MA2 Crash Course - Program a Show From Scratch

[Music] before we get started in this full length to our ma to crash course I want to state a couple of things upfront and let you guys kind of put this in perspective and I want to make sure that you know that learning MA 2 is not an overnight process it's not even something that you could learn in a week or a month or even a year it is a continual process where you need to kind of establish a repetitious way of learning as you are using the hardware and software and this video is pretty much designed to give you a foot in the door because not everybody can be lucky enough or fortunate enough to have access to one of these machines and they really are machines at the heart of it it is just a computer in a fancy case with some faders and a whole bunch of buttons and screens that look really complex on the surface but underneath it's really not that complex and I'm kind of hoping to illustrate that in this video and give you the resources that you need to kind of start learning on your own and I am titling this as a crash course because I know I've personally been in a situation where I've had to learn how to use this console pretty much overnight and you can kind of fake it till you make it in some regard but hopefully this video will give you a good jumping-off point and if you do not have time to watch the full two hours down below in the description there is a index or table of contents if you will with timestamps to show you where everything is so if you're stuck on one particular thing you can go check out down below and go directly to that point I also want to say thank you to all my supporters over on patreon they are the ones who support this content and make it happen so if you want to support as well head on over to the link also down below in a description anything is appreciated I'm going to presume you know at least a little bit about lighting and DMX and that you've kind of been tasked with the situation at hand of getting a show up and running on ma2 after it's been flown and all the lights are in the air plugged in and ready for signal I'll be simulating the lighting rig with a program called capture capture 2019 Symphony Edition it's what I use to previz and design all the shows that I design and you'll see that kind of pop in and out on the screen with different overlays on different sections of the console and please note that this video is in 4k 60 so if you do have a monitor make sure to go fullscreen make sure to check the little gear icon down in the corner make sure you're at the highest possible settings because there's a lot of detail that you might not be able to see if you're looking on a phone screen or something like that so without further ado let's head over the console and get into it all right and here we are we have our blank slate in this example video I'm using an MA to light but this will apply to any size of console so I'm using an MA to light because it's what I own and it's I would say probably the most common desk you will run across if you run into an ma - chances are it's probably going to be a light so first things first once you have run power to your desk and you've gotten it uncased we're going to flip the switch on in the back I've already done that and then hit our power button on the front and that's going to start beer start our boot up process so you'll see our channel page and fader page buttons blinking back and forth and at this point we can see that our software version is three point five point zero point six now the first three digits of that is the it's called the streaming version and the streaming version has to be the same across all of the things you have in the network that are ma to right so if you want to network two desks together or a desk in an NP you really any sort of hardware they need to be running the same streaming version so that's that first three digits so three point five point zero that's the streaming version so we're just about finished booting up here and we are presented with what in my opinion is a far scarier site than what you would see on any complex show file and that is a completely empty show file so we are kind of simulating the idea here that we've just been handed a paper patch sheet for a show where you've been called in to to be the programmer because someone called in sick and you raised your hand and said I know how to use ma so maybe you're back in catering on your lunch break watching this trying to figure out how to use this console it looks complex I know it looks complex but I'm going to distill this down into hopefully about an hour worth of material and if you don't have a whole hour to watch this there are little index notes down below I think that direction in the in the description so be sure to check that out if you don't have the full amount of time here so what we're looking at here is totally blank new initialized show file and I want to point out a couple of things before we get started and we dive right into it so we've got our two main screens up here in our commands screen the command screen is always referred to as screen number one the screen directly above that also called the programmer or encoder bar screen that's screen 2 and screen 3 over here and if we had a full-size the before screen would be screened for of there but yeah I'm not quite that rich I've just got the light today we'll also note that there's a couple of sections to these screens anywhere you see these like this white grid that's what's called the user-defined area of the screen you can see we've got a user-defined area down here on screen 1 we have a user-defined area on screen 2 and screen 3 of course so that is the section where we can kind of customize the user interface to be whatever we want and we can even make different views and we can switch between them so in this video we're going to create a programming view and we're also going to create a playback view below the actually let's start over here on screen number 2 we have a non user-defined section and this is kind of the the Masters and encoder bar section we don't see anything filled in quite here yet because we haven't passed any fixtures that have any preset types but when we do that this will be filled in with things like dimmer position gobo color all the different attributes you're used to working with with fixtures and I'm not going to dumb this down to like I don't even understand what DMX is level but if you're watching this I presume you understand DMX you understand patching and I'm going to kind of show you the MA way of getting a show up and running really fast or as fast as I can practically show you above our encoder section here we have a command line we have one here and then we also have one on-screen one they both do the same thing if you type if you type something in one it shows up in the other but the important thing I want to show you here is the command line feedback window we can open if we hit the yellow dot okay if we open this this shows a history of all of the commands that we have sent to the desk and and it's a really really good tool for learning how the desk kind of speaks right because it is using a command line language so you have just like any other language you have objects and verbs and syntax it's really just like speaking a very basic form of a new language if you were to learn a language so if we look over on our keypad section this is like our programmer this is like the hard keys for our programmer we have a couple of different groupings here we have like the keypad which is obviously just like a 10 key keypad with some modifiers we have a section here that are like actions or verbs this whole section right here is for for verbs and this whole section here is for objects objects that we can store into the AMAs filesystem and so the whole job of the programmer really is to store data into the file system of the MA and then make it easy to play back so I'm gonna walk you through that as well so again we have actions or verbs if you want to consider them that and then objects with the exception of go to go to is like the the one orphan from the rest of these so everything over here except for go-to is isn't is a an object right and then all the all these other buttons up here these are just to assist in programming okay alright we're getting through the basics here you'll also see that there is a grayed out channel in brackets you'll also notice that my channel button is illuminated even though I have nothing I've cleared out it's nothing that's just how the console booted up so this greyed out keyword is referred to as the the default keyword okay so this means that if you just start typing numbers without typing an object first it's just going to presume that you mean channel oh if you want to change this default keyword you can just hit an object and hit please and now our greyed out keyword is fixture which I'm going to use in this instance so okay we've kind of gone through the layout of how it looks like when you've got nothing going on here let's go ahead and start patching some lights again we're going to pretend that we just got handed this sheet of paper we have nothing else to go on except for the stage that we're looking at presume that the stage is already built and yeah let's start by patching some lights so I'm noticing here that we have a bunch of Altmann scoops for house lighting and they're all patched to the same address now I could go through and patch all of these it's like probably 30 or so fixtures but that seems like a waste of my time so I'm going to patch first by hitting setup and I'm going to take this screen and change it to screen 2 so it's a little easier to see we will go to patch and fix your schedule and we are prompted with this layer name pop out pop up excuse me I tend to label all of my layers and organize them by fixture type it's just easier for me to remember sometimes you can assign layers by location there's there's a whole bunch of theories on on how to do this but I will tell you in my experience the most common way you will see this done is by fixture type so I'm going to label this as house lights and I'm going to be prompted with selecting a fixture type for our house lights now these are all just one channel dimmers so dimmer is already in our show file and I'm going to rename this as house lights one now anytime you name a fixture in here and you end it with a number it's going to sequential II ad so if I were to add 36 of these or however many there are then it would fill in 1 through 36 however since they're all patched to the same universe and address I'm just going to patch one of them and I'm going to call this fixture ID 10 and then channel ID I'm not going to put anything on there we can see that our patches at f1 which is universe 6.1 