MA3 onPC: The 40min Crash Course! Program a Full Show with No Experience!

hey everybody hope you're doing well today we are going to do a ma3 on pc crash course we're going to set up a full show from nothing um and we're going to get up and running patched get some effects in there maybe do some time code so whether you are switching over from ma2 or you've never touched any pro m8 products before this is for you a few quick notes before we get started i am on ma 3 version 1.4.2 0.1 which is the latest version at this time um they are working on a version 1.5 that's going to be coming out in the next few months so i'll do an update to this video with all of the lovely features that ma3 version 1.5 will bring out so be sure to hit the subscribe button and the notifications button and that way you will be the first to know about that and also all of the other ma3 tips and tricks that i will be putting out over the next few weeks all right so let's get started here when you first open ma3 on pc whether you're opening on your pc or on mac you're going to see something like this it's going to look blank and scary but it really isn't and we're going to build our show uh from this pretty easily actually just a quick uh kind of overview of this workspace here over here you have more like um general like functionality tools and stuff if you click this power icon here it is going to you know ask if you want to shut down the console or in this case the program on my computer if you want to save it or what if you tag this here you're going to get to the settings we're going to get into this in a little bit uh this is your like a command interface if you had a physical console um it would the keys on it would look similar to this and would be laid out similarly uh here you have like master speed controls like i said we're not going to go into any particular detail on these here your playback controls and we'll store some stuff in here a little bit later this is where you can set different monitors this is the help button as you see it puts help in the command line here and you can tag on something and it will uh it will get you some help there which is kind of cool all right over here the at this is your programmer so you can put at full at zero cut programmer copy programmer all that kind of stuff we'll talk more about that a little bit later uh you have the screen lock key here it will if you tag it it's gonna put your screen in this scary dust locked mode to get out of it you're going to do a little orientation here click in the top left corner of your screen the bottom right corner the top right corner and the bottom left corner and boom you're out yay okay this section here is your programmer this is where you are going to manipulate values of fixtures um and create effects and all that fun stuff and then over here are different views um so if i type a fixture view you're going to go to a fixture sheet presets it's going to load a preset view sequence sheet phaser a whole bunch of different things and these are all customizable and we're going to talk about that uh in a moment okay so now we are going to go and we are going to patch some fixtures if you don't know um about what dmx patching is um you're going to need to know that for this next part i won't really go into it but there's plenty of great resources um available and i'll probably make a video about that at some point as well all right so you're going to click this icon here you're going to go to patch okay so now we're in the patch menu you're going to see here there are lots of different fixtures and different you know your gdf fixtures here as well um we're gonna go to ma2 because so the ma3 fixture library is still being built up and it's mostly at this point just 3d uh objects here which are somehow in the patch um so i wouldn't really bother doing in here unless you have like some of these specific fixtures just grab it from me too you can type in if you know what fixture you have you can just type it in here so i know i have a fair light i'm going to be using verilight 2600 profiles with my favorite fixtures i'm gonna name it just l2600 quantity for this demo we're just going to use 10. this is going to be a pretty small rig fixture id okay so your fixture id is very important because this is a thing that you're going to be typing in the command line you can leave this at 1 if you wanted i typically do mine in the 100s so i'm going to do 101 because if i decide that i want to have more fixtures you know like a wash unit instead of a profile unit i would put them at 201 or something um starting from there so this will start at 101 the next structure will be 102 on you know onwards here is a dmx patch we'll start it sure at universe 1 one all right so hit apply and now you see our fixtures are now in here great yay okay and we might only use nine of these depending on how we want to set this up but i'll patch 10 for now all right so now click the x key here it's going to say keep changes yes we we do and now if we go back into you know back in our fixture sheet you now see that there are fixtures patched and also there's more stuff down in the uh programmer here these uh palettes here they all just kind of appeared so this is great we are now where we want to be to start um setting up some of our groups and presets okay so now let's um let's let's start some groups let's let's get some of the stuff coming okay so now i want to modify this screen um i don't want this stuff here so i want to delete uh the picture sheet and this programming parts so in order to change that and delete it i'm going to need to click the m a icon here hit delete window same here and this can skip some people when they're started out because now supposedly i've just deleted it out of my fixture sheet right but you actually haven't if you go back here it's going to reappear there and we're going to store this in a second but now i'm going to create a group pool so in order to add anything into here you're going to just tap anywhere in the screen that's empty there's lots of different things here at windows we're going to go to the pool and we're going to go to groups wow that's a lot of groups we don't need that many let's drag it over here make