right it's like if you're doing an edm show you probably don't need three trusses of washes to light your band because you got at least like maybe one dj maybe what three four if you've got what was it btsm that's got like three guys on stage um but like though you've got people that are in fixed positions right you don't need to wash the entire stage so the way you're working with that rig is gonna be very different um so it's a matter of not not necessarily like using this format it's about knowing what's going to work for the kinds of situations you're going to run into with the style of show that you have programmed so that's kind of the overview of how this rig is programmed uh as we move forward i'm actually trying to get my brain back on me i need a little more coffee pumping through the veins uh but okay so with those in mind we can kind of start making some informed decisions about what we want to clone to what so as i look over at these plots i'm going to see okay well we've got let's look downstage first i only have spots downstage or washes yeah same thing right i've only got washes downstage the way the show's set up i don't need those downstage specials um yeah pretty much ever um they're they're purely supplemental the way it was done so these can all just clone to downstage washes so i've got 10 washes here and i've got 12 washes to pull from so i'm going to pull from the center 10 of these one thing i also want to stress very heavily is that it's super important to keep symmetry in mind as you're starting to clone because it keeps the number of things you have to deal with updating later so much so much reduced um like if i was to clone from the first 10 of these and there's like a let's say there's like an effect going from center out right well center is now going to be like off off stage right all the way over here like this is the the center line if i pick from the first 10 rather than over here and that effect is going to look like garbage until i go and update it and remove individuals and do all that if i pull from the center 10 in the first place it's not going to do exactly what the original phase was set up for but it's going to be close enough no one's going to tell the difference and it's not rather i should say it's going to be close enough that it's not going to stick out as being weird uh so that gives us one less thing we have to worry about updating later we don't have to worry about updating that spec the the effect so that um it's calculating it's removing individuals right the the individuals will work just fine in here moving forward let's look at so blinders i've got eight of those things and i've got 12 two light blinders so i'll usually play around with maybe like what particular patterns i'm picking from i don't think this show was programmed with any particular fancy effects on the blinders that i can remember because we had we had some nexus 7x7 panels uh in our tour package so there wasn't need for that nor were there houses that were regularly going to have you know 24 uh blinder cells for us to be using so these are pretty much just kind of on off or doing a little dimmer wave so i'll probably just pick from i don't know the center four of these moving on to beams and spots let's go to our mid and up stage trusses here uh and this was sorry this was tetanka tatenko ranch to tonko ranch um which was put together by toucan productions um so moving on to these sorry i'm blanking right now um so we've got our mid and our upstage washes uh again the way that i've got them set up in mind these are identically purposed in my clone clone source rig um however i only have six washes per truss and we're cloning two eight trusses per wash per truss eight washes per truss in addition to that we're also cloning two multi-instance fixtures which is going to be a bit of a thing as we move forward but i'm pretty much just going to clone all six of these to the center six of these washes and then i'm gonna re-clone the outside two washes to the outside two washes of a given truss and then i'll repeat the same thing with midstage looking at spots we have so this is a situation where we don't want to get like too literal with the trust positions so i've got eight spots total here i've got four downstate or four mid stage four upstage generally speaking i am not going to be able to create a whole lot of positions with only four spots on a truss uh if i'm using those four spots as like their own system like you've got what four positions you can do you got straight you got fanned out you've got crossed in you have x1 and x2 so that was what maybe five not a lot you can do with only four sources if i treat these all the way they've staggered them as one set of lights i can now have if i set up my fixture order just reading them left to right i can have what more or less functions as one truss of eight spots which will be a lot more helpful to my positions and it's gonna be one of the situations that i've got oh sorry i do have eight spots here so that'll work perfect i just take all eight of my upstage uh trusspot my upstage truss spots and clone them to these uh again we're gonna go in order of left to right not in fixture number order so we'll set that up in a minute and then beams i'm gonna do the same thing i've got eight of these things they're just kind of staggered staggered in reverse from the spots so we're gonna do the same thing with those we're gonna treat these all as one system uh which again we have uh eight beams on our upstage truss here so that'll work out perfect so let's hop into the m.a side of it and figure out how we're going to map that let's switch screens here okay uh sorry i was just checking some comments real quick um cool cool cool all right uh here's our house fixtures we need to pull up our groups view so again we're i should i should absolutely color code these let's color code these real quick all are spiders so if you grab the group while you're in setup mode here i can go to border color and for me washes are orange don't ask for explanations i have none uh spots are gonna be green as long as you've got a color system that works for you that's kind of all i find that really matters and beams are gonna be blue oh x4 xl is downstage that's right there were two different kinds of washes should have been paying attention to that border color i'll make you red just to differentiate all of our blinders let's just move you okay that worked out let's try that one more time sure good enough okay so there's our blinders uh all right so i can at least see by the colors i know it's kind of skittles on the screen but at least helps me identify uh different types of fixtures in here and usually i'll even i'll go through and take the time to like create i'll filter out from this to create just the spots view just the beam so just the wash view i'm not going to do that in this particular case so let's start from the easy side because the washes i think are going to be our biggest pain in the ass on this one so let's start from the spots the spots are super straightforward let's create our left to right spots group four five six seven eight and cool uh my keyboard over here get our set going and we're gonna go into our cloning stuff and we're going to let's delete all these groups we're going to store that here now one thing that is super super super super important to me is labeling this stuff as we put it in here um on a rig this scale is less critical but as you get into something like i was mentioning at the beginning of the stream um stagecoach or anything where you've got like i don't know five six ten trusses of stuff uh it's super important to label what's going into these because as i'm getting into pages of clone stuff it just it's going to turn into a mess real fast if i don't know what's in what um so when i'm labeling things i'll basically just say like i'll put what kind of fixture it is usually the location since i've only i'm treating as one trust there's no location to include right now and then i'll say the number of fixtures in there um so i know how many i'm cloning from and how many i'm cloning to sometimes that's not a one-to-one thing so that helps me keep track of like the way that i'm planning to map each of these so there's our spots left to right just so we check through that our fixture order is correct there i'll clear that out uh we'll do the same thing with beams now so i can actually just grab left to right and say if beams so if you guys are not using the if keyword i can't begin to recommend it enough it's just a filtering tool so like whatever you've got when you say if it will only keep whatever's in the destination object that can be a group that can be a sequence it can be a preset that can be anything that can hold fixtures um and that's a really easy way like a lot of the time what i'll do is i'll make one oops that was the wrong thing we're gonna get back here all right i'll make one giant left to right group i'll just call that like house left to right um sorry so i'll grab that and i'll just say if these fixtures and now i've still got those fixtures in that same selection order so i don't have to keep doing that over and over uh that becomes really helpful again when you have just much larger numbers of fixtures anyways there's our left to right on our beam so i'm gonna go into our clone view and i'm going to store that here again our bottom row is what we're cloning to i'm going to say beam we're going to say it's eight of these things all right so now let's look at well let's do blinders those are going to be easy we've got eight of those things left to right call them mole and we'll say we're looking at eight sources there so let me go ahead and grab what we're going to clone from on these and then we'll handle we'll start tackling washes so our stuff is i've got source camera view and i've got more of a layout arrangement so uh static we're looking at again i'm just going to grab the center eight of these i'm less concerned in this particular inst in the way this one's programmed about capturing the full range um there was a previous tour where i had this exact same setup for molds it was like the previous tour i was on so what i would do if i was trying to capture the full range was i would try to basically spread it out so that the frequency at which i was i was capturing the full range but also not capturing like the same cell on every light because like there might be effects where like all of the outer cells would light up first than all the inner cells so if i'm grabbing just down the line like this that effect is going to look really dumb in the cloned version so again just kind of general there's a lot of things to keep in mind as you get to know the way your show is programmed better um oh i already created that group stupid okay uh so movers we want eight beams and it just so happens we have a set of eight beams right there uh and um i do want to label this mole eight um this one's already got numbering in it so i have to worry about that and then we're going to take our upstage spots and do the same thing and that's got the one through eight listed there in case anybody can't see it so i'm not worrying about like typing that one out because something is indicating pretty straightforward what i'm working with here uh okay washes so let's take a look at our house stuff so our downstage wash is going to be pretty easy we have 10 washes left to right make sure i grab those in the right order cool so there's our source for downstage wash make sure i label how many we're working with here so there's 10 washes we're cloning from o2 okay that's why it's important to pay