that's the way capture does it so we can see here we've got our house lights layer and we have one fixture in there with fixture ID 10 as our house lights cool let's move on to the next layer and next up we have a couple of source for so I'm gonna go s for leak oh I know that's not really a correct way of saying it but let's just go let's go and do the same thing here leak Oh one quantity of we see here we have six and fixture ID one through six and I just have to put the first fixture ID in I'm going to delete channel ID I'll tell you why in a second here and we can see that our addresses are one two three four five and six on universe D so 4.1 is universe D and we can see our auto numbering for the fixtures has taken place as well as the auto naming next layer up I believe we've got alright we've got eight Vipers create a layer called Vipers and I'm gonna go into the library and search for manufacturer Martin Viper profile make sure we have 16-bit extended mode 34 Channel make sure that all matches up 34 Channel and we have eight of these a renamed and Viper one fixture ID starts at 101 and our addressing is split up a little bit here so I'm going to show you a trick if you have split addressing I can notice that because we've got universe B and universe C so if I don't put any patch in here it imports the fixtures it gives them a fixture ID but there's no patch okay keep in mind that you don't have to have any fixtures patched in order to program with the fixtures this is a really like useful powerful thing about ma when you import a fixture into this patch the the DMX patch is like the last thing that is considered when when you when it's like outputting the data when it's like crunching all the numbers in the backend so all of your data all your presets all of your programming is stored into fixture this fixture it doesn't even have to have a fixed your ID number just this line it is all the data is stored in there so we can see our first four fixtures are in universe B sequentially so I'm gonna highlight those by clicking and dragging with my finger hitting please and then typing in 2.1 and it's gonna fill in that whole range okay now I'm gonna do the same thing for the second segment here and we'll go 3.14 universe see and just double check just cross check make sure that your numbers match okay should be easy enough we've got a set of twelve point e's again we're going to go into the library we're gonna search for row B Point C and that's in mode 1 2014 mode boom so pointy one we've got 12 of them starting at fixture ID 2 0 1 again these are split up so I'm not gonna hit Pat I'm not gonna hit patch yet I'm just going to go and highlight in this case it's the first 6 and put the first start address in again just cross-check do a quick little check to make sure everything is accurate new layer quantum wash and we've got the extended mode which means that it has the different rings that we can control so there's like an outer ring and inner ring and then like a Center cluster that we can control with this and I'll show you how to how to deal with that in a minute I put I put some like little tricky things in this whole setup that we're going to go over and yeah I'll just I'll explain to that when I'll explain about that when we get there okay so we'll import extended mode 33 Channel and we have four of these I'm just gonna call this Q wash we have excuse me we have six of these they start at fixture number 301 and the universe is a 289 and a 1.2 89 okay here's an important thing I want to show you fixture IDs up until now we've only seen whole numbers I'll excuse me numbers without a decimal point but when we imported these quantum washes you see this decimal so it's 301 dot one that indicates that this is a multi instance fixture okay that means that it's like a compound fixture where you've got like a main moving light and then you've got like different segments of LED rings the way ma deals with it is by having different instances so 3 0 1.1 is the first instance of that first quantum wash I hope that makes sense and then it just kind of goes on from there you can have I'm actually not sure what the limit is on the number of instances in a fixture but you can have whole universes dedicated to these really big LED fixtures sometimes moving on we'll talk a little bit perving of programming that in a second we got our atomic layer Tomic 3004 channel import four of them 401 and three duck to 81 and then lastly our color forces dope paper flying all over the place we have eight color forces CF 72 is big boys this is color for whoops spell correctly color for 72 mode 312 channel or 12 instance RGB mode CF 72 one eight of them 501 and they start at 1.1 oh okay so we have a slight overlap here let's figure out why this is maybe I selected the wrong mode so we can go back here's another trick you can select an entire column of data by tapping the title column okay and then clicking with our screen encoder so we've got our four main encoders underneath the programming section and then each screen has its own dedicated encoder each main screen I should say the command screen doesn't but this this encoder screen will also work for items that are selected here so we can click go to color force and go to our 36 channel mode 3 so I had the wrong mode selected and we can go in here and do our patch again this time it should work perfectly well sorry about that so across check again 253 is our last address sweet so we have not saved anything to our show file yet all these edits have been done without saving and when we hit exit we get prompted with a warning screen and you pretty much always just say yes to this and now we can see that our encoder bar has filled up with all of our preset types and if we hit setup and go to patch and fix your schedule all of our fixtures are patched sweet and at this point I'm going to save my show file I'm going to save as ma to crash course 101 and I've saved that to our internal drive if I had a flash drive connected here it would pop up under here right next to templates and now that our fixtures are past we need to output DMX to what we're controlling now right now we're not in a session we can see that because we have a a red broken heart very sad I know however when we're not in a session we can still output DMX if our station has dmx outputs like on the back okay and in this case the ma2 light has six inherent outputs and there's an input that you can flip around to be an output but for the for the sake of simplicity we have six dmx outputs here and we can see those six outputs if we go into setup and network configuration under our consoles tab since we have console connected we can see this line is our console and it's shown in light green here indicating that it's ours and it here we can change what those ports on the back do so if I did want to change that that seventh port on the back which is the XLR in port I can just click on the XLR in and assign it as an out and then say that okay I want it to output universe 200 okay and we can do that these are all assignable all of these all these cells within the network configuration page so we can output DMX through those ports but in this instance and in a lot of instances you'll be using or protocols and in order to output like either artnet or scanning ACN or path port a net I think that's what it's called what's it called Network protocols at path port if you want to out port output over any of these we need to create a session first and a session can just be one console you don't have to have anything else in your session but in order to output through that Ethernet port on the back and out port output to like nodes or any other kind of output device you need to create a session and we'll do that by going again set up ma network control and we can see we have no sessions not connected no session ID but we have two stations we've got this computer and then my laptop over there that's running the capture visualization so we can create a session by you can just create a session name be like okay this is MA crash course and session ID would be one I think you can have up to three sessions on a network don't quote me on that I'll have to watch one of will Murphy's AC T videos on that we can see our station IP and the host name and station priority don't worry too much about that right now we just want to create a session and it's created just like that and now we can see up in the tab here we are the master in the session that is important because only the master in the session can output those Network protocols if you're connected with ma net any station can output any of the universes on the MA net but only the master will output those protocols like artnet or scanning ACN out of the back of the console so we can see here we've got our console connected see if we've also connected our on pc i want to invite actually i'm going to go over to over to my PC and add it to the session here so now we have two stations in our MA network and we can see here we've got this console and we've got the computer over there running capture to visualize this we can also see here that our link speed is fast that means everything within that session is running on gigabit speeds you can see that link speed 1000 there's nothing bad about using a hundred Meg connection unless you're using like a really complex show file and doing a lot of data back and forth then it can get a little bit sluggish but gigabit on everything is pretty cheap to do right now and you should be running gigabit regardless anyways now that we have master we have a little blue heart and you'll see that on the console and then on the on PC that I'm recording the screens with you will see a green heart that means that it's connected not master though so from here we can go back into setup network protocols and from here we can turn on our net output you can see each line here is a different section of artnet you can pretty much pretty much count on the fact that this is always going to work anytime you're having any sort of artnet connection issues you should really be troubleshooting on the node side of things because if your IP and your subnet is set correctly on the desk and you're out net art net output is active and you've got this green network protocols thing going on then 99.9 percent of the time any sort of artnet problems are not on the console side so we've got our fixtures patched and we're outputting DMX whether it's through the ports on the back of the console or using an Ethernet protocol what do we what do we do now if you've patched everything correctly and all of your settings for the output are correct all lights are plugged in you should see them home into their what's call the default position and the default position is the values that all of the lights will go to it's what the