it nice and neat and i'm going to go over here and just make that eight and you and to change the size of anything like that you just you go here in the bottom right corner of the object and you can make it whatever size you want which is kind of cool okay so we have some groups this is great this is going to kind of be the foundation of our programming screen that we're going to customize now we need to save this so that way we can recall it or else it's going to disappear as soon as we click one of these so to do that go over to the command section hit store and now go over here click this and it will you know let you title it so i'm going to call this my screen hit ok and boom now we can go to any of these other ones go back to my screen and it will have this here yay okay so now let's store a group with our fixtures that we just put in so we started them if you remember at fixture id 101 it's super easy i'm going to go over to the command line here which is where you enter all of your commands i'm going to type in 101 through that's a shortcut for through 10 no 110 okay boom you see now we have a number here now i'm going to go store in the command line i'm typing that or you could also just hit the store key here but i'm going to store there and then i'm going to tap in my empty palette here boom i have a group hit the space bar of your keyboard and now you can name it so i'm going to name this vl2600 boom okay so now to get rid of that i'm going to here i'm going to hit clear three times clearing it three times will clear everything out of your programmer we'll talk about that more on that in a second so now we need to get our 3d window up and going because we want to be able to see what we're working with so to do that let's start by going over to the 3d section all right looks a little scary a big blank screen it's actually pretty quick to set up there are quicker ways to set it up if you use vectorworks but because this isn't a vectorworks tutorial we're not going to talk about that so to set up your fixtures in this 3d space so you can see what they're doing go over here to mode click setup great okay now let's go over to command line and type in 101 i'm not having to type in fixture in front of that because it automatically has a mastered fixture there select it break you can kind of see it selected right there now we need to move this in our 3d space i'm going to move this up the z-axis here is how high the fixture is so 12 12 meters boom it's up there you can see it now and now i'm going to move it to the let's say i'm going to move it to the left a little bit negative let's do negative six but now it's over there okay now i can go to the next fixture or i don't i don't have to type that in i can just hit next boom and i'm gonna do the same thing 12 let's go negative 4 next 12 negative 2 next 12 zero you can see i'm kind of spacing these out just a way it was already at zero so i didn't really need to do that um next now we're going to go 2 because we're going positive we're going to the opposite side so now this is going to go 12 4 one more here next 12 negative not negative six boom okay so now we have our fixtures here i've only actually used seven even though i patched ten so why don't we do what let's do some others um while we're here next all right so with this one i'm actually going to just flip them around on the ground so um i have a ground fixture so let's put this at negative three there and now i need to flip it so that way it's uh you know oriented towards the sky or the top so i'm going to go to rotation x hit 180 boom now it's up there next i can just go to 180 uh next i'll go to 180 3. okay great so now go clear and you can see all of our fixtures are orientated here in this 3d window so now if we go back to my screen and we tap over here go to common 3d great now we have our 3d window all set up i can select them you see them there we can put them in full and they're working great okay so now let's record some presets really presets are used pretty much every time you make any sort of cue or effect or anything like that it's a quick and easy way of selecting colors positions all that kind of stuff so let's clear all this out go over here under groups and you're going to go to presets here and you'll see all these different preset options here i'm going to select dimmer and we're going to make eight of those uh we'll put position next also eight of those color gobo probably actually gonna want a double color and double gobo i'll do some beam ones here and we'll want some focus ones okay so let's store some um let's store some intensity some dimmer presets so select our fixtures go here 100. fixtures are 100 we're going to store this now so type store into the command line and then go over here boom see how lovely that was now we can go on to that and just label that 100 and now we could go we could do 75 there now we could um store that that's 75 then we can make a zero one as well store that there zero percent oh my gosh and i'll uh we can make those as well add a later bit but for the sake of time let's move on okay so now let's do some color palettes we'll do position palettes in a moment i know i'm skipping those so select them put them at full let's go over to our color picker here um i added that in when you guys are not looking but basically you can just tap here go to comment and go to color picker so now let's go over here red that looks amazing type store let's go right here yay let's do green i know i know we don't like we don't like but we kind of do it's a love hate relationship i'll do blue see how i'm going over here every time it's instinct i want to hit the key there sometimes it can be quicker let's do like a pink there i'll show you like a yellow these aren't great color palettes guys instead of better ones and let's just do like a white as well boom okay so those are our color palettes i'm leaving some extras here for effects i'm sure we want to do those then we can clear all those out select them put them a full and we can go through basically every single color palette here and it will all work which is kind of cool and fun okay so now let's do some gobo palettes so let's clear this all out select your fixtures go to gobo and we'll