attention to that okay we're cloning two of those ten so it's going back into ours we're gonna pick the center ten out of these and one tool i'll use to check myself as i'm going is i will keep a oh my buttons disappeared something went wrong when i loaded this guy at some point well that's a bummer um let's see if i can load that back real quick i bet oh it's probably not worth it i thought something weird was going on um that's kind of am i logged in it's the wrong user profile nope there's only one left very curious how that happened i must have only loaded part of the show um anyways so i usually have a macro on here um that just runs a little lua line and i'll pull it up from an older version that just when i it's a one line lua macro that just displays how many current fixtures i've got it it's just pulling up the selected fixtures count variable so uh list there what is it there we go so there's the selected fixtures count variable it's always keeping track of what you've got in your live programmer i'll keep a button around that just shows me that at any given point so that i know how many fixtures i've gotten each just to double check that i'm cloning one to one when i'm aiming to so we've got 10 fixtures there we're going to say downstage wash we'll call it 10. cool now we have a little bit of a what might be a hairier situation with these other washes because these are all multi-instance i don't know how visible it is from the stream but each of these has another at least four instances or let's take a look at our fixture sheet yeah so each of these is four instances of fixtures and one thing you'll notice is that as i'm grabbing these guys they are not selecting in instance order um this was kind of a hang up for me when i was first trying to clone an emotions and stuff it took me it took me a minute to kind of get it together so let's go make uh let's look over here do i have yeah so i can create groups just based on names and this is part of where that naming thing starts to come into play so i've got a macro that'll basically ask me to type something and then it'll pick any fixture that starts with that in its name so i can say select anything that is midstage and it grabbed if we look at our fixture sheet here we have anything that whose name starts with ms selected which is again super handy especially working with larger rigs that is super handy for me to quickly build my groups of specific fixture types on specific trusses um get a whole i don't know eight truss rig done in three four minutes um so anyways so there's our midstage group i keep these kind of sectioned off at the bottom here got all of our upstage fixtures store that here cool so now i'm going to say all of our spiders if midstage there's mid-stage spiders all spiders if upstage there's upstage spiders and i'll say spider okay so we got all those and in theory they are currently in uh patch order their instances are correct should it happen that you have done something that they're showing up in the wrong order and you need to reset them if you're not familiar with the invert keyword um basically invert will grab anything in your destin in the you say invert and then you grab another object it will grab anything in that object except what you already have grabbed so it's kind of like the opposite of if uh if you don't put anything after it will grab everything else in the rig except what you currently have you do that once you get everything except that you do it again and now you get everything you had in the first place but now it's been reset into um patch order i picked that one up from oh ryan tanker on a gig somewhere um fourth of july yeah um so anyways um then he was actually pulling that from uh the vert 676 probably just combined two console names there but anyways so all that to say right now what we are looking for is we do actually we don't want our stuff in patch order because mapping this to source objects is going to be a pain in our ass and that's because let's take a look at what we're cloning from let's say we've got one two so i want to grab these six washes right i'm sure i've got a group form somewhere yeah upstage washes so we've got these washes straight in order well if i grab the um let's hop back over here if i grab these guys just by their instances let me grab the upstage spider group what we're going to end up getting is the first wash is going to clone to the main instance second wash is going to clone to the second instance third wash to the third instance fourth washer to the fourth instance fifth wash is going to go to the first instance of our next light which is clearly not the way that we are uh not the way we're going to want to work let me tweak something here real quick doo doo doo there maybe i'll make that easier for some of you guys sorry about that okay um lost my thought okay so what we want is basically to get these guys in their fixture order and then stack the instances from there um that might not make sense quite yet but let me um let me explain i'm sure i have a better way of doing this but i'm just going to grab all these guys i'm going to do an matrix of four i'm going to say next so there's all of our dot ones and i'm going to say next there's all of our dot twos next dot threes next dot fours great oops i'll label these dot real quick that would be a little bit more descriptive i'm trying to work a little faster right now okay so there's all of our instances now we grab all these guys together and we can create a group of spider instance uh actually i actually forgot how i would name these but i'm gonna call them instance order for right now and then oops move all house spiders here spider fixture order so basically i've got the same group pulled up but just with different selection orders one keeps all of my instances together so all dot ones all dot twos all dot threes all dot fours and the other one keeps them in patch order because i have different needs for them depending on what's going on so right now i want the instance order and i want just the upstage of those so i'm going to grab an instance order i'm going to say if midstage spiders and now i have all eight of these grabbed um basically going one through eight on instance one one through eight on instance two and so on down the line what this is going to mean and i'll actually pull up the gui uh clone option here in a moment is uh let's take a look at in a second let me let me store this group and show you why so we're going to store this this is our destination oh actually that's going to be a bit of a problem because we're cloning only from six so actually what i need to do is actually i can just grab this and i'm going to say minus this guy minus this guy so now we have just the center six so we're gonna store say mid-stage wash and then for our count i'm gonna label it six times four just so i know i've got uh basically four rows of six so a source of six is what is going to properly clone to what is intended here because once you reach the end of your source fixtures it just recycles uh which let me demonstrate that real quick and i'll get in to the deeper part of this oh i have eight washes upstage okay apparently at some point i realized that was an issue so never mind on all that um we're gonna clone from those eight washes in there say midstage wash eight times four we're going to delete this guy okay so let's take a look at what that means in our clone menu just to have it visually represented so we're going to cloning and i'm going to grab our source say take selection our destination say take selection and when we look at that we see that you know as it repeats we are going one through eight it's going to one through eight then we're going to get one through eight here is going to one through eight again but on instance two and so on down the line one through eight again is going to one through eight on instance three and again on instance four so it allows us to use that repeating mechanism in a way that doesn't make us have to go build a separate group for this and then a separate group for this and then so on down the line we can do it all in one one go so let me get this guy sized back appropriately okay so there's our mid-stage washes and then it looks like our upstage washes were the same thing it's another set of eight so i'm just going to go back into groups i'm going to say our spiders in instance order if upstage i'm going to create a second group and i'm going to put that straight underneath here which tells me that both of these are going to clone from the same source fixtures the way i've got that set up so i'll say upstage wash eight times four and now we know we have eight rows or four rows of eight sitting on that row as well and they're all coming from the same source fixture and if i'm not mistaken that is our entire rig so now i'm going to get into why am i using macros instead of the gui this was this again this was a thing that was introduced to me from trevor allstrand and i can't even begin to thank him enough for that because this has changed the way i work so one of the issues with the gui first off first off i just like having macros because i can any specific preferences i have i can just set those as options in the macro lines so like for example i'm only cloning one to one on my position presets all the rest of them i'm going to clone fixture types and i'm about to explain that in a minute um and then i've got all my effects and i've got my merge options preset some of them are low priority some of them are normal merge and even specific groups referenced by their name that's something you can't really do in the gui is reference anything by wild cards using their names um when i'm building my groups for for the punt part of this file i'm naming anything that's going to be used as a group master on my punt um my little punt page on there with with mst at the end that way i can clone just those groups over but not be cloning the rest of my groups because that will just create i don't like cloning my groups over most of the time there's very little reason i ever have for that but for group masters for a punt page that is super handy for me so it is set up to clone just those parts in there in addition it also goes through and like does some color coding so i know which ones have already been done because i can't i've i have like yet to make it through like two days in a row and actually make it even through just that much cloning without getting cut off somewhere in the middle um so just helps me keep track i'm also very distractible so i'm sure a huge part of that is just on me but anyways so you can do this in the gui and that's i think the way most people are used to working um however let me just go ahead and demonstrate i'm going to back up now because i want to make sure i don't uh kill anything so if we look at our presets here all of my color presets are global there might be one that's selective somewhere yeah like that guy um but i try to keep i try to keep presets global as often as possible it makes your updates so much easier and if you have anything that's specific to a fixture type rather than the individual fixture there's no need to have selective information in there you should have information that applies to all of your fixtures unless you need discrete or individual information for a very specific reason so for colors a color makes a blue from one aura to another is going to be the same from one viper to another is going to be yup account for for lamp temperature differences sure but realistically we're most shows we're not going to have time to get that uh picky about our our colors um or at least i'm i'm