MA2 Lighting Color Effect Generator Tutorial

hello and welcome to this tutorial video where I will be showing you how to program and operate this color effects generator that I have figured out in gran ma 2 on PC first of all as always you can just pick a color on the left side with the color picker and we'll be using the LED strips particularly in this example so I'm going to set the background color of my LED strips to a magenta this means that the LED strips what I'm not running the effect generator will always be in the magenta color right so I have the intensity on my LED strips up and the color selected as magenta if I pop over into my layout view where I've selected a few of these pixels of the LED strips we can see it yep they are indeed in magenta in my layout view here the real magic is with this other fader that I have selected it's the green selected fader here that is labeled as effect generator go this is a temp fader that allows me to fade in and out at my whim the effect that I've generated with the other screen so if I have this template or a zero it means they're going to be magenta and if I bring that all the way up to full it means the effect is going to be running and the magenta will be disappeared into the background until which time I release the tap fader down to zero this means that I can select between any of my colors that I have in this Q stack here so I have color one and color too those are the two colors that the effect is going to be chasing between or using as the high and the low values so we can do like a cyan and a pink and if I bring my effect all the way down we are still at magenta and as I bring the fader up we are now chasing with an effect between cyan and pink and this interface is all live so if I decide to change number of groups to none the groups will change to none if I decide to change to a ramp down waveform instead of a PWM it changes live as I'm doing it and again as I fade the temp fader in and out it's going between the background color in this case magenta but I could switch it to whatever else I wanted if I wanted the LED strips to be yellow in the background I could do that and then as I fade down the fixtures go back to yellow as I fade up they go into the effect pretty cool this top row of buttons says like spots active wash active wash - active strip active that is a different that's like a way of choosing which fixtures I want to have in my effect when I bring that fader up so if I just want the LED strips to be in this queue then I have just the strip active indicator on if I want to also have my spots and let's say my LED 2's I usually use those for like trust warmers things like that then that means that when I bring that fader up and down the other fixture types will also chase between those two colors in the same manner as the rest of this is dictating below so you can imagine if I have my entire rig selected as on on on and I'm going between blue and orange as I fade this fader up the entire rig will will do the same color chase so let's delve into how exactly this is constructed first let's talk about the color picker selection which is choosing between color 1 and color 2 as you can see when I just click through this this sequence on the screen it is just allowing me to pick which Vic or which color I want to be the low value and the color 2 is going to be the high value since in ma you can only really realistically have a high value and a low value for waveforms unless you get into some macro ray that is beyond the scope of this tutorial but keep in mind none of the information in this entire executors button page it actually has any control data in it these are all just placeholders for lines of command entry so if I click on or if I edit this color one sequence for example none of these cues have any color information in them actually all they are is they're just command cues to copy a preset so if we look at this is for color one if we look at the yellow cue which is called yellow but actually doesn't have any yellow information in it all it is doing is telling the console copy preset for point for at preset for dot 100 /m for merge so let's look over at our color presets that I have on this page as well we can see that our preset 4.4 is indeed yellow and our preset for dot 100 is this says line number two but this is actually just called low effects I'm going to change the label for this so it's a little easier to understand so what I'm doing when I'm clicking through these color 1 colors is I am taking a color from this preset these global color presets and copying it from the slot that it's originally in and merging it into this low effects color preset which is preset 100 this preset 100 is the low value in each of these 5 effects that you see over to the right over here so if I edit each one of these effects you will see that the low value is the low effects or 4 dot 100 and the high value is high effects or 4 dot 101 that's true for all of these so these 5 different effects that I have here for each different type of fixture are just referencing the low affects and the high affects values and all the color one and the color two buttons up here are doing are just copy merging preset data from one of my you know basic 15 color presets into each of the color slots to chase between and keep in mind what's happening when I am activating or deactivating each of these different fixture types is it is essentially changing the effect from a template effect to a selective effect because selective effects when they are stored to a sequence they will auto-update so that is how this whole thing can work is because those selective effects when they're selective and not templates are stored into my effect generator cue on that fader but since they have all been transformed into template effects when I turn them off with the activate buttons then