probably put that full so you can see what we're doing and let's go over here now we're going to scroll along to our first gobo here take a look at that that's a gobo wow okay so now let's go store bim now we can uh scroll along to our next one store the next one store these are just kind of like all the is in this wheel here oh that's an interesting one this is the default load store and this means that you won't have to go into here and be doing this every single time that you want a gobo you can just select it and you will be able to quickly get it which is needed in programming store there now let's go all the way back and do an open okay great that one doesn't have it but let's just open it okay so now we have those let's do a few others for the gobos um so what you can do here is we can select a gumbo and then we can rotate it if we go into there see how we did that take a look at how cool that rotation is i'm actually not going to set the palette for this you can that's maybe just um but i i i'm not going to set a rectangular palette for now for simply for simplicity's sake but you can if you want and you probably should if you're doing a show let's see if there's anything in here yeah this is another wheel of gobos as well that you can make pallets for all right so now let's do some beam pallets so let's put it in full go over to our beam uh this beam here basically means iris so we can do like a zero iris store boom oh take a look at that hang on okay so i made a mistake here because i want this preset number one and this is preset number nine so i need to delete this the easiest way to do that is go over and hit the oops key boom now it's gone and it's fixed it's amazing the oops key is your friend to use it every time you make a mistake it will quickly undo it and that's very helpful uh zero percent then we'll just do like a full one there great that's a hundred percent okie dokie put those out select them again go over to focus 100 we'll do like as uh sure let's do zero percent zoom store that um see there i did it again i need to be at preset number zero please zero percent zoom clear i guess i didn't need to do that did i don't know why i didn't store it into here and now we have 100 great all right so now we want to save this view because i don't want to leave this so i'm going to go over here clear i'm going to hit store i'm going to go over to my screen hit ok and now i can go back into that and have everything all right so now let's set some position palettes i save these to last go to position let's go to tilt take a look at that little mistake there the fixtures go opposite directions what are we gonna do all right this is a little easy uh and quick thing to fix so we want these bottom fixtures to go in the same direction go to set up here clear everything clear everything out select those fixtures on the bottom and um uh basically we're just gonna rotate them so if i put them at full you should see where yes it's set up wrong one that work did i do that right i don't know if i did no i didn't negative 180 wow this is trickier than i thought i was going to be there we go wow okay so now i flipped them around you guys got to go on a little journey with me there okay so now that they've finally been flipped around clear them out and now we can go on with our position pallets all right so tilt them i'll do like uh let's do that store boom out and then let's do one where it's more like in yeah let's do that store in okay okay so now let's do some stuff with a line a line is a function that is very helpful when you are uh is need to spread out parameters across different fixtures and it can create some pretty cool looks so let's select these pictures up here go to position uh let's just go to out here nice there we go so i'm going to go over here to the align button hit it once see the little icon there and now i'm going to grab this take a look at that able to spread those out like i can fan them in like that i can pin them out we'll do that there i'll fan them out looks kind of cool store fan now fan is what they call it in etc um eos which is why i'm calling that an online and i like the word fan better than online anyway all right and this is fan in awesome and that will create some super cool kind of um looks that we can uh we can use okay so now let's do some quick effects so there are two ways to create effects in ma3 recipes and phasers recipes are so cool and awesome that they kind of deserve their own video because there's so much you can do with them so i'm really just gonna focus on phasers here um and we'll create some super quick effects in there so let's put let's take our fixtures here let's just put them in there out preset there and now i'm just going to select the top ones here all right i'm going to go and create a little intensity effect i'm going to go over here to my dimmer and i'm going to put this at 0. okay great so now i'm going to go over to this little stack bar here see how it says one slash one i'm gonna tap this arrow key and now it says two slash ones so we are now on step two of the effect and i'm gonna go to 100 boom and now take a look we have a little effect running okay so now let's uh let's modify this a little bit so you can see here you have multiple um uh editing capabilities all these ones in purple here are four phasers so let's go to speed um the default is 60 or whatever you set it as but we can make that quicker if we wanted we can do an 80. that's a little quicker and that's in bpm now let's go to phase so phase allows you to evenly distribute um the parameters around so let's go one through three sixty take a look at that wow and then you can adjust things um like the transition time so let's do zero transition time exactly like that you can see now i can steps in and out and that's kind of cool okay so now i want to store that so store and i'm going to store it as an intensity preset and that's kind of cool do you see how it um it has a like a half split so it shows you there are two steps there so now if i put that out i can select those fixtures and i can put into that okay so interesting something interesting to note here is that these bottom fixtures even though i selected them uh they were stored because they