not not not with what i'm working with generally um theatrical people might rip my head off for saying that um but in in this case our our color mixes are pretty much gonna be the same from one to another of the same fixture type um same thing with gobos right like your your position for uh a specific gobo on one viper is going to be the exact same information to the next viper so there's no reason to have selective information in here uh same thing with your strobe palettes uh unless you're creating like your randoms by on a fixture that doesn't actually have random strobe like that's one of those tricks where you can like just set a bunch of off speed syncs and it will make it look random short of that i have no reason to have selective information here delay times would be yes if sequences referenced delay time pallets in ma2 they do an ma3 um but since they don't i have very little reason for that as well and you can also see i did not use a whole lot of uh delay patterns here um so the only thing that really has discrete info that i regularly that i really need updated day to day is positions for me so i'm only ever going to be doing those but let me show you what happens if i just clone from the gui everything to my global presets so let's take a look at our clone menu here i'm gonna so cloning would you stop that damn it windows all right let's go from let's take our spots we're cloning from spots we're cloning to prepare we're going to say all sequences no groups you know what i'll i'm actually curious i'm just going to leave it at all presets for right now uh no worlds all effects no layouts cool first off i just hate the amount of time it takes for me to do that every single time i'm sure there's probably something you can set up for that but so i'll hit clone and i'm going to say let's do a low prior merge sure alright so if i go back to my presets here we can see they are all selective information now every single one of those things has selective input stored into it now and the problem with that for me is let's say you know i've gotten to to blast through and check some updates but maybe i missed that there was a color off like every now and then you get a light that's got cto in it and um yes we'll hit that um and somehow like deep blue is what shows up on your cto palette that's a very specific instance i've run into i can't remember what caused it but um so you pull up what's supposed to be this nice warm white light on your artist's face and it is congo um and you grab it real quick you kind of fade it into the right color you update that preset that's great except if that's selective you only updated that one light which means now when the rest of the rig comes in in that color the rest of them are going to be in congo and you're going to have an even harder time grabbing only the ones that are still in that weird color and not the one that you just did and it's going to be a whole mess rather if that was global and you just updated that one and updated it global all of those lights referencing that palette will now be in the correct color when they show up in in there so i can't stress enough how strongly i try to stay away from selective uh palettes which was the initial reason trevor had warned me away from using the gui so i'm just gonna undo that and hope it doesn't crash because sometimes undoing a clone does crash the desk okay it looks like we're good um generally i would not advise undoing a clone if um if you have a recent save point just always say before you you clone anything just it makes your life so much easier so let's go back in and um we're going to do this with macros but before i do that what is causing that selective thing is it's looking there and it's seeing that this fixture doesn't have global information there already so we need to put global information there which means we need to clone our fixture types we need to do global cloning so for anybody unfamiliar if you ever like if you ever right click edit click on a palette you will get in your fixture sheet all of the fixtures contained in that palette as well as what values that's at hey can we actually do feature sort here that'd be cool all right that's fine um so when you do that at the top you'll see all these fts and that stands for fixture type uh i want to say i learned that from one of alex hughes videos um so that's fixture types that is global information being stored in there uh fixture type one is your universal information and then two and on down the line are any any global fixture types these numbers correspond directly to your fixture type numbers in your patch um so this is showing us what our global information is in here and just like you can clone from a fixture you can clone between fixture types which is what this first macro is over here if i edit this and pull it up we basically will tell it to clone from the fixture type we're gonna be cloning from to the fixture type we're going to clone two to handle this process i make a a fixture type map and in those dropbox files there is a file labeled of f-type cloning map it's an excel file i apologize if that's a problem for anybody to open but let me pull that up over here uh and i usually am just handwriting this on like a freaking napkin or piece of scratch paper or something day of um but i'll i'll put in here basically what fixture types am i cloning from what am i cloning to and their fixture type numbers there's a couple different ways you can pull these up personally the way i always work is if i go back over here man that lack of macros is really pissing me off because i've got some macros that i frequently use for this oh here still got them in here let's get some stuff moved real quick so make all the jokes you want i can't can't seem to function without my macros clearly so so i'll go through in like a couple different ways i can do this but like if i'm not dealing with a bajillion fixture types i'll grab all of my source fixture types and i'll say selection is world and then when i clear out if i turn off programmer only at the very bottom of our fixture sheet here we now have all of the fixture types that are still in our active world which is showing me fixture type 1 which is all universal stuff and then my r2 washes my mk2 spots my platinum beams and my cupix cool so if i'm going to be cloning from any of those i'm going to go over here and start writing those numbers down so i'm going to say r2 wash and that's going to be fixture type 16 and mk2 spot and that's going to be 26. now say flat um screw it uh 39 and i i've got realistically no presets to clone here but why not let's say q picks 47.1.2 and i'm specifying that one because over in our fixture sheet that's what's specified uh in a multi-instance fixture you can clone from specific um i guess we could call them instance types or fixture type instances because each fixture types instances have kind of their own set of information as well if it ends in a 1.1 you can just reference the main number if it ends in dot one dot anything else i type out the full thing so i specify which part of it i'm cloning from i actually kind of forget the behavior if you just grab all of this type um at once i'll remember if it if it does both of them or if it just defaults to the first instance but anyways so that is what we've got from what we're cloning from now i'm going to go and do the same thing for what we're cloning to so i'm going to go back to our lighting world this is world one and i'm gonna grab all these guys that we're cloning to and world of selection again and now when i go to the bottom of this sheet we have all of those things we're cloning to so i could have changed some of my fixture types here but our dimmer is oops is going to be fixture type 60. okay and then we're going to have 61 is our x for xl uh that's going to clone from our wash so we're going to say 61 x4 xl i'm actually going to create another row here because i'm going to copy oops again i'm usually writing this so it's much less dif or much less easy to read most days um okay so but we also want to clone our spiders in there so all of our spider instances which are just dot one and dot two as far as types go are destination so sixty one 61.1.1 so 60 oh sorry 62 yeah.1.2 and that's going to be our spiders uh to do vl 4ks are going to be what we cloned from spots so we're going to call that that's 63 vl 4000 and beams are going to be also platinum beams but probably in a different mode so 64 and um realistically what i should have done first is check that if that i had any duplicates to existing fixture types um if anybody wants me to go over in the q a there there is a way to actually store your um your global presets into your fixture profile and that that's something i use a lot during festival season anytime i run into a fixture type at a festival and get all my updates done there i'll go ahead and store all of those global presets into that fixture type so the next time i run into it i just import that profile merge those presets back in and all of my tweaks from the last time i used them already done anyways so realistically what i should have done is check to see if i had platinum beams in the same mode already in my show file with their with their presets updated uh and then switched these to those if i did i don't know if that's the case but that's that is a step you should take earlier on um that's the biggest misstep i make i'm doing all right so cool there's our map so we are going to be cloning from fixture types these two fixture types these um again i i want to make it my one-to-one map what fixtures are cloning to what fixtures first because i'll have days where i've actually got a show file that i'm gonna pull up later for this where like i have nothing but washes in the rig but i've got like 50 of them so on those days i'm going to purpose some of them as spots so even though i want their fixture information coming from spots i want all of their colors to be consistent i don't want to pull the the colors from the spots for half of those washes and then from my source washes from the other half because when they're all in saturate red they should all look the same when they're all in cto they should all look the same so i'll pull my fixture type info maybe from one source even if um and kind of do some submerging you kind of can get into some layering with it um i feel like i'm gonna make i'm gonna butcher that if i go any deeper into it right now so anyways figure out what's cloning to what first then make your fixture type map once you know what fixture types information you're going to need and then let's get into running the macros on top of the last one you used um i've got a question asking if i'm always stacking my show file on top of the last one i used um usually no uh and that is why i'll export my stuff to my global presets to my fixture profile to import later is because i'll usually have like a start file whether it's festival season or whether i'm going to day to day um i usually prefer to um to kind of have a clean start file and then any changes i'm making i'll take notes of them or if they're really big then i will keep it and then clean it back up but usually no i'm usually starting from i guess a clean file i feel like clean is a strong word for my my organization skills some days but yes a clean file uh yes thank you zach for answering that one um cool so these are our fixture type numbers let's get them let's get them cloned over here i am focused on the wrong window so now that we've made that map i can go back into world one and we're going to start running our clone macros so with that map pulled up maybe i can just kind