it's the value that the desk will send when there are no playbacks running the DMX tester is empty and you have nothing in the programmer so if everything is off on the desk there's nothing in the programmer and the DMX tester is off or released I guess is a better way to put it you have no like weird artnet merging going on that is the value that the lights will go to so with that said let's start building our programming view and we can do this by starting with our command screen my favorite thing that I want to usually put here is a smart window so if I tap in the upper left hand corner that'll populate a create basic window dialog and from here I can go to other and each one of these tabs has different types of windows and you'll get used to where everything is in due time but right now if you're a brand-new programmer the smart window is going to be your best friend your second best friend is going to be a command-line feedback window so once we've done our smart window I'm going to create a command line feedback window so we will go to and the reason why I'm tapping here is because if I were to tap in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and do command line feedback it's going to take up the whole screen and then I would have to resize it and move it down and do all that extra work when I could just say okay I know that I want it to occupy like this section of the screen so I'm going to tap in the upper left-hand corner of where I want it and do command line this is important because you don't want to always be clicking the yellow ball and opening up the screen to see what the desk is thinking and doing and this will help you learn again how everything interacts with one another next okay so the next order of importance is going to be some sort of sheet so I would say you want to use a fixture seat fixture sheet and I'll drag that up here resize it and we can change it to programmer only and that'll show you the values that you're actually putting into your lights in the programmer before you're storing them and then let's think here what do I want to do in maybe we'll just do a clock something like that because we know you're up against the clock at this point in your life and everybody loves clocks in MA that's just how it is now on our screen to here I'm going to start by putting in some presets here some preset pool items so we'll go to presets and I'm going to go to beam and I'm going to make a couple of different windows here I'm making them horizontally some people do vertically it's just it really comes down to your personal choice whoops and then just resizing as we go here then we'll do a couple positions do like an all presets and then I'll go over to pools and we will create a groups window so now I kind of have a basic layout to begin programming so I'm gonna hit store I'm gonna hit View button 1.1 and I'm gonna label this as programming so now even if I were to clear out our screens either accidentally or on purpose which you can clear the screens by holding down this is called colloquial colloquially it is called the nipple button but I believe it's also called the like dialog button something like that anyways if you hold this down and hit clear all screens it'll reset your screens but if you call our View button ah this is a great example to show you where I made a small mistake when I stored this view I only stored it as this screen but I meant to store it as all three screens we can use the oops key to go back to where we stored to the moment before we store it and now I can go and do this again and select ok I want screens 1 2 & 3 to be stored in this view button and I'll name it programming so now if I do that again clear all screens and I hit programming it's gonna populate our screens with that view is stored ok great but ok how do I start like manipulating fixtures this is all just a bunch of layout stuff so far right well let's go back into our setup menu and go to a wonderful window called Auto create or a page called auto-create so within here we can create automatically groups based off of there like index number so we can see here we can choose fixture type or we can choose layer we can choose yeah either layer or fixture type so I'm going to go to choose layer and I'm gonna just highlight all of our layers I'm gonna hit create all okay created seven groups but where are they well they're all in that first open slot in that group window we created so now I don't know if you can see that on our pullback here at my 3d mouse our house lights we can highlight them check our leak goes okay they highlight appropriately our Viper's hey they're on to point ease cool the washes i can't quite see them so let's see if I can tilt them towards us okay yeah I can see those cool and I did that by just tapping on the group and we can see in our programming or excuse me our program only fixture sheet we can see they're all selected in there in like bold yellow and then I can select position and just tilt them towards us just to verify okay they're working test our Atomics okay they all flash our color forces they all come on wonderful okay we're off to a great start let's see what else we can auto create because that was pretty useful let's Auto create some worlds gonna highlight here and I'm going to start at world 2 because world one is the default world it's like the the world bit encompasses everything and don't worry too much about what a world right now is just think of it as a restriction to what you can access so if I were to go into world 2 and world two only has the house lights in it then as long as I'm in world 2 I can't modify I can't do anything with the data of anything outside of world 2 so it's a it's a really useful tool for programming and I'll show you why even at like the base level of learning MA you should be learning you should be using worlds so create all of our worlds created seven worlds now here's the fun part let's create some additional presets I'm going to go to all of our layers are all of our fixture types that have color as a preset type I can do this by either highlighting full sections or holding down control on our built-in keyboard and highlighting just the things that I want to have color presets and let's see do amount saturation we just want one hues we'll sort by hue and then I will go add global mix color ah but I messed up because I want to do merge global mix color so create additional presets let's go merge global mix color so if you hit add it makes individual presets for each individual type but if you go merge it'll merge them all into one preset type let's do one more thing here before we jump out of the auto create page let's go to our s4 LICO and our channel pages and let's make sure all of our source for lis COEs are highlighted and start at page one start at fader one and we'll just create six channels of channel faders let me show you what that is real quick if I exit out of auto-create we can see we've got all of our color presets here global color presets I'll explain what Global means in a minute and we don't see anything on our faders here we just created six channel faders but we don't see them we only see them if we switch over to channel fader mode by hitting either up or down on our channel page minus or plus okay you can also do this by just typing in let's see if I were to like go back to a fader page by clicking fader page if I were just to type channel page one that brings us back to our channel faders now what is it what is chant what does the channel fader versus a regular fader well this is a way of programming the channel faders are a way of setting values to the lights this is very common in like what do I want to say corporate events or things where you want to be doing like fine tuning on multiple lights at once and it's easier than like selecting on a layout view and then like rolling the dimmer wheel you can just instead grab different lights and make little adjustments to the look of the stage overall and you can see those red numbers with the red background are corresponding with our dimmer attribute levels here so all these little changes easy that you can make these are all saved in the programmer and waiting for you to store them to an executor ok so that's one way of adjusting values is assigning channels are assigning fixtures to channel faders and then you can make all of your adjustments with your hands on the faders here this is really useful for like theater and corporate events like I mentioned TV anything video related if you're recording anything then this is going to be your best friend for programming let's clear that out and we clear that out those values go back to zero they go back to their default values because nothing is being played back right now I will jump back over to our fader pages for now I'm not really gonna use that channel page thing but I wanted to show you that that's one way that you can change values to store later okay let's move on and start programming a little bit here so I'm gonna go through this relatively quickly in a way that I would do it if I was actually in a time crunch for things right now so I'm going to first go through and make sure that all of our lights are in the correct position and correct orientation okay so I can do this by selecting a fixture and highlighting through we can see okay everything is seeming to go from stage right to stage left that makes sense let's do that with our Vipers 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 cool everything is in order pointees 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 okay all 12 of those are in order wonderful now we get to our quantum washes let's just tilt them towards us again because that was a little easier and if we want to get really sneaky about this let's store this position where they're tilted down as our default preset a default preset will override or it basically rewrites the default values on a per fixture base basis so the default values I was talking about before those those can be kind of overwritten by creating a default preset so I've put a position into the programmer highlight does not count as like adding values it's just a temporary output of highlight values which are assigned in the a fixture type window so if I go back over here go to fixture types edit our quantum you can see there's a hot there's a column in here called highlight and highlight will temporarily output those values instead of what it would be outputting normally it's basically overrides everything even group masters found that one out interestingly enough it overrides everything overrides the grand master it's pretty sure no it does not override the grand master but it does override group masters strangely enough so yeah in here you can edit all of your defaults but you can also do this easily by creating