Scroller Calibration Editor

Hello Sarah!

WOW!!! I think this would be called "caught with the pants down"!!!!!

Fortunatly I've been working in a new theater with new clean gelstrings so I haven't needed to calibrate after programming. I have to admit that this comes as a big surprise!

I have always belived that the Congo had a good way of handling scrollers. It looked more or less like the Safari way. Beeing an ex-Safari user I was therefor quite easy to fool... In my opinion the frame-reference part is one of the basic things you expect when having a dedicated scroller-handeling...

I made a quick scan in the manual, and of course I didn't find anything about this. Only how to make and calibrate the rolls...

I hope this issue is among the top few on the wishlist. If not, it would be better to just clear out the whole thing about scrollerrolls and make templates for them. If you have to make palletes for them anyway, I guess a template with subranges would work just as good.

It would be good to hear others sharing my frustration here - or am I the only one missing this? (hope not...)

Thanks Sarah! I've just started making the default-play for a operahouse with about 250 scrollers in the standard rig. Got this just in time!

All the best!

Nils Haagenrud

I'm actually pretty surprised the topic has not come up before, but I guess if you have a new console, you are also likely to have new scrollers as well.  I am not so fortunate and am having to fix my scrollers quite frequently.

Sarah

Doesn't look like we're gonna get any comment from ETC either.

I guess they're better off not speaking to much about it...

Nils

Hi Nilsh,

Richard above is from ETC.

Regards.

Hi Guys

Sarah Clausen, the Congo product manager has been on holiday for one week and then traveling in Europe the following week. She is probably swamped with information to reply to. We always make an attempt to answer and will not dodge any issues. This forum should always be an open communication device. Please understand that Sarah bears the big burden of managing these types of issues and she has been out of pocket.

If I am reading it correctly, the question of this thread is whether or not scroller frames are referenced data (like Palette data) or absolute data (just plain DMX values.) The scroller calibration changes the DMX values output when a frame is selected manually - but as far as I understand it - the desk records the absolute DMX value to the preset. Therefore the calibration editor will not work when correcting an old scroll on a show that was cued while the scroll was new. The way to do this ofcourse is to setup all your scroll colors as palettes. Then you can bring up the palette and recalibrate one time - update the pallete and the show is updated.

The concept of making scroller frames referenced data directly is very interesting though. It is logical to do so since you know that the data will change over time. Then you could skip the step of making them into palettes and calling them up as palettes. The frame data would be like a new type of reference data, a "scroller palette" so to speak. It sounds like a good idea to me. The Congo team should consider this.

David Lincecum

In the last weeks, I have tried to find the time to investigate this closer to give you a proper answer. However, it has been pretty busy. That is why it has been a bit more quiet than usually. Finally, it seems like I will be able to give it a closer look.

The problem (and the reason why it isn't stored by reference) is that you should be able to store values in between scroller frames. If you were restricted to use only whole frames, we could have stored the frame number in the presets (and calibration would have worked on recorded data as well).

Currently, we store the raw values, which is the root of the problem.

I'll investigate if we could update the stored values when you modify the calibration for a device. This would work with the existing storage and make calibration work as it should.

I am not sure if this can be done in a safe way yet and if it could be implemented in the next version. However, since there has been a lot of discussions about this lately, I just want to let you know that we are working on a solution.

The scroller calibration system has now been changed. When you exit the Scroller Calibration Editor for a device, recorded frame values in presets  and palettes will now be updated to use the newly calibrated values. (Values between frame values won't be affected.)

This means that it should now be possible to use the calibration like you want.

This change will be released together with the next major Congo release. More information about delivery dates will be given shortly.

That's excellent news Anders.  Thank you so much!

 Sarah

Wow!

Thanks a lot Anders!

This really made my week!

Nils

Dear all,

being quite annoyed when working with my scrollers, I found this old post that deals with exactly my problem.

The online-help says, this was fixed in 5.0. We are using 5.1 and I still end up with my palettes NOT updating after the calibration. Am I missing a confirmation or something else?

By the way: When creating my palettes I stepped through the scroller roll using # WHEEL KEY, so I don't think it's possible that there were some half-colours in my palettes.

Thanks for an advice,

Mario

This should be working fine since 5.0 so there is something strange happening here.

Can you email your showfile to congo (at) etcconnect.com along with a short description of the problem - Which scrollers you've tried to recalibrate, and which Presets/Palettes did not accept the new values.

It would be even better if you could send a 'before' and 'after' version of the showfile - one of the ".001" through ".009" auto-backups of the show are likely to be a 'before ' version.

Are your palettes recorded by Device or By Device Type? Color palettes default to By Device Type, which means only one channel is used to determine the output level for any device of that type. To get the full benefit of scroller calibration and color palettes, the palette must be recorded by device, which stores unique data for each channel and will allow each channel to recall its calibrated information. I just tried this out in v6.0.2 and it is working there.

I hope this helps -

Thanks -

Sarah

Sarah, Richard,

thanks for the answers. It really seems that my original scroller roll definition is corrupt.

I was able to create a new play, patch nothing but my set of scrollers and create a new scroller roll. Then I imported this roll into my showfile and everything seems fine.

However I'll send you the showfile if you wanna try some bugfixing...

Thanks, Mario