of do a little split screen here i don't know something here uh okay nope that's not gonna work at all yeah close enough no no i tried i tried a thing it failed oh my god how how many times do i have to explain this one yeah it's just not being cooperative it okay fixture types we're cloning fixture types i give up on windows so we're going to clone from 16 to 61. we're going to go back over here hide this window so clone fixture types we're going to go from 16 61. i'm just going to go on down the line i will usually default to a low prio merge so let me explain what those options mean real quick um you have three merge options and there's actually another file over here explaining our our merge options a clone options explanation it's another excel file it's opening and this is just a really basic rundown i it is explained in the help menu but i didn't see a graphic representation if it is somewhere i thoroughly apologize i missed it um but you have three three main options um well three merge options you have overwrite you have merge and you have low priority merge when you overwrite it will essentially delete all information in the destination object and then copy information over so for in this example even though fixture b was already green um it the the console went and wiped out that data and then just dropped and fixed your ace data so that's gone merge means that anytime that it will keep everything that the original fixture was doing uh however any new information posed by the clone source fixture will overwrite so there's no conflict here so nothing got overwritten however when fixture b went to yellow fixture a was turning red so that overwrites that piece of information and so on down the line low priority merge flips the priority of that so if if both items are doing something at a given in this case in a queue it will give priority to the destination fixtures existing information so since fixture b already had yellow when you do a low priority merge it stays yellow it will only allow you to write new information in there if existing information isn't already present so i default to low priority merge in when i'm dealing with presets that that's kind of my default so that if i need to clone from multiple fixture types into one fixture type i'll always start with the one whose information i want prioritized um but in some cases maybe like if i'm cloning from a wash um i don't know maybe like that wash the source fixture didn't have certain strobe options i'm gonna need to use them as spots so then i'll also clone from spots low priority merge so that any information that was lacking from the washes will be filled in by the spots when i'm cloning sequences i usually tend to default to normal merge i very very very rarely use overwrite overwrite is one of those like oh i it up i need to start over and my last save point is way too far back or whatever it is but i need to wipe out the existing information that is a do not use unless you specifically need it kind of event um so those are our three options and these are the tags you use to get them again it's just overwrite merge and low prio merge so let's switch back over here so i'm going to do a low prior merge on that and i'm going to keep on going down my fixture list here which i can make a little bit bigger for this so i'm going to go from 16 to 62.1.1 low prior merge again i'm just keep going down the line 26 to 63 39 to 64. and then 4712 to 60 which i doubt i even need to bother with but okay so now all of my fixture type info should be cloned and as i check on that i'm gonna grab these and see what um they have i did i really didn't ask you to do that all right let's get screen two back in here in screen one cool so now if i grab any of these we will see that should be seeing that they have all of these colors huh that's a new one i wonder if that's a change in how i somehow embedded the fixture oh i just hadn't released it dummy okay so now when i grab these we can see that that these fixtures have all of these colors even though there's still only global information stored into them which lets us know that our our fixture type cloning worked so i'll just go down the line real quick and check that they all have well moles don't have colors washes have them and all of these watches have them so we know that our fixture type cloning worked um i should have saved before that i'm gonna go ahead and save now uh pre one to one clone so now that that's done uh now our one-to-one cloning won't force the addition of preset information as it finds it missing because it won't be missing so now we get into our clone macro again just to show everybody this in case they want to reference it for later this is what the macro looks like it's just asking clone from what clone to what and then it will say clone from that fixture type of that to that if all of our presets so star.star means all fixture types all or sorry all preset types all presets within uh that pool and then i just wipe out those variables again so that's that's the whole macro it's really three lines all right so that's that part and then we get into our clone group part so this is where i just start mapping one to one and i think this is a good time to explain what this is doing um so same thing uh we're asking what group are we cloning from what group are we cloning to i make sure i'm in world one um i was using a clone filter for a while uh generally a good practice especially if you're like cloning to any fixture first off if you got a fixture with like the uv lights like the the solar spot i just go into the patch and wipe those things out i turn them into a dummy channel i'm sure they're useful for some things but they they screw up the color mixing so bad um because emma tries to account for them in the colors that i just i completely remove them as color information there's a cat under my feet um so anyways um i'll use a clone filter uh generally but it's kind of really only good for dealing with situations where you have like color mix options you're trying to avoid uh i used to have some update cue lists and you'll see that in the other show file in a little bit that i would unlock to clone things to and then re-lock and then we start the actual cloning process so it's we clone all of our position presets again because that's the only place i really have selective information i care about i'll clone all of our effects so we want to do all those before sequences because we want to make sure those exist before we clone our sequences then we clone our sequences uh all sequences and then we handle our groups so let me discuss some of the options on these so i don't know why specifically on preset uh position presets i pick low priority merge oh i know why because if i do some updates and then i realize i need to clone something else if i've already done position updates the last thing i want to do is redo them so i keep this as low priority merge just all i really need from the clone is to make sure that these exist once they exist for that fixture the rest of the updating is on me so if i've started updates i don't want that overwritten 99 times out of 100. effects this pmc stands for prefer mixed color so that's a color transform option um if if anybody's unaware when you are cloning um it will do some calculations to figure out okay well this fixture only has rgb but this destination picture has rgbw or you're going from rgb to a fixed color wheel or whatever so it does some transformation that's the only like cross cloning capability that ma really supports is changing your color types as you go so that's just it says keep it mixed color when at all possible i try to avoid the color wheel uh kind of whenever i can if i have mixed color available uh so that's what that's there for and that's the same purpose over on the sequences uh all these slash ncs just mean no confirm so it's not going to give me a pop-up asking it's just going to use these options and keep moving uh and yeah same thing with our groups anything that ends in mst that is just for my pun page and then i just color some stuff so i can keep track of what's been cloned so do we have questions um before i jump ahead um i'm gonna go and start hitting these but any questions about the options i'm using there go ahead and start posting those so we can address them while we're here but now i'm just going to go through and i'm going to say group 1001 to 1201. we can see that's cloned 1003-1203 1005-1205 oops 1007 to 1207 1009 1209 1009 to 12 25 yeah uh and i've kind of got these colors set up so that the one that's being cloned from is always brighter brighter than the one being cloned too just to make sure i didn't fat finger anything and then anything that was previously cloned turns black as i move through so i know that it's been handled cedric i am glad to hear you are happy with the with zach handling the comments here because that is making my life so much better coatings into a color wheel set um so yeah it's um it has been brought up on the side um you can clone into fixed color wheels so like if you're cloning into a beam um you can absolutely clone from a color mix source into that beam which was one of the issues i was running into uh on this tour was that um not the not the fact that you could clone that wasn't a problem it was the fact that i was cloning from color mix which meant there were nice pretty fades and if you have um if if you're unaware um a fixed color wheel generally kind of really doesn't do nice pretty fades at all so that was that was one of the things but yeah you can totally clone from a color mix source into a color wheel and you can even have it force both of those things so you can have it force each color preset to have both fixed color wheel and color mix so if you've got some kind of specific updates you want to do there totally an option never fixed your type yeah yeah like i've said fixture type cloning has changed my world again because everything is stayed global here which means my updates will be maintained in the way that i want them to be which is not a bunch of selective information that i can easily very easily lose track of which ones have been updated which ones haven't uh and just to add to that i mean let's say you add two more of a fixture type into your show if it's all selective i mean you can you can clone your presets over but it's one more step you have to take whereas when it's using global information it's just there and ready to go um and yeah fixture type clone also completely works um with those color transform options jesus words yeah yeah i see you up there elliot um cool so that's kind of the uh rundown oh uh so the question came up how to tell to clone fixture type so in that macro we are specifically saying clone fixture type uh which is hold m a and then hit the fixture button is what will pull that into the um into the command line for you um but that is as opposed to just fix your number and again i pull i pulled those numbers up uh using the fixture sheet you can also just go into your patch and like go to that layer and you'll see okay our dimmers here are fixture type 60 x4 xl's or 61 spiders or 62. uh this doesn't give you like this the sub fixture type number so like for the spiders it doesn't tell me until i go all the way to fixture types edit this and go into our module manager that okay our main module is dot one and our rgbw cluster is dot two um whereas the fixture sheet will show you that right off the bat which is part of why i use that in partly just because i can just grab some groups use a a world macro and all of a sudden that's the only information i see um cool um i think i hit the