a default preset so I'm also going to zoom in go to there and then make our default preset straight out like that so I just stored a preset by adjusting values in the programmer hitting store and then clicking on icon or excuse me clicking on I don't know why I called an icon it is a pool item and it is a preset okay so a pool item a preset can be a pool item there are all sorts of pool items right so everything that you see with this like tile or arrangement those are all pool items and presets are a type of pool item this happens to be an all preset which means I can store any attribute to it if I were to just store that to my position preset then it wouldn't store the the zoom value that I added in there I wanted to store the zoom value in there and the preset or and the position so I stored it as an all preset but our lights are still facing here the values haven't gone anywhere as far as our output is concerned because we still have them in the programmer they haven't been removed from the programmer yet it's not like it got sucked into the preset they exist in both places right now but you can see our little position red dot and our red values over in our programming sheet are no longer a red background so only things with a red background will get stored so if I were to now change the color let's say and put the dimmer in we have the dimmer and color with red backgrounds but our focus in our position don't have red backgrounds so if I were then to store this as if I were to then store this as a fader and then turn it on you can see we have the lights pointing straight up and in blue and on so if I hit a sign I click on the preset that I want to make an all / that I want to make a default preset and hit enter I can then change what's called the special mode I'm gonna change this to default but I haven't it hasn't done anything yet it's assigned as a default preset but it will not write those preset or it will not write those default values to the fixtures in the patch until I double click or call it so anytime you're anytime you click on an item it selects the fixtures in that item first it's called self fix you see it in the command line feedback here if I clear out again and I just tap the icon once it says self fix for select fixture preset 0.1 so the MA has called in to the programmer all of the fixtures that are in preset one now it will not write those values or call those values until I tap it again and now if I exit out we have new default values so I'm just gonna call as default preset home and now that fader that we wrote earlier even though it only has dimmer and color information in it since our preset for the default the new defaults was called that's our new default are you with me so far I hope all of this is is making a little bit of sense let's move on to instances for a second the reason why I want to talk the reason why I want to talk about instances is because it's maybe the most confusing part to new programmers if I grab all of my quantum washes again we can see that our sheet here is showing a whole lot more than just the six fixtures that we patched and that's because each fixture each of those quantum washes has five fixtures embedded within it okay so let's talk a little bit about that and I'm going to use a fun tool and I have macros for this in my main show but I'm going to show you how to do this manually first since we imported every auto created these groups they're imported in like indexed order which is the first fixture and all of its instances the second fixture and all of its instances so on and so forth and if you import by fixture if you store by fixture type you can go into ma tricks and type in an inter leave of the number of instances you have if you can't remember you can always go back into the setup window go to patch only fixture types we can see here our quantum wash has five instances okay you could also take a look at your handy dandy fixture sheet that we've created over here and you can see okay 301 okay it stops at 301 point five and then restarts at 302 point one so that means we've got five instances so I'm going to type in an answer leave five I'm just gonna hit next and now we can see in our fixture sheet only the first instances the first instance of every five instances is now selected okay so I'm gonna create a new group right below and I'm gonna continue making groups by hitting next and store until we get to that fifth one now I can call this first instance since we have all of our first instance selects selects here actually let me show you another way to do this because that's that's the way you can do it via a matrix but if you want to select a certain instance from an entire group say I want to select only instance one boom I select group five which selects all the instances of our quantum washes now if I type in and this is like a little bit more of an advanced feature but I think you'll really like this I type in if fixture I spell fixture correctly geez fixture and then I use an asterisk right shift eight gives us an asterisk which serves as a wildcard so think of an asterisk as telling the ma this asterisk can be any number or it can be any letter it's any it's any character in the whole system dot remember dot determines which instance we're talking about dot one okay isn't that cool I just said if fixture wildcard dot one and it selects a restricts our selection to only instance one of all of those fixtures in that group which is the same it's the same thing as doing the a matrix but if you're ever in a more complex situation that can be really helpful so now I'm just going to go through and rename these groups queue wash mein RGB 1 RGB to RGB 3 and then Ora because that's the layout of the channel or that's the layout of the instances so I've just created smaller groups from our main quantum group and just makes things a lot easier ok since I made this one little sequence just as kind of a demo sequence I'll show you something cool about this if I delete the sequence the output stops and there's no more fader where it was but I've only deleted the executor the physical thing of the physical handle that I'm using to control that sequence if I wanted to reassign that sequence we could just go into the sequence pool and assign it from the sequence pool so I'm going to encoder button or whatever you want to call it and I'm going to create a sequences pool so again basic window click here sequence hey there's our sequence that we stored earlier this brings up an awesome topic about how the MA organizes your data in the background even though you're not really even thinking about it even if I were to just say ok I'm gonna grab all my vipers at full store store to q1 ok I've stored the fader but I've also populated a sequence automatically in the sequence pool so it's saving me a step by storing directly to a fader it will store also that sequence as a new sequence in the first available sequence ok and again if I were to delete that it's no longer on our faders here but it's still in our sequence pool not labeled as anything so I'm going to label sequence two you can do this completely through the command line you don't have to touch anything on the screen I'll show you if I do a sign a sign that gives us the label keyword and then I just type sequence two please it's gonna give me a pop-up says okay what do you want a named sequence to I'm just going to name it Viper dim okay cool now what if I want to have that sequence controllable through an executor because I got nothing on the executors right now okay let's do it through the command line again assign sequence two and I think I can do this without saying at executors 1.1 cool so now I've assigned that sequence and its contents to an executor pretty sweet I can do the same thing by clicking assign clicking a sequence and then tapping a key so now we've got our Vipers and our quantum washes and the values that are stored in they're being controlled from physical executors so all the buttons are called executors the faders have three buttons associated with them so this first fader has one two three buttons this whole row below here they're just buttons they can only do one action at a time so I'm gonna sign the second one as or or sorry quantum wash queue wash them but if you remember in this queue wash we had stored let's do fix your sort if you recall we stored a value of blue of some sort speaking of which let's go through and rename these instead of their hue values red orange yellow lime green this is the more tedious part so you see cyan blue indigo violet magenta pink okay these are like 13 basic colors that are auto-created in MA so we stored blue 2 here to this Q quantum wash sequence right maybe I kind of changed my mind I'm like okay I don't really it doesn't make sense for me to put blue in where the dimmer fader is okay I want to do that separately maybe later some other way really easy to get rid of it so I can just select quantum wash again I can go to color and I can just tap on the preset type again remember our red background means that those are now active values and I'm going to hold down store hit remove and now the store mode since it's changed to remove it's going to take any active values and if they existed previously in whatever button I press now because we're we're in store mode whatever I press next is going to store 2 there but I'm kind of doing the reverse of storing I'm removing right because I've changed the remove the the mode from overwrite or merged whatever to remove so if I click here ok and I clear out we no longer have dimmer or we no longer have color associated or stored into this sequence so now we've got dimmer only here now you notice we got a big fader moving in addition to our fader number one now why is that you may notice that that one fader has something different about it than all the other faders and that it has a green title bar okay that is because it is what is called the selected executor you can select multiple executors but there's only one like first selected executors and that first selected executor is controlled by what's called these default Go buttons is like big go big go - and big pause there's also a small go - a small pause and a small go plus these are different buttons these are not the same in any way these are actions that can be applied to any other like pool object but these the big ones will only ever apply to the selected executors now right now I only have one selected executor but if I were to hold down select tap one and two and hit go on both of them they both have a blue background now which means that they are on okay now you see when I fade up and then fade down the blue background changes the reason for that is these faders are assigned as auto start and auto stop so if I hit a sign click an executor we have a window that pops