were a hundred percent so which is why this is a little bit more than half um so you have to make sure that when you are storing so you can see here even when i select them that they only um they still have two steps even though they're not programmed so you could remove that right off or you could create an effect there as well so that's kind of cool all right now let's do let's see let's do um let's do a color effect okay so out let's go over to color let's do like a red and then in step two let's do a blue great take a look at that okay awesome so now let's get a phase let's add a red fade time of that and then let's add a blue fade time of that take a look at that that looks kind of cool all right and now let's store that and you can create phasers with pretty much any um anything which is kind of cool oopsie i didn't do that i got the store boom and that's how you create phasers so now that we have some groups presets effects stored let's start creating a cue list let's create a sequence for show now if you're running a show there are lots of different ways to do this sometimes you might want to have lots of sequences running um you know and then you kind of mix it live especially if you're on a console um sometimes you might you know you have the full show programmed from start to finish and you're just hitting the go button it really depends i'm going to set up a cue list because that's how i tend to set up my shows at least right now but there are lots of other ways to do it so we're now going to slightly modify this because i want this space here so i'm going to delete this and i'll move this like there okay so now all right we are going to go and we are going to go out a window and we're going to add a sequence okay great and then over here we're going to add playback it's very small but we don't need a bag okay so now let's store this great okay all right so now let's let's store our first cue so um i'm going to i'm actually going to just select the top fixtures here distance of the top fixtures here we're going to put them in full i'm going to put them at their uh fan out preset i'm gonna put them in blue throw a gobo in there let's always say uh zero percent zoom that looks kind of cool all right and then i'm going to take my bottom fixtures that fall out i'll put them at like a yellow i kind of like that yeah looks kind of cool okay so now that we have that let's say we want this look um we are now going to hit store and we're going to go over to one of our playback keys actually it's probably easier here just to go to here um because they're much bigger so let's say we're going to store that in here there there we go okay so um now in if you were on a physical console you could just tap the key that you wanted it to go okay so now we have our sequence stored here you see here how it has sequence two um if i double tap that here i'll go to the um sequence like editor page where i can like have a little bit more um control over it i can adjust what the key does so if i wanted instead of to go plus i wanted to go minus or like learn ready to learn speed or whatever we'll talk about that uh in a later video so i now have this and i want to get this sequence onto here because i want to be able to see it and edit it so i'm going to go i'm going to look over here see how it says sequence 2. i'm going to go to my command line i'm going to hit sequence two please come over here and boom sequence two and now i can name this so i'm gonna hit the space bar and i'm gonna name it one great okay and you we can add a whole bunch of data here let's say i wanna fade time of this three i can go q1 time three please and boom now we have okay all right so now let's run it let me go over here to this little button here and take a look at that so now we have our first cue running if i go and clear everything out of the programmer it is still there because it's in our queue all right so now let's store a second cue let's say in the second queue i'm going to have these fixtures turn off and these fixtures are going to turn to glue themselves all right store and now i don't even have to type anything i can go store cue to time and i'm going to add my fade time or whatever time to please great and now i have two cues so i can go and i can run that let me clear my programmer and now i can go hit the go button and take a look at that it ran it awesome okay so now let's store a third queue where these are going to go out and those are going to come to full in their fan in palette uh in the red say with that gobo on it out of 100 zoom okay yeah all right um i'm not gonna go store cue three time two time i'm heading again at three okay so when i hit q once i mean time once it adds q fade so that's the fade time and i attach it again so i'm also adding a delay time store and the delay time is gonna be the time before it actually runs so if you see here fade to delay three so if i hit this now i'll actually clear this out and if i go um here it's going to count down my delay before it runs and there we go now it runs okay now that looked a little messy because i don't want my fixtures if we uh we go back to the top and we see how it runs here see notice how those fixtures fade out and i don't want them to just like fade in like this i want them to just reappear there i don't want to see that movement or that color change so now i have to go and i have to add an mib mi b stands for move in black and it means um that it will automatically uh move the fixtures in this queue to that position so that way you don't get that nasty transition so i'm going to add a cue early to both of these so now i will go to this one and now see how this works those fixtures fade out awesome okay and now when i hit go again it'll run that delay time and then take a look at that it's nice and neat all right so now let's say i want to add um an effect to this and a phaser gonna hit that there take a look at that and i'm going to select those fixtures on there both great okay now i'm going to store this store cue 4 time 2 please and if you go back over here you'll see it created a little part here that means that there's an effect in there so we can hide that if we wanted and that's four great okay so now did i not add a