questions with that okay cool so i'm gonna keep going with this although i'm not sure that there is actually a whole lot more to hit because at that point our cloning's done from here we're just doing updates um so that is the very very fleshed out version of that that two minute rundown i gave about an hour ago um so let me see if there's anything else that might be worth hitting on as far as the clone process itself but i think i think that's really it uh after that i've got some stuff that helps me with my updates some of them are just kind of generic programming tricks like i've got i don't know some some pan tilt macros that will invert either of them i will do a flip until i find the right one i can do i can extract certain information from certain presets to combine like my pans from from one position with the tilts from another to make a new position um and in effects i've got some stuff that oh my god this isn't right at all oof big oof damn oh there it is okay they didn't move too far uh so i've got some like conversion uh those aren't really have it's more copying effect lines really anyways i've got a copy effect line in here somewhere so like if you want to reset a fixture order you can copy one line um and then you can put only your newly cloned fixtures into that line so you're not screwing up the source information especially if those source fixtures are also live like if you're cloning from your floor package um but yeah i guess kind of just to show that that all worked in case since i just told you that it worked but i haven't actually shown you any of that let's take a look here so i'm going to switch into ma3d real quick i'm going to keep my clone source rig turned off but i am going to add in our floor package oh that wasn't the right button at all there it is there's our floor package let's go in full screen here okay sure good enough and if i just pick any old song in here let's get the hybrid view going uh shrink you just a little bit a little scoot over here uh and one thing you can do that i haven't brought up i actually pulled this from uh max lennox um if you're trying to like clone between rigs and you're really working on your updates and you want to see what it looks like on one and the other instead of hiding and unhiding groups in ma3d um you can oh yeah i'll hit that thank you zach um you can just like position your second stage beside your first stage and you can see them both going at the same time and figure out oh well that that's supposed to look like that and what i've got right now looks like i should fix that um so um i'm just gonna pull up a couple songs and i've got some more questions to address here so oh so my positions are probably not going to be completely right so first thing i'm noticing is that everything appears to be aimed the wrong way um oh some of our stuff appears to be aiming the wrong way and that's some stuff we would flip probably in ma3d i'm not going to worry too much about it right now because again um yeah we're just demonstrating kind of how to get the information one of the other um flipping fixtures is not a huge deal but this would be about the time i would like check like a fan out position or a downstage center position and then go into my live patch and start figuring out what pants need to be inverted what tilts need to be inverted what pan offsets need to happen um and then um that that little presets to offsets thing if i see that we've got some some not thoroughly home fixtures in there then i might hit that as well but anyways so there's we can see we have some general information going on here there are a couple of cues here i'm sure that will show that our clone worked out right somewhere we've got to have some big old left to right effects in here somewhere right yeah so there we go there's something that kind of shows us that our left to right mapping worked out the way we wanted so if i zoom in on our layout view here as well we can see that like our left to right mapping is correct so we don't have any like weird symmetry with starting like halfway to stage right or something like all of our symmetry is preserved so i don't even have to do anything with that effect because if i go into that effect we will see that uh it is oh my god even the effect view is all screwed up man i must have done one stupid move before this thing started somewhere in here is a live effect that i may or may not be able to find my off off menu tell me where it is well not that's a bummer well oh well i would show you where it is but apparently i screwed that part up so my bad um let's see we had some questions but anyways that's just kind of showing that the symmetry is preserved so even though that effect has individual uh phases in it right now it works the way that we've mapped it because we made sure it was symmetrical before we dove too far into it apparently my ma3d view wasn't the cleanest because that center ain't the ain't the most centered that's an interesting one okay what's our questions here uh let's see so shofar only has current rig and original info yeah off off didn't work because it's inside of a queue rather than running like as a separate effect um i know there's a way to say i think there's a running effects window um okay so from six fixtures to eight fixtures so yeah let's hit that situation um so actually let me go ahead and save this as post cloned and let's go back and let's let's recreate that doing the mid-stage washes from a set of six let's say that's all we had so let's go into there load it and i'll go back to our 4k here okay so the question was brought up like how do we clone from six to eight um going going down in fixture count you start omitting fixtures um going up is it's where it can get a little bit to be more pain in the ass so let me delete this guy so we're gonna clone from our trusses of six we're gonna pretend the trusses of eight don't even exist so our source movers we're going to pick our mid-stage washes i'm gonna store those here and we're just going to say stage wash 6. okay well we can't clone straight into 8x4 and actually let me go ahead and do that and show you what will happen save show as 5a so i'm going to clone let me clone the rest of this over 1201 1003 1203 1005 1205 1007 1207. okay and let's back up again here because this is where we're going to start diverging okay so right now if i clone from a group of six to sets of eight especially since it's multiple rows of eight uh we probably have a good idea of how bad this is going to look but let's just go ahead and show it because what's more fun than just things up for for the hell of it all right so let's go take a look at that song again so we can i've definitely seen some flashes of color that already didn't look right um that might have just been a fixed color wheel i forgot to set to huh our washes oh oh i hit that wrong button i need something that's got some wash effects in it so let me uh also one thing i keep on hand that again is not readily showing right now as i keep fast forward and fast rewind buttons assigned at all times you can't tell me they're assigned i'm on the only user profile sign assign shortcuts nope we're gonna get there oh i've got shift stuck assign you here sign you here uh just so i can blast their cues really quick somewhere in here we're gonna have some wash effects that look like garbage but i actually have not yet hit them i'm hitting everything that's green washes right now well let's do this uh let me make an effect real quick that will show that since i clearly don't know where my own wash effect would be located okay so let me just make an effect with big old left to right selection do a dimmer effect cool wings of two and what if i just run that now it's close it's close to being right um do i have my copy effect line macro around don't extra bummer clone clone clone clone clone all right well you know what each individual line is looking close enough to a center out so that'll give us the idea i'll answer those questions in just a second so now let's do this i'm gonna assign that to a fader oh this must be the one that i screwed up uh there we go okay now i'm going to clone again 1009 1209 1009 12.25 and now when i run this effect and we look at our house fixtures oh you guys couldn't see my ma screen that entire time well that was stupid um anyways we can see that these guys are not really doing a center out wave so much as just kind of freaking out on their faces because all the instances cloned from the wrong thing so i'm going to switch this into uh an overwrite clone for these this situation and let's fix this mapping so we're cloning from six we're gonna maintain that um but these guys are gonna go away we're not gonna delete them because we still have some use for them for filtering some stuff uh so we want to get the center six out of these to clone one to one we're gonna start from there so let me i'll usually do like temp groups for this let me copy my view over here um another thing i took from ryan tanker i don't know where he got it from but um these screen copy buttons are freaking lifesavers like if you need to work with two views that generally live on the same screen you can just copy your screen over and then switch to a new screen which is just copy screen exit y so anyways so i want just the center six of these so i'm going to say all of this and actually let's just subtract let's go in highlight mode i'm going to say minus this guy minus this guy i'm going to store that here it's going to be mid stage wash and we're going to say 6 times 4 because we have four rows of six which we can verify in our fixture sheet we have six on instance one six on instance two and down the line and if i say display selected fixtures we get 24 which is the product of six times four so we know we're good let's go back into our layout and let's do the same thing for upstage so upstage subtract this subtract that and store as upstage wash 6 times 4. all right now those outer ones um in this case i've kind of already committed that i'm gonna be re duplicating the outside lights um instead of the inside ones had i wanted to duplicate the inside ones i would have subtracted the center lights from the destination fixtures instead of the outsides so now i'm going to say let's say mid-stage wash minus or the 8 times 4 minus the 6 times 4 which will leave us only our instance versions of the outsides we can check that in our fixture sheet we have 2.1s 2.2 so on down the line and that is our outside group so we'll say mid-stage wash i say like out and i'll say two times four and then same thing i'll say that full range minus the center part store here and us wash out two times four and now all i have to do is grab those outer two mid-stage washes again so we'll go into our movers and i will grab just these two put them in solo mode and mid-stage wash out two now that we've done that i can go ahead and delete these guys i'm gonna edit i actually usually will make a copy of the clone macro if i'm gonna do something unusual with it just so i don't forget those options for later and i'm gonna change all of uh actually yeah we're going to do it for everything so we're going to say overwrite and we're going to say effects are going to be overwrite and we're going to say sequences are going to be overwrite probably wasn't the fastest way i could have done this but it would have been faster to load an old show file but i just wanted to show it uh yeah so we changed all those to overwrite so all that that crap that we put in there before is not going to be maintained so now i'm going to go back in here and i'm going to use this macro 1000 actually let me zoom in on this