up for all of our options for just that one executors which is pretty crazy to think about and these options change the way it interacts with the rest of the show file so I was saying that auto start an auto stop or enabled so if I turn those off for both of these now you'll notice we have no more output our faders are moving but the lights aren't coming on they're not dimming up and the reason is there are two different distinct actions that need to happen for dimmers to react in a in a in an executor the first of the first of those things is that you need to have a level so right now they're at zero so even if they were turned on the level is still at zero but if I bring them up you'll notice that we have little indicators where the faders are assigned to says LTP value of 36 on each of these at 36% are the reason our lights aren't on is because the sequence isn't on on executors the value the level is set but the actual sequence itself is not on so I can do that hitting on and clicking on an executor we can change that assignment to kind of do that on our behalf now there are reasons why you would want auto start an auto stop on four different situations but for now you're probably gonna want auto stop an auto start on I'm just informing you that that's how that happens why that might be useful but we've got a few other things that we can do with these two faders that we've stored now okay we could change the buttons so that instead of acting as a go you can see that they're assigned as go on button one we could change the assignment by going to function clicking on our like you know this is a virtual Arrangements your fader in the middle and then our buttons 1 2 & 3 we change button 3 to flash change the function of button 1 - I like top top brings you to the top of a cue list so if you have multiple cues stored in that sequence if you hit top it'll always just go to the first cue and then go as button - so go we'll go forward with fade times through different cues right so for example right now we've just been working with one cue and now we have a flash button assigned to button one I'm just going to do the same real quickly to this guy and I'm also going to save this as a sequence default assignment so now any other sequences I star will have that same fader and button arrangement so let's go back to just selecting our one executor now we just have Viper dim selected what if I wanted to have it so that fader or a cue one controlled all of the intensity of all of the Vipers and I wanted like a second cue where only the back ones came on and then a third cue where only the front ones came on and I could go between those cues okay well let's figure out how to do that now I could start typing in the numbers of all of these all these different let me just say get a little bit closer 3d space Mouse 3d connection space Mouse for the win okay so we're a little closer to the stage what if I want to like easily grab say the the first four Vipers are the middle two vipers okay right now it's not really that convenient because all we have is full groups okay we just have full groups of fixtures and we have no real like granular way of selecting it this is where the most important feature of any like any programming comes into play and that is layout views love layout views I'm gonna store this as just a solo view as sheets per sheet and then I'm going to do a nipple button clear screen just this screen and I'm going to go to other create a layout view and I'm going to shrink it by just one one like J bracket or L if you're looking from that direction and I'm going to go into this column create a groups pool I'm going to go down here and create a world's pool I haven't forgotten about worlds yet you thought I forgot okay not quite yet and I'm gonna store this view as a layout view so we've got our sheet view our layout view and I'm actually gonna change this I'm gonna change this group pool to a layout pool and if you ever make any changes like that remember if you are to click on this view it's gonna go back to group okay so I'm just gonna go back one action and I'm gonna store that view again so now I can toggle back and forth between sheet and layout view and I am going to now create a 2d representation of our 3d stage because remember we don't really we're just walking into this right we don't have any like paperwork or plots or 3d or anything to really help us but we do have all of our fixtures stored into groups I can dump those into a layout view and arrange them in a layout view in a way that makes it easy to select everything so I'm going to select all the things I want in a top-down view so I've eaten my aliquots Viper's pointees quantum washes Atomics @ CF 72 s i'm gonna store those to layout I'm just gonna call this top I'll call it top 2d make it easy to understand and now this is the fun part I'm going to do set up and set up will automatically change my encoder view to something a little bit different it's going to change it to allow us to edit the properties of the layout view so I've got all my lights selected I want to arrange them by camera and then we're going to do top view 2d boom now I'm going to unclick set up zoom to fit all of our fixtures are now stored at like the zero zero zero XYZ point in the 3d like stage view because when we imported them and we made layers for them it was automatically assigned an XYZ value of zero zero zero if we had a stage view or a capture file that was exported with 3d positions like I have in other video you can click in the corner up there then we could automate this process a little easier but since we don't have that and we're going on well over an hour and 15 minutes now of this video I'm just going to show you this way of doing it so we have all of our fixtures kind of laying over top of each other in this 2d plane from the top and from looking at the stage I could say okay well I know that our Viper's exists in two trusses so let's start by building a layout for the first four Viper's so we got one two three four okay so let's just move those by clicking set up going to element properties let's just move them up and I'm just going to arrange them loosely where they are so there's one oops let's go back I'm going to undo that I'm going to select all vipers move all of them up and then I'm going to select fixture 101 through 104 try that again fixture 101 through 104 now we can move that to our upstage truss and I'm going to arrange them in a line a line that is you know it's pretty close to what I see on stage hit apply now we'll go fixture 105 through 108 element properties arranged by line close enough we don't have to be like scientific about this we've got our pointees do the same thing element properties let's move it up a little bit and then we can see we've got six fixtures on each truss and I know they're 201 through 206 from our patch that we got earlier I'm gonna move them all up onto the upstage cord of our invisible truss on our 2d layout view here I'll do a range by line and apply again you don't have to be perfect about this I'll show you why in a second fixture 107 through 112 whoops 207 through 112 through 212 fun times go onto this truss arrange by line and apply I was pretty close now here's a cool thing if I grab all these fixtures even though they're spaced oddly and I just hit a range by line it'll automatically space them lion apply it'll automatically space them I love that's like one of my favorite little tricks is the align or the arranged by line trick to line up things amazing okay next we have our color force 72s in the back now I know these are grouped by blocks of 12 so I'm gonna first move them up stage and then I'm going to go to Ma Trix blocks of 12 move so that first one I know is over there next one's gonna be right next to it third one just confirming on the screen that we have the right positions Oh oh my goodness guys what has happened look at our 3d versus our 2d the last two are backwards Oh oh man what a mistake who could have possibly made this mistake okay I actually did this on purpose and I'm gonna show you why so if I were to next through here we can't I can't really see let me see if I can get my space mouse in here a little come on okay 3d space Mouse is not too happy right now anyways if I am nesting through I've purposefully made it so that the last two are flip-flopped in here so in our imaginary stage last two color forces got flipped ok 507 and 508 in reality on our stage someone put them backwards let's say that okay we don't have any more people to help us go change the addresses on the fixtures or physically swap the units we can do this on the console side relatively easy so we need to swap 507 and 508 so we'll go back into the patch we can go into patch live CF 72 layer and I'm just going to highlight the last two starting from the bottom and I'm going to type in the address of the first one so one dot two one seven we're going to get an error patch collision error but hit OK and now the addresses of those two bars are swapped so now look I hit select highlight and I next through they now go and order properly sweet okay so we got those color forces laid out now here is an interesting one back to our instances on our quantum washes we know there's five instances so I'm going to make sure I select all of them move them up into position along the upstage edge of our deck and I'm going to again arrange by first going to MA tricks and doing blocks of five and then manually spacing them evenly long upstage just like that again precision isn't like super critical on this but if you want to go back and make a few adjustments there you go easy peasy what else do we have left we've got our source for leak OHS I know they're not called source for leak o's actually but it's fun to trigger people first one is on far stage right let's pop him here just kind of continue filling in the gaps and then lastly we have our Atomics and they're kind of hard to see with the default value so I'm gonna go in and switch to our beam preset type click on strobe duration go max duration shutter Mac strobe and it looks like that might be a default value that I can change okay so now we can see if i zoom out here use our grand master okay well we only have three visible this is another another thing I've formulated to kind of show you guys how you can troubleshoot some issues like this so first I'm going to lay them out how they should be on our plot so it should be 401 402 403 404 we can use our line arrangement to do that apply so let's highlight okay we've got our first one that's reacting correctly according to our layout number two is not coming on 402 is not coming on n three is sting and number three is coming on and four is coming on so our address is wrong on 402 but our trust is already flown in the air and Atomics use dip switches right