MA2 Startup Macros - How and Why

in this video I'm gonna show you how to set a start-up macro that will fire every time you open your show file this is a really useful feature and after I show you how to do it we'll talk about some creative use cases for what you might want to set specific startup macros but for now let's jump over into ma and I'll show you how to do it so here I have the command screen of my default show file that I use for everything from festivals to clubs to corporate shows and this screen we're looking at right here with this macro window in it it's referred to as screen one and I'm gonna be showing you everything about this process on screen one but if you're on an actual console obviously you can do this on any of the screens there are a couple of ways to get into the setup menu you can either click on this little soft key that says setup or you can actually type in to the command line setup and that will bring us into the setup menu and since the startup macro is a function of the show file we will go over into the show file tab and go down to playback and MIB or move in black timing will talk about MIB and manual MIB in a different video but let's pop over into playback in MIB timing and you will see we have some options here one of which is a option that says start up we click on this empty green box we get one of these little pop-up windows that comes up and you click on this little plus you can get a full keyboard if you're working on a touchscreen or you don't have access to a keyboard say you're on like an ma to ultra light which doesn't have a keyboard or a backup power supply or motorized picketers you can type in stuff using a little plus on there and all this edit startup window is is a command line you can do anything that you could think of to do in the normal command line you can put that in here so I guess theoretically you could run a whole show off of the startup command which is kind of interesting to think about now this startup line isn't considered a macro per se but you can trigger macros with it you can also dump variables and all other sorts of stuff into this line let's keep it simple for our first example let's use the command login as our start up command so now if I go and save this show because remember if I loaded this show without saving that start up macro wouldn't be in that show file we go to load show and I'm gonna load the show and I'm prompted with a login page because that first command that fired once the show file opened was login which is actually kind of also logging you out at the same time if you log out if you just use the phrase log out it'll just sign you in as the guest account so I'll go ahead and log back in as administrator because that is the user and user profile that I have on my master show file I used to mess around with having cool login pages and stuff but I found that it actually slowed me down lining is a troubleshoot some things so I have have since switched back over to having just a default which is admin excuse me administrator as the name and then the password is admin all right so now we're back in and I'm gonna go ahead and delete that from our start up line here Andrey save the file okay you guys are with me so far okay good let's let's do something else with this so we're back on my command screen here and I have this macro window that has no macros in it I can lump over here these my programming macros like an a matrix window but let's go ahead and create a new macro called startup so to do that I just right clicked on this empty macro in this case it's a 291 but it could be whatever I'm not gonna put anything in here no lines of command I'm just going to label it as startup and in the first line we're just gonna type in login now the reason I'm doing this is because as I mentioned before if we pop back up over into setup playback and miv timing and under the startup command instead of typing login or just typing a string of text that our our command we can actually just fire that start up macro by saying macro startup capitalization doesn't matter in ma pool items so now when the show file is loaded it will search for a macro called startup and it will run that macro you'll also notice that I did not need to type go macro startup it's just macro startup go is kind of a redundant thing when you're calling macros so let's go ahead and save the show and then load the show and we can see we have effectively the same thing and I can log back log log back in as administrator so okay why would I do that that just seems like an extra step right but the beauty of this is now you can go into just this startup macro without having to go into setup without having to type out one big long line of code you can actually just edit only the startup macro and what you put in this startup macro in a file is something that you have to decide for who's using the file and where the file is being used like what kind of show for example if you were working in a nightclub you might want to have a show file that when you start it it automatically turns everything off that was running in the show file the last time it was saved kind of resets everything to default turns off all play backs and lamps on the fixtures that way you just have one button to load the show file and then it'll be off and running I used to do this at hue nightclub I had a startup macro written that would reset all the fixtures a couple of times because we had some dirty sensors and some motors that weren't exactly on point so it was helpful to reset two or three times so after about a minute of resetting it would also strike the lamps and then it would fade it into a startup look and it was the same look pretty much every night we had four special nights so you could actually decide which which walk-in look you would want to have when you started the console so that's just one way that you could be a little more creative with your startup macro another fun thing you could do is you could also prompt the user to ask whether or not you want to run the startup macro when the show file runs here's how you would do that so the first line of our startup macro is going to be in parentheses and I'll explain why in a second and we just want to put parentheses run startup macro question mark when we put any sort of text string in parentheses that's going to create a dialog box that pops up when it's run so for example if I just hit this test line button it's just gonna test macro line one and we can see right here pops up with a little window that says run startup macro question mark and you either just hit enter to continue to the next line that's that the dialog box also kind of pauses the macro so if you want to pause the macro and kind of wait for a user to input either a text string or just hit enter that's how you do that and so I'm gonna actually edit this to be a little more clear run startup macro escape will cancel and then enter equals run so now when I hit test line it's gonna ask me run start at macro escape peoples cancel and then the dialog box is a little too small to actually see the full text so I'm going to abbreviate this so I'm gonna just do startup macro question mark or start macro that should be enough yeah so that's enough to fit in our dialog box and then we could have line to be logging all right so let's give that a shot let's save the show file and then load it right back up so now we're prompted as soon as the show file starts start macro escape is canceled enter is run so canceling it will just be hitting this X or if we just hit enter then we're presented with the login page so there you have it that is the long and the short of how to run startup macros on the ma2 ecosystem if you have any questions make sure to leave them down below in the comments and if you have any questions that have been like itching you in the back of the neck like how do I do this I really loved reading all the questions people come up with both in the comments on my Instagram snapchat and then on all the ma lighting Facebook groups that I'm a part of that's where I get a lot of these questions that I'm gonna be going through the next couple of videos here I figured these kind of shorter format videos with really to the point topics would be something you might be interested in so I appreciate you taking the time to watch it I hope you learned something and if you're interested not necessary by any means whatsoever link to my patreon is down below I offer some perks like access to this show file that I use on every show behind the scenes photos videos things like that sample plots from shows that I've done once again thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Christian Jackson

Views: 38,408

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

Id: mQYSoZAm_EU

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018