just so you can see so there's our sixes to sixes twos to twos uh 1009 to 1209 1009 to 1225. all right and if i go ahead and switch to ma3d now we can see that those center six lights are now functioning the way we expected them to so i'm going to continue on with the the outer two so now that we have split those up i'll do 10 10 to 12 10 and then 10 10 to 12 26. all right and if we go back over here so it's not perfect right so we can see that that phase is perfectly in sync for those outside too and if this effect is super important um also i might must have screwed up that effect a little bit on that upstage truss but um if if the phase of this effect is super super important i would encourage having it in an update's cue list um but this is definitely better than having just have it split from like center out and have a weird symmetry this is at least uh symmetrical minus whatever i did on the effect on that upstage truss but let's let's ignore that let's look at the midstage truss uh because that is an issue with the source programming um but that tell that allows us to at least have it symmetrical at least have it you know work together so if there's if you've got like 400 effects within your show file like you don't have time to update all of them so it gives you something symmetrical looking into some questions here what do we got see if there's a global colors in a fixture can you see if there is a global colors and a fixture somewhere where's the original question on that oh god oh god there's so many comments oh man okay give me a second to catch up here um i assume that only ma3d was from the moment i have already noticed or rather i already missed um oh man this thing's skipping all over the place it's hard to hard to read it with every preset yes oh okay okay uh so someone is asking that is dan asking about saving uh so you can't i guess you could save the selective info it will store as uh global uh he's asking about that process for getting your global uh fixture or your preset information into your uh profile man i'm uh oh i've got coffee left not much but with something okay um so that that feature was actually something oops that's the that's the chat you guys can already see that um i've got like five screens open trying to keep track of everything here uh i am i am very newbie at streaming uh so let's talk about that that is our process for yeah i'll hit that and that'll go into the updates thing that i was talking about from the other show file uh so part of our auto create is that we can actually store preset references into our uh fixture profile and again this is for me this is super helpful in situations where like i'm running into uh a fixture at a festival next week that i'm encountering in a festival today uh so how do i how do i work with that so that it so i don't have to re-update all of those things because part of the problem like even though like cloning your fixture types does keep it cleaner the clone engine it makes some assumptions and sometimes they're not assumptions you want it to make but you can't turn it off for example open strobe it will always pick the last the highest possible dmx value for open strobe when it clones and a lot of fixture types have like four of them um so for one thing i one of my first steps is always go into your fixture profiles from the new fixtures in the in today's rig and turn on snap for every fixture type for per strobe i have never wanted to fade um i've never wanted to fade my strobe information personally i i can see an argument that would be helpful for strobing from like medium to fast i have literally never done it um if other people are that's fine that's not the way i'm i've been working um so i go turn snap on because of that issue because it will go from closed at zero and fade all the way to open at 100 and you will get the little strobe dance i'm sure any of us who have ever cloned more than two shows have have dealt with with the the nice smooth blackout and all of a sudden some fixtures start going into every possible strobe mode before they hit blackout um so actually i might as well just show that real quick so for all of these fixtures i would go in here um and if you don't know grab a fixture before you hit fixture types and it'll automatically uh hone in on that one hit edit and we'll find shutter and we'll turn on snap and then we'll go down to the next one and we'll go to edit we'll go to shutter we'll turn on snap i think i might have turned on stage on the previous one oops pretend i pretend i did it right because hey for all we know i did oh shutter snap and platinum beams shutter shutter shutter shutter okay so we have snap turned on so that we don't have to worry about the the fade of of strobe hell um yeah we'll save that um but regardless of that part like it can be a little bit more of a pain a certain stroke things like you'll pick a really nice range that you like for a certain strobe speed and it'll pick up that it's near the max end of it and it's just going to slam all your strobes there or some of your gobos maybe the rotates don't translate the way that you want them to by default so keeping that information persistent you could possibly psr this i feel like that would be a major pain in the ass because you would be psring all of the information from those presets which is why it would become a major pain so we store into the fixture profile three minutes later maybe we'll finally get to it autocrate you can say create preset reference so what this is going to do is basically good lord this show files been through some stuff um what this will do is it will take let me show you why don't i shut up and show you uh so you pick one fixture so basically while the i while the goal is to do this with um with global information you still have to pick a fixture for it to use because if some of that information is selective it will pick up whatever information's there basically if you only have selective information it will still merge it into here as global but you have to pick one it can't store you know five variations of the same preset right so we'll pick this one and i'm going to go with pretty much just my good lord i don't need any of that uh the the general global stuff i'll be updating so if i have any dimmer presets which are very rare um that's usually for blinders gobos are going to be global color beam which is generally our strobe information uh focus and control any lamp on lamp off reset stuff that's all going to be consistent on that fixture so i'm going to go ahead and say create reference and actually yeah let me go and say that so we're going to say merge and now and there's a if we want to get nerdy in the command line we can even check what this information is um but in our auto create presets if i scroll down to that spider you'll notice when i switch between the vl 4000 and the spyder this button becomes enabled on the spider because those preset references stored that preset information into the fixture profile so now i could go in and let's say i don't know let's take all those spiders just to see if we can demonstrate this working this is screen 2. let's grab all of our spiders and let's put them into strobe focus i don't know do we even have a strobe mode that works for these maybe i need to use a different fixture type let's say all vo4 thousands oh well not in highlight mode we sure don't that didn't work i know you guys can't see ma3d i'm trying to find something that's actually uh that the strobe cloned over worthwhile okay so here's we're gonna use the platinum beams then um so you guys can see that's uh that's what we're working with right now um so our beams are strobing great uh let's go create references for those platinum beams instead so auto create create preset references scroll down to our platinum beams and we're gonna if we have the same options enabled we are going to create reference merge all right so now we go look over here and create preset now has the option for from reference cool now i'm going to go and intentionally screw this up just so we can see that it's working so i'm going to say let's grab those platinum beams put them at full and put them into a fast sink and now let's just let's just go screw this up oh yeah now it's open great all right so now let's pretend like this is the default way that it cloned it right because i was actually having some issue with um some of this stuff um so we can see that fast sync is definitely not what we expect it to be if i go back into too many buttons to push our auto create we will go down to preset go to the platinum beams can i disable all these at once lord okay there's all those i'm going to switch to from reference and you can either add global preset or merge merge will look based on the naming and try to match any presets in here with a preset in the same pool by the same name um so as long as you're using the same preset names you're not renaming your presets day to day this will work great for festivals but you do have to be mindful don't rename your if you're going to use this feature so i'll say merge it'll say created however many global presets now if i go put them huh well i'm feeling a little silly because that didn't work i wonder if it's because there's selective info in here so if i go to the screen and sure enough there's selective info so i'm going to grab all these and i'm going to say remove i think that was the right number of yeah double tap on delete that's removed i'm going to say update yeah let's try that again so let's look at this let's go to our beams grab some beams put them at full and not in highlight if i hit that and then sync fast and now it's working i realize i was in the hybrid view so it might not have been super easy to see the screen there um but that is how it embeds it in there now getting this from one show file to another is the other major step of that um so two important things to keep in mind here one i mean it's it's really kind of one step or two steps and uh one thing to keep in mind so we're gonna export this um thing and i might call it like mode standard presets or something and i'll go ahead and export this guy and yeah i'll export it to my show drive okay let me pull out on my show drive um basically at this point all you would really need to do is import it into another show file um however for those not aware uh sometimes if if you want to import it into an older version let's say let's say you're running version 37 the festival was running three nine that day uh so you exported from three nine but your main show file is still in three seven uh to get that back if i go into my setup here we're looking for what profiles library library i can like an adult um good lord i didn't realize this was so loaded presets okay uh apparently i do that exact naming system plenty often uh platinum beam is somewhere in this list um i forget who makes that platinum being platinum platinum pop beam i actually don't see oh here's oh no crap let's just pick one of these because we don't need to kill a bunch of time on this all i was going to say is if you need to import into an older version go to that second line the xml file and you can change your version number here this one clearly was exported from three seven but like let's say i don't know got a show happening in version three zero because that's the kind of day we're having um you go in there you change that and it'll let you import it again um be careful with it every now and then you might run into some issues i personally have yet to run into issues doing this but again because i'm not usually exporting back like 11 versions but just be aware that's a thing you can do