so how could we possibly figure out what the address is set to let's say we can't get up there and change it well I'm gonna use a awesome tool right after I save my show file and turn on autosave for 15 minutes we've gone this whole time without saving big no no you can also command-line save by saying save save show I'll just save sí yeah sí anyways how can we figure out what address that atomic is set to well we know for a fact that the first channel if it's set well in either mode for mode for channel or mode one channel that the first channel is going to send a shutter value 200 okay how can we send raw DMX values without patching a fixture we can do that by going into the DMX tester which you get to by hitting channel Channel and it pops up here we know for a fact that it's in line with those other fixtures on that universe which is universe number three so we can go to universe 3 and we can send a test output signal I'm going to send a test output of 255 to address 1 now if we start scrolling through that universe we will see different values pop up okay so if I just continue scrolling through here you can see okay there's our pointees there one by one coming on oh wait so we got strobes coming on so I see that number one 401 flashed and it's at address 281 okay that means that four addresses later our next fixture should come on four zero two so two three four but it doesn't come on it should be coming on at address 285 will continue okay there's our third one and our fourth one hmm so obviously we know our address isn't set correctly but maybe we can figure out what the address of that atomic is so just keep on scrolling and we're just waiting to see some sort of flash from that atomic on the screen or in real life so it's keep on scrolling I'm not seeing any flashing yet we're getting towards the end of the universe losing hope losing hope oh whoa what was that you see that oh my goodness so when we get to address 420 flashes okay so what if we change our address to 420 so we'll release everything from the DMX tester okay we're we're good on that we'll go back into our atomic addresses and we'll say okay that's actually universe three dot a dress 420 all right let's see if that worked can we select it and highlight it ie look at that so our paperwork was wrong and I I I set that up does another another trick that I just wanted to show you if you run into an issue like that you can you can determine the actual address of fixtures using the DMX tester do all sorts of other fun stuff okay now that we have a 2d top layout view let's talk a little bit about those worlds I was so adamant about we've got our worlds store down here from our Auto create earlier and we can use this as a access filter what do I mean by access filter it restricts what we can modify with grammar doesn't change your playback at all so even though I'm in viper world I can still play back the quantum wash executors right and the full world world number one you can't delete it you can't do anything with it really it just exists as like a default right you can't modify it but you can store other worlds and one important thing to remember is if you enter a world and you like you know can make some adjustments say okay these lights need to go this position and you store that whatever you clear out if you then start programming again you won't be able to access anything until you go back into world one you won't be able to access anything outside of that just an important thing to remember okay well we're getting pretty long in this video sorry about that again appreciate you watching and if you're enjoying the video like favorite share subscribe check me out on patreon I've got a lot of videos not quite like this this is a little more long format but hope it's been useful and enjoyable anyways onto the rest of the video let's talk a little bit about those quantum washes because if I were to enter quantum wash world I still have all of those instances mixed in with it okay maybe I want to be a little more restrictive maybe I want to just change store a world that is just the quantum wash main instance world which has just the pan in the tilt and the dimmer right and then I want another world that is just the RGB values okay and then call that Q wash RGB okay now I can turn up the dimmer value and program using presets all right it's a lot easier [Music] and then let's go one step further I actually want to get rid of the aura the background aura from the from the layout that I start so I'll go back into the full world got the aura I can do this a couple ways I could just remove them as I say it like store remove but I'll show you another way here that's sometimes helpful click the title bar to get our element properties I'm just going to move them out of the way and hit delete and Boop select them now they're no longer in here the aura background for the quantum washes doesn't exist anymore and I want to make it so that this queue washed dimmer that I've stored only affects the main instance that makes sense so I'm going to highlight and I'm going to go back into world one and I'm going to hit full store click the executors hip over right so now we have just the main instance with a dimmer on it so why aren't we seeing any color it's because the defaults of the RG and B cells are zero now how can I change the defaults right we can either go into setup or I can just create a 100 value open to our default preset and now those RGB cells will come on I'll stay on at 100% and I can modify their color values with the presets cool we're getting there so we've got our layout view everything's set let's create a couple of faders more for our different fixture types select all of our color forces we can either select them in the layout view or a hit group full clear out label CF 72 dim cool we got that got our quantum wash we've got our Vipers or missing our pointees twenties full pointy dim got those and I also want those to default at the ultra narrow zoom store back to our default call the default now even though we only have dimmer stored here we can see that it is in ultra narrow alright let's create a DJ LICO look okay so let's go into our LICO world and let's find two that are focused mainly on the DJ so that one's good that one's good so we've got like an a wide and at a tight DJ look so let's create a two you sequence starting with first full intensity tight in on the DJ and now I'm going to bring those values to zero you can either do this by using the dimmer wheel or if you hit dot dot takes them to zero and I'm going to go to our outside lead goes at them it full so that'll be like the outside wider look store click our sequence we're working on click our executors for the sequence we're working on create second cue ok now what if we want one that has both ok I haven't touched the values on the ones that are still on and those values will track through to the next cue tracking is like layers of transparency where only what you change changes so if I don't touch the values of those other Li codes they're gonna stay on because they're on right now in this cue so now I've got a bull now I want all the lights that are on in the next cue to go off I can select those fixtures by hitting our shift key if output take them to zero grab our kind of like this is like our I call this like the family photo light look right and then create that cue and then finally we'll do one where they are all on so right now I've got five cues if we turn it on there's our first cue we can then select this it's a little easier to see we can then go to our second cue which is the outside both just the little center stage wash and then all and then it cycles back you can change whether or not it's site goes back again in that assign options menu restart first wraparound allows it to go back to q1 I want that on for this cue okay so let's say I want to have a little bit of a fade so it's not so sharp between those looks hit edit click on our sequence and we can start by like naming like DJ tight DJ wide both stage and all and we can change the fade time of all of those cues to like two seconds okay and that'll mean that it won't be such a harsh like on/off type deal you can fade between those values and you can see that changing on our layout view okay cool I'm going to change that to DJ key light and it'll always restart on the first cue because of that setting that I set go back into world one we have not done anything with our house lights yet put our house lights on a totally separate fader house lights okay those are over here now last but not least our Atomics I'm going to create two separate faders one for the dimmer on all them and then a dimmer for the shutter speed right how fast the strobe goes so if we hit full we've got Atomics atomic dim and then i'm going to select the fixtures again go to our beam preset type and you can either scroll up on our shutter I'm gonna go Mac strobe I'm going to store that to a beam pre-set store that as max shutter I'm going to call that preset and store it right next to the dimmer now so far we've only been working with dimmer levels in regards to the faders right so dimmers are thought of a little bit differently than other values when it comes to fader assignments so if I were to look at our Atomics you can see the fader isn't fading the shutter values it's just it's jumping directly to 100 okay and that's because these LTP faders only fade the dimmer values since we don't have any dimmer value stored in here it's just flipping on see our blue background is going to a hundred percent if we want to fade the shutter value we either need to use crossfade or my favorite temp faders so I'll hit the sine function master temp fader so now once we've assigned that fader as a temp fader our shutter values are fading okay so if we bring our Atomics up we can see that our strobe rate is getting faster and faster and this the visualizer can't even keep up with it it's so fast so now we've separated out the intensity and the speed the shutter speed so we'll call that strobe cool go back into world one and remember that smart window I apologize I should have been talking a little bit more about it but let's let's work a little bit on creating a playback window on our our second page over here on our like layout view so I'm gonna create another page playbacks will go action buttons and I'm gonna make action buttons like this and then let's make another playback page and change this fader assignment here I'll go to channels never okay we'll call this page playback and let's create a series of color looks for every fixture type okay so I'll start the Vipers if I turn them up on our playback here the values don't go into the programmer okay their output on the stage but they're not going to be stored into anything that we do in the programmer so I've got