MA2 onPC Quick Start Guide

hello and welcome to this ma2 on pc tutorial in which i'm going to show you how to get started from the very basics with your first show on grandma 2 on pc this video is going to be more like a QuickStart guide that's going to kind of gloss over a lot of the minutiae of the advanced features of this desk and just skip right into getting a show up and running for you all the links to the software that I'm using in this video are going to be down in the description below so make sure you download and follow along with the video when we first open ma 2 on PC we're going to see a very blank ominous-looking screen just like this we're going to consider this window that we see the command window all of the other windows in ma 2 are accessible through the the soft buttons on the right-hand side of the screen say X turn 1 X turn to screen 2 so on and so forth and those screens correspond to the physical screens that you can have connected to the desk at any given time but first things first let's just get some fixtures patched so we can play around a little bit to patch fixtures we're going to go into setup then patch and fixture schedule ma 2 works in user-defined layers a layer can be anything from an entire universe of lights to maybe even just a set of types of fixtures or physical locations of fixtures for example I'm going to label this layer ground 1 once we've got our layer selected we can go into the fixture window side of the Edit setup menu and go to add fixture from here we can browse the library of a lot of specific manufacturers and fixture models I'm going to choose one of my favorites the Martin Viper and we're going to scroll until we find a fixture profile that fits the one we want we're going to be using the Mac Viper performance 16-bit mode when we hit import it's going to come up with the fixture wizard which basically allows you to auto patch a lot of fixtures all at once you can give them names and quantities fixture IDs channel IDs and starting addresses as well I'm going to go ahead and import eight Vipers into this ground layer and start my fixtures at fixture ID 101 and channel ID 101 when we hit apply it's going to auto patch these into our lair for ground one nothing in the patch is saved until you attempt to exit the patch and it hit save when you get the warning that it hasn't been saved at this point I'm going to talk a little bit about the ma net control in order for us to see what I'm doing with the lights I have launched the MA 3d visualizer that we can see over on this other screen that I have to get ma 3d to communicate with MA to on PC you need to make sure that you are in an active session you can tell whether or not you're in an active session by going into ma network control and if you see a session ID that is green and when you select it just like we selected in our layers in our fixture patch if you see that your station or your PC is listed in that session ID number that you are in an active session also make note of what IP address your station is in this instance I have 10.00 3 as my MA 2 on PC station so over in ma 3 deal and we want to make sure that our network settings as long as you're in the same IP range you will be able to join the session which I have already joined in MA 3d but if you are not in a session it will look completely blank at which point you will want to join the session by clicking on the session in the sessions list and hitting join takes a couple seconds and then we can see the fixtures that we just patched in order to more easily see these individual fixtures that are pretty much just laying on top of each other in MA 3d what I'm going to do is create a staged view in MA 2 on PC so I'm just going to open up any random screen doesn't really matter and I am going to create a basic window of a stage and I'm going to go ahead and store this view on screen too once we have our stage view we can hit setup and that will bring up a bunch of different positioning options for our selected group of fixtures so I went ahead and boxed all of the Vipers that we have on stage now and I can type in x-coordinates so for example I can do negative 4 through 4 and it will spread those fixtures out along that range and then I can drag the encoder wheel to the position that I would like on the ground so let's just say I like those on the ground at 3 meters back and spread between negative 4 meters and 4 meters so there we have our 8 fixtures we clear out and everything is saved to save the show file just double hit backup double click backup on and it'll automatically save your show file in the main command screen now I want to create a group tool so that I can more easily reference all of my fixtures here so are we going to create basic window groups and then this this auto saves you don't have to save this view but I need to save some fixtures into these different groups the little tiles represent different group numbers so if I select channel from our objects up here channel 101 through 1:08 then hit please we will see that all of my Vipers have been highlighted in ma 3d and I can go ahead and store those to group one I can rename that as Vipers cool so now I can easily reference that and just to make sure everything is working well what I'm going to do is set the Vipers to full and then let's just tilt them towards me make sure we have everything looking good so yeah so far so good make sure we have all of our colors and everything yeah cool now we're rocking let's go back in and add another layer of maybe some some suspended five our beams so we're going to go back into passion fixture schedule create a new layer we're going to name this truss one and then we're going to find some elation five hour beams of our beam beam five are in standard mode in Port let's just do eight of them again keep it easy we're going to name this fixture ID as 201 so our 100 series is going to be the Vipers 200 series is going to be our five our beams and let's just change this to a 2.1 universe so that might be convenient if we want to run two separate universes so we don't have to mess with more cabling it can really uncomplicated just go over here verify our patch numbers everything looks good and then save to exit so now those two are excuse me those eight five our beams just popped into my visualizer at at the center of the plane so what I'm going to do create a group forum 201 through 208 please store group to name it five our beams great now we can select the five-hour beams in our group pool and then go back into setup in our stage view and do the same thing that we did before negative for 304 please and then since we wanted to suspend these fixtures we're going to elevate them on the z axis and let's just elevate them by 5 meters but now when you do invert them by using the rotation a part