if you need to reverse export from really from anything that uses xml uh okay what other questions do we got yeah it was elation i know i'm dumb um [Music] zoom enable invert show the invert macro oh um questions on using the invert macro i don't need to save any of that um it's really just the keyword invert um i don't think there's a a keyboard way to access it if there is i hope it was not in the help menu and i've never found it um but yeah this this invert macro is literally just the word invert um the at sign before means it'll keep whatever else was in the command line already and the one after means it'll let you type something after um that's that's the whole macro there same thing with my if macro it's just the if keyword just because i don't like hitting the if key four times to get to it um that's it that's all that is um let me read through here real quick invert macro yes no snap covered i only have one fixture for layers from chat would you recommend to use as a base for cloning in terms of the oh what would i recommend to use um you know that's actually a pretty good question um realist really when it comes to washes you think about all of the things that you're going to run into on the road are basically the most common things you're going to run into um and try to account for a fixture that has all of those things because you can always subtract but you can't cross-clone to add right that's not a feature in ma2 um so saying cross clone is in like i can't clone let's say well i can't clone shutter into shutter 2 or dim into dim 2 god forbid um yeah uh in case this needs to be said like just never use a fixture with dim2 on it like just just there are so many other things that are better to do with your time like picking your your fingernails off with a pair of pliers than dealing with them too i like literally i can't express how much i hate dim2 so just like tweak your profile for an extra instance or something just don't use it let's see jesus christ i got derailed there okay so so one issue i was running into um with a prior tour was that the the programmer had set it up with um he he did his palettes with um basically doing like all of his shutter options so like zero through 100 in increments of 20 and then strobe duration zero to 100 and then strobe mode like it had like a random mode a sync mode versus fixtures where that's kind of all living within one channel and the pro problem with having the presets built separately with that was that any time so a shutter of 20 was always a shutter of 20 but if that was combined with a strobe mode a random and a strobe duration of i don't know zero to minimum that looks the same as when it's combined with a strobe mode of sync and strobe duration of 100 which would function as open shutter on a jdc uh when i clone that it's all just going to show up as strobe 20. so i started combining those presets so that like it this is really more getting into the idea of like how you build your presets um but i built it so that there was a preset that included all three of these parameters called uh let's say random strobe 20 right or uh sync strobe 20 so that when these two were absent this was still referencing a specific preset to that situation that i could update for strobe fixtures that only had that one attribute uh and so you can always boil down um combine combine parameters in a way that makes sense to what is what their specific purpose is um i understand the process of like keeping these separate because like if you're working in a strobe palette oftentimes what you're going to want to be doing is like they they could be wanting to go like i want this speed um but in random mode and i want this duration and i fully understand working that way when you're trying to like tweak and figure out what's going to look best in that moment however duh sorry just derail trying to read comments at the same time that just kind of causes problems when you're trying to update palettes later um so i always work with trying to keep my presets um in a way that's specific to what they're doing for example on gobo presets um first off i keep all wheels in all presets all of my rotates are in each of my rotate presets all of my gobo selections are in each of those selection presets if i'm using a gobo from wheel 2 gobo wheel 1 is also an open at the same time and stored into that preset because if i'm cloning from a fixture that only that has three gobo wheels into a fixture that only has one and i only put information in there from gobo wheel three you know how many fixtures have gobo wheel 3 not a lot um which makes you want to rip your damn hair out so you by combining them all into that preset you have put information from a different wheel in there even if that's not the wheel that you're focusing on which allows you when you clone down to a fixture that only has one gobo wheel you can substitute that with something uh and that preset will be referenced um to get back into the question of what i would suggest cloning from um i know there's a lot of the time like there's the philosophy of just cloned from something that's got like all the parameters um i don't fully disagree with that just make sure that if you're going to do something that has a lot of parameters that it's not going so overkill and your presets aren't so convoluted that it actually screws up your cloning one example is a a solar spot has that same kind of strobe structure where you have a strobe speed and i don't think it has duration but it does have a strobe mode you can switch between random or synced or pulse or whatever other options it has um totally fine to work from that but make sure that each of your strobe that you have your presets built in such a way like you know random strobe men random strobe medium random stroke fast uh sync medium sync fast kind of i mean i kind of keep it the way i've got it listed right here um rather than having that strobe mode channel split off because your cloning will be kind of worthless on that channel once you have split it that way a vl 3000 is great for number of gobo wheels if you want to be able to clone into something else that has three gobo wheels and have all three of them available um for spots that's a super handy one just for the sheer number of of gobo wheels that it uses i want to say a mac viper profile also has three um although i think only a it does not have rotation on the third one whereas a vl 3000 does um washes i just kind of pick any generic wash fixture unless i'm trying to maintain some pixel stuff again like this kind of gets back into what you're going to be working with um what what kind of situations you're going to clone into if you're going to be working with major like like a level double a level festivals where you're the smallest rig you're going to have is i don't know like 200 fixtures you can afford to have some pixel mapping information in your show file or not picks up pixely stuff happening on the faces of your lights because you have a lot more guarantee that you're going to use that on a tour where you're going between clubs that's just not going to be the case so there's no point in having that kind of information in there so cloning having a maxed out wash fixture with all of the instances isn't really going to do you any good in that situation um so it's kind of like i can't i hate to do a cop out of like it's just dependent on what you're doing but it's it's very much kind of that thing i would pick something that kind of goes just beyond the bounds of what you're expecting to use and then you can always dial it back in from there just you know also don't program crazy for something you will never get to use there's no point programming uh a set of matrix blinders into your clone source file if you're going to have one venue in a five month tour that has them i hope that like answered that question i kind of wasn't looking at the screen when i was saying it um let me take a look here and see what else we've had coming in the color priest okay it looks like that's been answered um let's see okay well let me go into like my update process on that first tour and uh that might be the end of i don't know if we're gonna have many more questions uh coming up um and yes for people asking oh this should be saved i don't know if it'll be this exact same url but this is pretty much gonna go live as a video you can re-watch as soon as we end the stream um which is made to two hours i didn't think i'd have that much hot air but here we are um what the hell was i doing oh it's going to open up that other file okay so this is the trevor all strand file let me go ahead and save i don't know i'm just going to put a b on this i don't know what i'm doing anymore load show let's get into that other tour rig yeah okay really the thing i wanted to show from this one um was just kind of the updates process this was a much larger rig to stand by that ain't right it's definitely the file we were just on [Music] yeah probably shouldn't have swapped those names last minute that was kind of dumb this clone and gobble presets will allow me to have my sequences work still have to fix the right value um i'm not sure if this is answering your question cedric but um essentially like what i was getting at with the gobo stuff is just as far as what you're storing into your um god brain fart trying to read things same time um as far as getting things in your sequence is just to include all of your gobo wheels uh in your gobo presets uh and i split it by like gobo selection are all in one and gobo rotates are all in one i don't i don't merge those two together um but just so that you can clone essentially you can clone from one gobo wheel to another because they're all uh being activated at the same time in a cute list um since you call since you put all those parameters into that sequence or into that queue into that preset and then you called that preset all of those gobo wheels were activated at the same time in that preset so you can change which wheel you want to use after you clone when you're updating your your gobo presets so you can pick a breakup from a different wheel than might have been on the source fixture um so cool cool um so all i wanted to show from this one really was just kind of the when i had a lot more fixtures to be updating uh i would be going through okay um and yeah that was the point of that was so that like because gobo wheel one might not oh yeah no like you're not gonna have the same slot from each one so like once you clone you're gonna go through and like update so you have a breakup it's just gonna pick slot one you wanna then edit that preset so you actually pick a breakup so it's something similar uh to what the original information was um anyways um as far as this was going basically i had a cue list set up for like festivals where there was just a lot of information to get through i mean you look at like some of these and there's a good chance i could have uh gotten some of these dialed down a lot more i'm seeing a lot of like different rotation presets coming up through here um basically the idea is all of my global stuff i would put that in one giant sq stack and then i would use group master so that i could basically blast through a cue list so that all of my rig is doing the same thing at the same time and i can just use my group masters to kind of bring up and bring down certain uh fixture types at once to see okay well it looks like these are all doing the same thing let's move on to the next cue and okay they're all doing the same thing and oh god okay like this fixture type is freaking out or this one is stuck in open be the most common thing so i