my Vipers selected we'll start off with white let go I'll hit store and then click on an empty tile or empty executors and I'm gonna do red orange stored into a separate queue and yellow into a third queue then I'm going to do our greens then our blues and enough finally our magentas so they're kind of stored into five different genres of color so I'm going to label a little bit here reds greens blues magentas now you notice all of these are set to go by default and they're not playing back right now we're just seeing the default values coming out of our vipers speaking of vipers let's move them and I don't like the way they react so if it feels unnatural to you that the way you rotate the tilt encoder what you can do is you can go into setup go to our viper lair and tilt dmx invert and now they're going the way that I feel is correct okay let's just create this this preset here this position preset will call it straight low now you'll notice there's a difference here between our position preset that has an S on it for selective and g for global think of global as a preset that those exact values apply to all of that fixture type so orange on this viper is the exact same as orange on that viper so on and so forth so global is for fixture types and then it applies for the other fixture types that are stored in there as well but a selective preset means that each fixture has its own unique values stored into that preset that aren't the same right so if I right now they're the same because I've pointed them all out but if I were to say okay I want to fan them out a little bit so if I grab this upstage row and I hit a line a line a line and fade them or excuse me I'll line them outwards and then do the same thing these fixtures all have independent pan-tilt values and I can store those so it will fan out low each one of those values is unique to every individual fixture but green is the same for all of them does that make sense I hope that makes sense so let's make a position stack start with straight low go back to our play box and I'm going to create a positions executor with three a width of three I'll label it has positions and I'm gonna label this first q tez straight though and I'm gonna turn it on oops by hitting direct action it's one tricky thing about starting a new show file is direct action means that it will become an action button for whatever that executors label is store playback cool so now that position is outputting and I can create a second q fan out low great 2nd Q now let's say I have like a variability of fade times that I can't really determine by just saying okay this is always gonna be a fade time of one okay how could I make it so I could adjust it on the fly well we could use what's called exact time you can see these two faders over here program time and exact time if this fader is up and set time is off it won't do anything it exact time will only work if that red dot is on on exact time and your executors are following exact time so we'll go hit a sign and we can see that ignore exact time is off okay so now if I take my exact time all the way up to 10 seconds the fade between those two cues will take 10 seconds instead of the one that I had in a fade time but we now have another kind of problem here all of our other execs were set to not ignore the exact time as well so I want to change that for all of my executors globally for the whole show file I would have done this sooner this part is not this is not actually something I was planning on showing you but we can assign executors we can do this all through the command line so I do a sign exec dot slash ignore exec time equals on so now they should all ignore it and they do so what that command line did is it just went through and instead of me having to click a sign click here and then turn on ignore exact time it did it to all of the sequences globally I just realized I hit the mic really hard at that point sorry I'm gonna save those as default options and now I can just go back and change that one to ignore exact time off so now that one will follow but the others vault cool so now we're getting somewhere once I'm going to move these out of the way a little bit okay and now we can bring our vipers up and go to our magenta color and let's create a little sequence of different zoom values so we'll go from narrow and again I'm creating actually it's just let's just do this with smart because I told you guys to do it with smart so go smart go wide and now I can name these as narrow medium wide click narrow put this guy out of the way wide so now I can call this Viper zoom and we can go through those three different zoom levels now we're getting a show going rearrange these faders a little bit by hitting the move key and let's create that position cue for these pointees oh hey whoa oh my goodness my appointees are going the opposite direction how can I possibly fix this that doesn't make any sense so and this is a this is again just a thing that I'm I I planted beforehand okay so our downstage truss is correct and the upstage is incorrect so what I can do I can go into our pointy patch and I can invert the first six tilts and now they work correctly again antastic so we call this one straight low and store it into that same preset and then I'm going to go to my pointy world Reis select make sure in the right order here and I'm going to change my align group to six and now if I hit a line three times they will align in a group of six pretty cool huh and out low antastic now let's say for our LEDs we want to do something a little bit different and let's say for the quantum washes I want to be able to I want to be able to mix with the colors with the faders this is a request I get like Oh a lot okay so we'll grab all our RG and B instances and we're going to create a red fader but when we hit red you notice that our green and blue also activated I'm going to deactivate both red and blue and I'm gonna store red to a fader I'm going to do the same thing deactivate everything except for green for the green fader and then create an indigo which is full just blue and deactivate red and green so now I'm going to go back and change that assignment again to temp fader for all of these temp fader attempt fader but we're not over yet okay we need to change the default of the red green and blue to black okay so we'll go to color and we'll go to special dialog and this will pop up our color picker wonderful color picker we can see all the beautiful colors of the rainbow here you can even align along it create like rainbows and stuff but we want to do something a little more interesting than that that is store the default as black I'm just going to store it black color preset and restore it is the default whereas before it was a white default now it's a black default and we can add in and color mix to our hearts content using the red green and blue faders for those quantum washes now let's go one step further let's give us the option to control which of those rings are on so by default all of them are set on so I'm going to create a dummy cue that has nothing in it right nothing no nothing active in the programmer I'm just going to store and label this as quantum rings I'm going to make that a 2 wide so now if I hit go I'm in q1 and it's just the default values there's nothing there I'll show you why I store q1 like that now I'm going to turn off instances 2 & 3 create second queue and now I can toggle back and forth between that inside ring and the full full thing being shown and we can control the color independently with the faders so now I can either just hit go or top and I can switch between those two ring loads and the dimmer still dims with everything else now let's create a button down below that just turns the shutter to max on all of our fixtures so we can like busk with it or something so smart window go to max strobe just do that with all of these quantum wash max strobe I'm just going to throw that to a button down here and assign it as temp so I do a sign temp button 1 and I'm gonna label that as all strobe so now that's just affecting the strobe values of the fixtures so if they're not on they're not going to come on but if I have our lights up it's gonna strobe all of them okay let's create a set of zoom cues for our quantum washes again we only need to select our main instance because it's the only one that has zoom go to our focus well go store a couple of these presets normal narrow oops now we can do the same thing as we did before quantum Rings okay let's work on throwing some gobos in our vipers so we'll grab all of our vipers go to gobo on our encoder bar and we need to first create a gobo one focus all right so this is just well uses a dummy focus for right now usually like around 25 is good and I'm going to store that I'm gonna call that g1 focus because that the gobo wheels exist on different planes in the optics so you need to create a gobo one focus preset go back to gobo we'll go to open first for wheel one store that and then I'm just gonna go through and store a couple of my favorite gobos no let's do like five okay so we got those first ones stored and we can see there are a little bit out of focus so how could we fix that well let's go back over our focus tab and let's adjust it until okay wow that looks really sharp awesome and hit update instead of store and now we can see in preset destinations we have g1 focus because that preset was previously active in our programmer and we went updated it I wasn't active excuse me it was in our programmer it wasn't active though we can now update that preset and now those values have been stored into g1 focus for us to use so I'm going to create open gobo and normally you would have an open focus as well so let's just create a BS one call this open focus and we'll store that as q1 and then Datsun space hit our g1 focus create second queue and now we don't have to hit g1 focus again because all the values track through the rest of those queues so we just have to have to hit next q store cool so now it's super easy we can hit our first Q which is opened second Q which is our gobos and then we can just click through them pretty cool and then if we wanted to add a rotation into that say maybe with throw rotation on a fader we could go to gobo again g1 rotate and I'm going to actually change our default to this stop so we'll do it again Viper that's really fast in one direction let's say we wanted the right side to go one direction in the left side to go another direction you can go to our Viper world and go the other way let's throw that to a fader now if you want to be smart about this you can call the values of a fader by hitting on on hitting call and then we'll store that to rotation to a gobo preset called rotate rotate fast we'll call that and store overwrite and label this as gobo rotate and of