of our stage setup so we can toggle back and forth between position and rotation once we go into rotation here I believe sometimes this takes a little getting used to if we do highlight here there we go so yeah rotate 100 to 80 degrees and they are now facing down and we can move them forward and back I'll move them back so that they line up with those upstage vipers on the ground and there we go we have our lights placed in our 3d 3d program and we are ready to get programming since everything is patched and good to go as we hop back over into our main command window I want to specify that in this video I'm not going to be going over using any sort of presets this is all going to be using hard value programming the differences of which I'll probably get into in a later video but let's just say that hard value programming is a lot less versatile but it can be quicker if you just need to get a show up and running so hard value programming is literally just what it sounds like it is not referencing a preset it is just saying ok Viper's I want you to have your dimmers at 100% and I'm going to store those values to an executor so that I can play it back so now we have full control using this this fader executor that I've just assigned so that's that's the beauty of hard value programming is that it is really quick but you lose a lot of versatility if you have a large rig and you need to be doing some more complex programming later but for now let's just have the Vipers on our first executor and then store the five-hour beams to our second executor so now we have individual intensity control over each of those groups of lights so now that we have both of our executors for the intensities of each of the lights up we're going to program some different looks for positions so I'm going to grab the Vipers and tilt them out or down towards the audience and then do the same with the five ours just like that and I will store that as an executor in this executor button section stored is 201 and when I clear this out they will snap back to their default values but if I hit go on this sequence they will snap to that position that I stored now if I want to create another position that is based on this position I can grab the fixtures I want and then let's say I want the beams to fan in the the method of doing that is using the align function so you do align align align three times and then tilt down until we are all converged on pretty much a singular point and then with the Vipers let's just say they want to go up and then we'll do a line a line a line a line four times and then now we have a totally different look for our positions and we can use the align function with all sorts of parameters not just position so we can do that with like a color fade different sets of gobos focus anything really so now we have the second position stored since we've only affected position because it has our little red LED indicator on the position tab we can store this as another executor and if we clear it out it'll return to the previous executor that is active now we can bounce between those two executors on that position just like that we can also add effects on top of our base position or our hard values that we just programmed so to do that I'm going to open up a second window here and create an effect pool just like that and we see all these tiles that are totally open for us to do all sorts of awesome stuff so what I'm going to do to create our first effect with the five-hour beams is I'm going to first select them in our group pool pop over back into the effect window right-click on an empty effect aisle and that will bring up our effects editor so let's just say I want to do like an even odd tilt effect on the beams so what I would do I would add a line of effect for position confirm will take us to the effect line editor and I'll explain a little bit more on this later but I'll just do this real quick to make things a little less complicated we're going to set our pan to stomp our tilt to sign we're going to change the speed to I will do 20 bpm and then we are going to keep those values actually I'm going to decrease this we're going to do negative 30 2:34 high-value and then we're going to do groups of two and now if I select the effect in here we can see that once I've loaded into the programmer by left clicking on it it has started to run the effect and that's pretty much the effect I wanted I might want to add what's called a wing effect which makes it symmetrical so now it looks a little more symmetrical that way and this is all stored in the programmer right now so everything I'm doing is being edited in the programmer live what I'm going to do is I'm going to store those values there in the programmer into another button executor so now when I clear this out this will snap back to that positions values and I can still go between here and here just normally but now I have the additional function of having this this even-odd tilt effect and I can still without stomping the tilt effect go between the two positions so that's pretty cool and then it just gets more complex from here you can change the colors of the Vipers say we want to have the Vipers turn to a magenta type color just use the color picker store store it there now you can assign that button to only be active while you're holding it down by doing a sign temp and then selecting the executor now it'll only switch to magenta as long as you hold down the executors button which is a cool cool feature probably one my favorite playback types is temp I use it a lot and then we can do things like add strobe effects on another executor by going into beam shutter oh we're going to do this one at a time shutter do Mac strobe go over to the beams Mac strobe store this as another executor assign temp click the executor and now every time I hit temp it will temporarily strobe lights and then go back to its previous state so yeah that's a pretty much how to get a moving light show up and running in a few minutes on ma 2 on PC of course this is just the absolute tip of the iceberg when it comes to moving like programming on this console and hopefully if there's enough interest in these videos I'll I'll make a few more and maybe describe how I lay out my show files but if you liked this video make sure to leave a comment like it you know that really actually helps out the video a lot in getting other people to see the video believe it or not and I really do appreciate any sort of interaction you have on my channel in my videos so with that said I hope to be bringing some more content to you shortly and I will see you in the next video thanks so much

Channel: Christian Jackson

Views: 203,576

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Id: sLjbQQM1zpg

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2015