fade time to that i thought i did um oh yes so uh whenever uh whenever you add a fade time to a um a cube that just has an effect in it it applies it to this part part 100 not the actual cue okay so now if we clear this out and we run it take a look at that all right and now to stop the effect in the queue if i want to stop the effect running i will select the fixtures and i'm going to go into here and i'm going to hit stop please and now it has stopped it and i can now put him at 100 store cue five time two please and now if we clear this out and we run it it will stop the effect all right so that's the basis of storing cues it's very very simple um you create your look in the programmer you store it and then you add uh any mibs any movement blacks that you need you can add delays times you can also create follow cues uh so if i make this a follow queue and i go to the start of the list let's say i'm going to go there then as soon as this cue here is done running it will um immediately start the next queue so there we go i didn't even hit the button it just automatically ran so lots of cool functions you can do with effects and everything play around with it this is not a deep dive i will do a deep dive at some point uh into uh effects and cues and sequences and all that fun stuff okay so before we sign off here let's talk about one more thing time code time code essentially lets you run cues sequences timed so that way you don't have to be hitting the go button every single cue you want to go unlike any major concert tour anything like that is time coded the whole thing mostly so that way those you know the blinders go on it for every single kick drum beat or you know whatever so here we're just going to make a little time code with this i'm going to use internally generated time code usually you would use an external source so let's just go over to our preset here let's delete all of these and we'll make this our time code menu so we're going to go we're going to go to uh time codes here we just need one really good slots you get eight time coded slots by default you can add more um and then we're going to go this time code view did they put that in there they didn't know okay so the time code view is there and now we're going to store this boom time code okay great and actually let me put play back up here let's rearrange this so we'll put our playback here okay so now we're going to do is we need a time code started in here so we're going to go over here store bam time code i'm going to label test great okay so now let's go into our time code here this is our time code window nothing in here right now so let's go over the timezokey boom i just hit one which is test and this is an internally generated timecode if you go in here you can edit more and i'll talk i'll do a video all about timecode and stuff in there so now let's go to mode setup okay so now we are in the recording mode for the time code um which means that we will be able to store uh cues along this time confirm so i actually i usually start my time code at 10 seconds so i'll just let it play out so let's say if we go back to here um let's say you want to get rid of this all right i'm gonna go off cue please and now we don't have our key running which is great and so now we can go back into time code we can shrink this at our 3d window here so that way we can see what we're doing oh man look at that uh and now i'm gonna store this okay let's start this time code so um i'm going to start recording the time code by hitting this button here you'll see now it's red and it's recording time code i can also stop at any point um just by hitting that again or you could even use the keys down here if you wanted and then i could go back to the start i could play it back i could pause it temporarily keep it moving and of course now it's run to the end so let's start recording this and we're just going to be running these cues i haven't programmed anything extra okay and we'll start it at uh 10 seconds you can see the clock here okay all right so i'm running our first queue you can see how it put that there i'm running our second cue now now i am running the next cube but it has a delay on it if you remember next cue and then out like that and off okay great so now let's go and clear everything up and we can now go back to the start of our time code we can go to playback let's go on off queue actually and now let's play this back and i'm not going to touch anything all right so we started this at 10 seconds just gives you a little bit of time to get set up here we go there's q1 nice now that'll fade out now our next cue here we go and boom and that's the end of our time code so you can see how this is really powerful tool using the internally generated time code is super easy and i would recommend that if you were just you know trying to learn it but i'll do another video about how to use external time code and how to do all of that but that's really the basics of how to use time code you create sequences and then you store it um you know kind of going along with your timecode and you can restore things as well so you if you you know needed to just a kick drum beat on one record and then the next record you like get your effects in there or something you can do that and it's super super easy and fun okay so i hope you learned something um this was a very basic crash course just kind of going over the uh some of the major features of ma3 but there's so much that we haven't even touched on like macros we haven't talked about magic matrix we haven't really talked about phasers um we need to dive into recipes so much more um that we will you know we'll go over time code more in depth so much more to come so be sure to hit that subscribe button and you'll be the first to know about those i'll be making at least one video a week on this and i'll just have some other fun lighting stuff um in there as well so be sure to hit subscribe and tag the notifications bell to get notified alright so thanks so much for joining in and i hope to see you guys soon

Channel: Jonathan D. Martin

Views: 14,047

Keywords: GrandMA3, MA3 Lighting, MA3 onPC

Id: 7VD3ZcEq1wo

Length: 40min 2sec (2402 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021