it no longer does anything when I bring the fader up only when I click on LED strip on does it change the effect into a selective effect at which point I can then bring the fader up and the chase or effect begins I'm using chase and effect interchangeably because I am bad at remembering to differentiate between the two but it's in effect all these are effects I don't use chasers in MA at all this means that I can also use my playback macros in conjunction with these colors so instead of me having to click through all the colors to find what I want I can simply say go to cue select green go to cue select magenta and now my effect runs with those two colors so let's look at this LED strip on macro so line one is for blind edit this is a pretty basic step for any of these live updating things anytime you're messing around with storing and updating a sex live for tricky things like this you should always use blind at it then it goes ahead and clears the selection out of my programmer and selects group 15 which is my symmetrical LED strip selection so I've talked about symmetrical selections before in other videos but just as a refresher when you have a layout view of all of your fixtures if you select them symmetrically all the effects that you use with wings from then on will look more symmetric than if you just select them left to right so that's what group 15 does group 15 please select my symmetrical fixture order the next line is the tricky part for storing as a selective effect so I've selected in line 3 my salute my fixture selection order then in line 4 of this macro it's saying store effect 1.66 6.1 through 1.66 6.5 so what exactly does this mean I'm not exactly sure what the the 1 prefix does I just know that you have to have it in order to store the effects this way but 666 is my effective number for my LED strip effect and dot one after the 666 is line 1 so line 1 through line 5 in this LED strip effect I want to do what I'm autumn ating is I'm automating this take selection button so that is what this LED strip on macro does is it just takes selection with the symmetrical effect our with the symmetrical selection order then from here the other options that we see in the interface are you know things like changing the waveform shape the wings amount the direction of the effect number of groups all these things are just doing that same editing of the effect line so if I look at this group sequence here where I can choose whichever number of groups I want in the effect all I have to look over is at this command line and see okay assign and then generated effects those are if I put that into my command line we can pull up and look exactly what that is so generated effects are effect six six three three six six seven and those are my five effects that I have stored to that fader so what I'm saying to the console when I say assign generated effects slash groups equals four is that in all of these effects even if they're just template which won't run actively when I bring the fader up it's going to change all of these lines lines one through five you can see we have our five lines here for all of our color mix attributes it's changing these groups column right so that is all that this button is doing so if I'd switched it to twelve here you can see it says assign those effects groups equals twelve and if we go through each one of these effects we can see indeed our group groups has been changed to twelve in all of them it's the same with blocks it's the same with wings all it's doing is assigning the effect and modifying the different lines right so I've just basically taken a shortcut to going in and manually editing all of these by using macros and those macros are triggered with these sequences so that I don't have to type a lot of stuff in I can just quickly say I want to chase between indigo and correct - just say indigo and white do a sine wave and I will do pulse width for wings reverse then when I bring the fader up it works and that's the basics of my color effects generator I hope this hasn't been too confusing I know there's a lot of stuff packed into here but if you watch this video a couple of times and take note of what you see on screen and actually do read closely into the effect line or the the macros that I showed on screen you'll be able to figure out how to do this as well it is a really fun little exercise in macro editing and excuse me writing and effect editing I've also gone ahead and in the description below this video included the links for the resources that I use to figure out what the different assign options are for the effects it's on the AC T lighting website or ACT lighting whatever you want to say they are the North American distributor for ma two products and they have a lot of good resources online so if you are ever stumped on what the different assign functions do in the command line and what you can actually automate through the command line for effect editing make sure to check out the links in the description and once again thank you for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and learn something leave a comment down below if you have any ideas for future videos or if you've seen anything that you just don't quite understand and you want to know how to do it I would love to show you how in any case if you haven't had a chance yet make sure to check out my video logs from my various touring and local production escapades I've gone ahead and thrown a link to one of my favorite videos up on the screen make sure to check that out and check out my other programming tips videos and until the next video thanks so much for watching I will see you later

Channel: Christian Jackson

Views: 93,771

Keywords: Christian Jackson, Pioneer, DJ, MA, Lighting, MA2, Event Production, Lighting Design

Id: Z5HZ9bmRCZk

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2017