Echo Touch Playback Toy

I'm experimenting with the sequence function of the echo touch, but I can't figure out how to manually control the playback of a sequence. In the online manual it references the "Playback Toy," but I haven't been able to find that in the software. If it's actually possible to do manual sequence playback I'd love to know how, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's not based on how hard it's been to find. 

  • +1

    Hi Justin!

    First off, I'm very curious how you found that page in the EchoTouch online help! I've looked myself and can't find it, but your link takes me to a page that indeed has that info and says EchoTouch! It shouldn't be there in the EchoTouch page, though. I'm working with our teams internally to figure out how that happened and get it fixed!

    Regardless, Playback Toy is a feature of the ColorSource console. As I'm sure you may already know, the ColorSource Console and EchoTouch share a lot of similarities in software. Playback Toy isn't one of those features that is shared.

    As far as manual playback of sequence steps, there's not really a way to do this. In theory if you go into edit the sequence you could click on each step to get a preview of what that step looks like (for the purpose of editing), but that wouldn't really get you what you want.

    I'm curious why you don't use presets for this playback instead of a sequence. By that I mean taking the look you would use in the first sequence step and instead recording to to Preset 1, then the second step to Preset 2, and so on. Then you would be able to manually playback each one of those looks.

    Thanks!
    Shawn

  • 0 in reply to Shawn Fernandez

    Thanks for confirming that for me Shawn!

    It's referenced on a couple pages: Record Playback Memory and Sequence Run are two that I just found back. As the Playback Toy wasn't in the PDF user manual for EchoTouch and the only other references to it I could find were Colorsource related I figured it probably was not actually a feature included with EchoTouch.

    The EchoTouch is installed in our Middle School Auditorium to control house/stage lighting so for 95% the time the presets are what they are using, but when I found the sequences function I was interested to see if it would be possible to use the EchoTouch to record & playback sequences for small theatre plays, chapels, or events rather setting up a real console for that purpose. 

    Presets could cover some of those simple cases, but if there was a way to step through sequences manually that seemed like a much cleaner and easier solution than filling a page with presets. I recognize that EchoTouch is an architectural controller and not a theatrical controller, but I got excited that it might actually have some simple sequence playback features and wanted to track that down definitively.

    Out of curiosity is manual sequence playback something ETC would ever consider adding in to EchoTouch or is that too far outside it's intended use case?

  • 0 in reply to Justin Dreyer

    Hey Justin,

    Thanks for the info on the Playback Toy page. We're going to get that cleaned up so I appreciate the help there.

    Also, thanks for helping me understand your use case here. Unfortunately, you're correct that EchoTouch can't do that right now. As far as future support, I will hardly ever say a hard 'no' to a feature request. There is always a chance that we may look into it. However, I can say that at this time we're not planning on doing so. I think the reasoning for that is less that it's entertainment vs architecture, but more so the fact that there are tons of features we want to implement and not enough time to do them all. As a result, we have to unfortunately pick and choose which features we prioritize. Because of that, I don't think we'll be hitting this one anytime soon.

    That said, I have logged your request so moving forward we do consider it when discussing our development plan.

    Thanks again!
    Shawn

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