can blast through all of my presets at once without having to worry about which fixtures i had selected um so like rather than like going into just to give some contrast here rather than going into my groups and saying like okay let me grab all my spots and let me check i didn't tell you to do that uh let me grab all my spots and like put them in open okay let me put them in this okay let me put them in that okay they're all good um but really i guess it's more of the issue like if i have that and the hybrids and my washes and whatever like sure some nitros grabbed at the same time and i'm testing through some colors and okay well oh the one of those isn't looking right oh now i've got to clear my selection and crap where'd that go and i've got to re-grab everything um that could very much just be a matter of my group organization sucks ass like that could actually be the main um that that could be like the actual issue with that um but like for me it was just easier to have it all set up in a cue list so i could just blast through it and update it and know that i had covered everything um going back to that view um and i would do that so like all my global presets and then i would put like um like i would put all of my specials in a cue list and i would even use this cue list um with the m a web remote so you can see that like i'm setting a variable here and that interacts with a whole bunch of stuff on the web remote page that i had set up um just so that i can quickly blast through any specific fixtures that use a given preset because there were a lot of presets that had more fixtures than actually got used so i would you know boil that down to only the fixtures that need updating and then keep that in a cue list so i could blast through and then if i'm doing it from a console i can also use these color coding macros so like if i select this guy i hit green no that's kind of supposed to uh oh there is q green oh there we go is it not working huh i can't see my colors yeah i can't see them anyways the thing works up somewhere along the line it's been so damn long since i've used this but i would color code the cues so that i could see okay these have been updated this one hasn't been updated yet a couple of these i need to come back to when xyz is out of the way on the stage um yeah i guess that's that's kind of the whole process for there um and then i would have a separate one for our video stuff any presets that were applicable to a video wall if we were using the house wall that day i would have to go through that and make sure all of the clips are adjusted correctly between my end and the media server to be sized appropriately for the wall because i definitely screwed that up a few times before i figured that figured out what was going on there um yeah and then i'd actually just keep some empty cue lists of just reminders for that i need to check um because i have a goldfish memory and especially after the fourth day in a row on like four hours of sleep oh let's see can you use the update button wait what oh that is that's not a question that is a response uh okay okay um well we might have uh derailed a bit um do we have any other like questions regarding update process i know i didn't like really get too deep into like the update uh once you've cloned it's really just like you go through your presets and you make sure that they they represent what they're supposed to be doing um i don't think there's really a whole lot of nitty gritty involved there uh that really the the the meat and potatoes of that one is how you built those presets in the first place um in this particular file uh an example i was going to give earlier wherever my gobo presets are kind of a mess for example i i added in these gobo snap presets so originally trevor had put in like he was snapping from one gobo to another and for our touring rig that was that was great it looked the way it was intended to when i was cloning the other rigs however whatever i would pick for those two gobos that would look right for them for the air for aerial purposes would have other gobos in between oftentimes so since that was for a specific effect of just snapping back and forth to whatever gobo was next to it i made a separate preset for that because the purpose of the preset wasn't the the aerial pattern it was creating the purpose was to have two gobos with a solid amount of throughput side by side um that i could just snap between so even though they some days may represent the same gobos as something done for aerial purposes on other days they may not and the purpose of snapping back and forth is the focus in that particular song for that effect um so it's there's more to i guess all that to say like there's a lot more to your presets than just like what it's doing but or rather which goby you have selected maybe but what the effect of that uh gobo is [Music] let's see i don't i can't think of anything else i think i'm kind of rambling um zach seems to have been doing a pretty solid job kind of responding to the comments which is why i don't think i see much that hasn't been answered uh so let's just kind of throw it out there any like last minute questions if there's anything that like i've just missed in the comments um like because i'm seeing zach respond so like if i've if i've missed anything uh let me know so i can go ahead and address that before we get off damn all right it has been brought to my attention that maybe i have spoken a little too much because um well this was just delivered to me so damn that's uh that was just mean but good that's strong goddamn that was super professional right the after show well i think i just started it with that one good lord my eyes are watering i wasn't ready for that cool cool cool well um i actually i had a bunch of other plots put in that folder that i was going to go through um i think we kind of covered really the backbones of it but feel free to dig through those because those are examples of some some real life stuff that i've actually like hit on the road just as a quick couple of things i did want to kind of cover i know i keep saying i'm going to end it um just like i there's not even anything like for the purposes of explaining stuff that i want to hit but this plot this was from um light source for tortuga last year for anybody who's like building um rigs for festivals i just want to point out like just from my perspective how much i appreciate a situation where everything is not only symmetrical but your fixture counts from trust to truss are the same i know that can limit some like creativity but the fact that i had six beams on each truss six spots on each truss six washes on each truss the amount of time it took for me to update my file especially updating positions good lord it was so much easier um with that kind of a setup um so i just kind of really want to bring this up like if you're hitting like a really big stage um like this is like kind of one of the ideal situations that you could run into um that's not to say that the more artistic stages are bad but they're definitely more difficult to work with and which can be a problem depending on your time i also love some of the more artistic ones as long as i can actually figure out how to do them it's one of those that like i only curse it when i don't feel like i'm actually smart enough to to figure out how to use it um so i guess that's really more of a me thing some days um but there's a couple other plots here um like give them give them some tries like just for for practicing cloning some stuff of your own um again this this was me touring country this was a this this rig was for a act that was playing bigger stages touring with a bigger stage um a lot of these smaller ones were actually this was from the same tour so it's kind of a mix in here um the tortuga one's definitely the biggest one i put in here the rest of it is uh definitely some smaller plots or some smaller stages i've worked with uh in comparison uh time in the us it is uh uh in central time 2 16. i've been blabbing my mouth for two and a half hours uh oh thanks bobby bobby was the uh first person to ever use one of my plugins we uh we bumped into each other hang out my very first year doing anything yeah see and that was why i wanted to do it at noon i knew it wasn't the best time here but i figured time zones i could hit that would it would kind of be ideal to start it here because like we're getting like 9 15 over in germany i might delay for a couple of hours next time around um i'm sorry to the guys in australia uh i i i can't i can't fit everybody um i don't mean to like put you guys on the short end of the stick um yeah let's see i think i think that's it so i'm going to um [Music] i'm going to shut the up and uh you guys feel free to dig through those files from from the dropbox and use them i hope this has actually been helpful i apologize for the amount of rambling this is the kind of that gets cut out of the videos when i edit them so anybody who sat through this whole thing uh appreciate you guys uh managing it um i know i'm a little bit long-winded my brain goes like every direction at once um which can be helpful maybe not the best for explaining things but um yeah so hope this has been helpful you guys i'm gonna shut up and cut the stream off and uh hope it helps we're gonna have like i've mentioned before elliott mountford and chris toms and jared paul rarick again i hope i got those names his name's in the right order uh on next week to go through their own processes and i can pretty much guarantee you they will be able to cover their methods in much fewer words and time than i have done um so don't let this discourage you from checking in on those um i'm probably the longest winded that we're gonna have for a while but check those out next week um hope this helps out let me know if there's anything you guys want to see improved change for the next time if it's just me talking less i'll try to figure out some ways to do that if there's any things as far as like things you see displayed access to links certain kinds of information you want available during the live stream uh please let me know i'm more than happy to try to accommodate that i want this to be as helpful to as many people as possible as it can be that's the whole point of it that's the whole point of bringing other people in because my way isn't the only way um it's ma you can skin a cat a hundred ways um if you're skinning your cats you should definitely get psychological help but that's not the neither here nor there um just you can do things a million different ways i think it's great to see how everybody does their things because what works for one person isn't gonna work for somebody else um so check out what other people are doing uh check out what christian jackson's doing check out what any of the guys we got coming out next week are doing uh there's so many great people on facebook that just probably don't have the time to explain some of their stuff a lot of the time but they kind of it's one of those things like everybody you meet generally knows something you don't that preset references thing i learned that for some from some random house guy that i thought didn't know where the damn power button was on the console um so like everybody has something to teach you uh if you are paying attention so definitely check out what other people are doing and let me know any improvements shutting up for real have a great day everybody [Music] yeah i'm sure

Channel: Giaffo Designs

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Id: 0e9rebZjnPQ

Length: 135min 24sec (8124 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020