course chain be fader assignment to attempt so now we have counter-rotating gobos on a fader and that'll maintain the rotation through all the other gobos alright we're getting there now we got to do a big list of colors for our color forces do white red okay so now our color forces are in a big list sometimes I like doing it that way versus having individual ones but it's really up to your taste see f72 colors there we go now I know you're saying where are all of the movement effects let's work on that let's create a second programming page I'm going to delete this I'm going to create a pool called effects okay window called effects and then we'll go and label that view as effects let's edit an empty tile hit load predefined and let's go to until circle this is a template effect it's a relative template effect then you can tell that because it says RT in the corner that means that there are no fixtures stored into this and you have to first select fixtures before you can apply them to that template let me show you let's turn everything off except for let's do our point ease and let's let's get them in that position go go pointees fan-out low go to our playback stork you to click positions now they're stuck there or at least their position alright now let's go back to our layout view go back to our effects view go to pointy now let's just see what happens if I select these and I click pan tilt circle okay well they're moving in they're moving in an effect that's for sure but maybe you like that maybe that's what you want to go for or maybe you want to do like one of those symmetric effects so let's hit edit and let's change the wings of the pan line to negative two and the tilt line to two okay now we're getting somewhere a little closer but it still looks a little off to me right like not like perfectly in sync and the reason that is is because I just made a pretty random selection of the lights before I selected the effect now keep in mind effects are like a waveform right like either a sine wave or a square wave or a saw wave it's really just applying different values over time in a waveform right so the way it spreads those values is based off of the selection order so if I just grab these randomly there's no real there's no real art to it it just kind of does an effect but if I were to instead create a selection that kind of goes around the circle of everything you can see okay now we're getting somewhere now we're getting somewhere where it looks a little bit more purposeful okay and that's all just because I made a thoughtful selection about the order starting from the center and kind of wrapping around and I know that those values are gonna be distributed evenly across my selection so let's store that circle to our beam row that I haven't really done anything with call that beam effects now if I yet go on here it's gonna do that effect I move them over a little bit I can do the same thing with spots let's go over to our Viper world pan-tilt circle now they're circling as well I can store that here call that Viper effects and now they can both go now what if I wanted to temporarily stop the movement or not stop the movement but take the effect to zero temporarily of course well I could create a temp fader that stomps the effect okay so let's go programmer grab all my moving lights and I can even create another group that is just all moving lights moving heads mhm grab that position switch to our effect layer change it to stomp now let's create that as a fader and assign it as temp and then the last thing I want to do is change my viper effects so that they are not off on overwritten so now when this fader is at a hundred percent its stomping out our effects here but if I were to hit go on beam effects again even though this fader is up because they are the same priority of normal LTP priority they override each other okay so when one takes precedence over the previous one those new values go forward if I want this fader to never be overwritten I need to change the fader to a higher priority so hit a sign and we'll go up one priority call it a high priority so now that fader is up and I hit go on either of these it doesn't matter because this fader is a higher priority okay cool so I'm going to call that move sighs so the further I move this up it's stop it stops the movement okay alright what else can we do to wrap up this video I've only got another 10 minutes before I really have to go I've been sitting here for way too long way too long I got a flight to catch in just a few hours here so we've got our quantum washes doing their thing you can change their values RGB we've got our pointees doing the pointy thing let's talk about making selections over a whole group of things and make like a dimmer effect that affects all of our fixtures okay how can we do this well remember what I said about selection order let's go to our top view 2d and let's create a selection oops also if you make a incorrect selection in a layout view if you just hit loops once it'll undo that one selection I'm gonna create that group as left-right left-right all remember that if key we were using before let's say I want to just have the color forces and the main instances of the quantum wash do like a left/right effect so I'm not getting any weird artifacts with the instances I'm gonna select left-right all and if I highlight we can see that's literally everything and I want to turn off our jeebies I want to turn off the Atomics and I want to turn off the lis Coase now I can store that as a new group call that left-right and dim just so I can keep it in my mind that a lot those are the fixtures I want to do my in my global dimmer effect with I can hit edit on an empty tile load predefined dimmer Sian and I can edit this effect line and we can look in layout view and see okay now we've got like an entire rig doing some movement and that's pretty cool I think we can change the wings to like - we could have it go from the center out or in outward to inward excuse me and I could even change it to a PWM form and make it like really fast from right to left it's make the width like 20 and then change the speed to like 100 okay I could even store that instead of putting it in a fader somewhere I could just throw that to flash button and so now I can use that at any time to create a cool chase that goes across the whole rig now let me show you something even more mind-blowing if so call this rig chase if I copy this create a new button right next to it so they're doing the same thing right they're doing the exact same thing but I assign one of these worlds to the second button let's say I'm just gonna assign the color force so now we've got a new little orange icon that means that only that color force world will play back from our rig chase okay if you don't think that's the coolest thing ever I don't know what to tell you like I just think that is so cool I think I can even change this to a swap so let's change the function to swap yep so now it'll turn everything else off and do that chase with the color forces in the background or I can chase the whole rig or just the background I think like that is maybe the that's why worlds are so versatile I wish more people use them and understood them okay let's see what do we got where are we going next what's what's the next big idea here we got most of the basics down presets are good remember presets you should understand the concept of these if you do anything with lighting if you update the presets it updates everything else in the show file where you use those presets what else can I go into like a 10,000 foot view on with this console there's just so much to learn see we've got our Atomics with their intensity and separated out but our go by rotation that our house lights let me think here what could be a good good topic now we went over effects oh let's go over fixing so let's say that you want to be able to keep one set of faders always on your active faders right so say you start building a show and you you want to access more faders but still have your same like your main staples like always available it's like your first five faders you want them to always excuse me lose my voice nothing to always stay here it's called the fix key so you fix fix fix fix fix now no matter what page you're on they will remain as a floating theater right okay yeah let's see what else can we talk about oh so presets if you tap them once again that's like it acts as select fix right so if we go tap self-express at four point seven if you double tap it'll bring every fixture that has that preset of those preset values in them to that preset so you can busk using presets i don't really recommend it you can do like program time with little fades and things like that that could be useful I almost never use programming program times however yeah I think that's honestly like a pretty good start for you guys make sure to always check the predefined effects there's just so much in here that you can go off of it's like fly outs crosses bitmaps all sorts of stuff but yeah this should be a great jumping-off point for you if you found this useful make sure to LIKE subscribe buy a hoodie go check out my patreon anything like that yeah this should give you a really good like crash course I kind of call this like the the oh tutorial where like you don't have time to really figure anything out on a deep level but you need that like 10,000 foot view of everything hopefully this gave you a enough information to make a show happen that's kind of what this is all about and give you a good jumping off point for continuing your programming education so yeah thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed the video and probably be doing a part two or we go a little bit deeper into this exact setup but yeah thanks for watching I'll see you guys in the next video bye bye

Channel: Christian Jackson

Views: 353,675

Keywords: MA2, Event Production, Lighting Design, Lighting Programming, GrandMA2

Id: ZoyhaQ196Nk

Length: 131min 41sec (7901 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dj_marx]

hazer's on address 420 plz :)

[u/spoken210]

This is huge man thanks

[u/DigitalEgoInflation]

woot.

[u/tommakesmusic]

Thanks for this, Christian.

[u/JulitoBH]

u l t r a l I g h t m a s t e r r a c e

[u/dj_marx]

"maybe i'll just do a clock"

Always gotta have a clock in those spare pixels :)

[u/U2_is_gay]

I think I feel pretty confident with 90% of the topics covered but I think I'm gonna watch this all the way thru anyway. It's always good to really drill in the basics and there's almost certainly something I've missed.

[u/snarefire]

Will be sitting down to watch this when i get a few hours to really concentrated and watch it. Should be fun. Thanks

[u/jello_sweaters]

/u/ishboo /u/mikewoodld this probably deserves a sticky, yeah?