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    Richard J
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Mapping Parameters to U1-U3

Hello again,

Today's silly question regards assigning parameters to the U1-U3 selections.

I'm looking into using this as a quick way of using custom masking (thanks Jeremy)

My question is this: Should the parameters mapped to U1-U3 be template-dependent ? -ie, you can set them up individually for each type of fixture, just as the regular 'Focus', 'Colour', 'Beam' parameters are mapped on a fixture by fixture basis ? -rather than setting them globally, for all fixtures, as seems to be the case at present ?

A cool side-effect of this might be that, rather than having to trawl through the list of all parameters ever invoked, only those applicable to the actual fixture you have selected would be available in the drop-down list, saving time and confusion.

Any thoughts ? -or am I being silly again ?

Thanks

 Richard

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  • Hi Richard -

    At the moment, you have access to all the defined parameters in Congo, rather than the truncated list you suggest. I would say that this could end up being a 50/50 choice since you might have U1-U3 set up based on your preferences when using a number of different fixtures (you may not want parameters "jumping around" based on the current patch).

    My suggestion is to use Congo's alphabetic search function in these long lists. Whenever you open a list like these, you might notice that the alpha-keyboard appears on the masters. This is so that you can search for items in the list based on their starting letter. For example, if you wanted to find Cyan, you could just press C until cyan gets selected. Each press of C will go to the next item in the list that starts with "c". Make sense? It makes it much easier to deal with these long lists.

    I hope that helps -

    Thanks!

    Sarah 

  • in reply to sclausen
    Hi again Sarah,

    My desire was to set up the U1-U3 parameter groups to allow for quick and easy custom masking. (particularly for masking beam parameters so that you can set up default groups that will allow you to quickly access 3 default mask setups for, say Gobo 1 only, Gobo 2 only, Gobos 1 & 2 only). In order to do this, with the limit of 12 parameters per group, it would only work for this function if the U1-U3 parameter groups are defined on a fixture by fixture basis. (Would this be possible by writing a custom template ?)

    My point about having access to all of the available parameters was that, while it makes sense to have access to all the parameters if the U1-U3 parameter groups are set globally, if they were to be set by fixture, you would only need access to the parameters pertaining to that specific device. -The benefit I was hinting at was that there are sometimes similarly-named-but-different parameters for different fixtures and only being able to chose from the list of relevant parameters would reduce the risk of error. (Perhaps it would be possible to highlight the relevant parameters in the longer list according to what types of device/s you had selected at a particular time ?)

    Does this make sense -or am I making a rod for my own back here ?

    -I take your point on the alphabetic search function, have found it very useful when importing templates, etc...

    Thanks again

    Richard
  • in reply to Richard J

    Hi Richard -

    If you would like to "normalize" your fixture templates to reduce the number of unique parameter names, you can actually do that. We won't do it too much because we don't know whose preferences to defer to. However, there's nothing that says you can't do it for your own rig(s). Each template is editable, as you know, and so long as you keep the parameter names within the proper categories (more for your own sanity than anything else) you can rename to your heart's delight. This could help you to fit your custom masks within the 12-encoder space of the U1-U3 categories.

    Does this help?

    Thanks much -

    Sarah
     

  • in reply to sclausen
    Hi Sarah, 

    That might be a good idea and could work for us -although there would be quite a lot of work in re-writing all of the profiles !

    The only thing that might scupper it would be when you introduce things like Media Servers which have dozens of parameters in te 'Beam' Group -maybe a more effective use of the U1-U3 groups... but if the U1-U3 groups could be mapped fixture by fixture...

    Thanks again

    Richard 
    (laughing at myself, again...)
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  • in reply to sclausen
    Hi Sarah, 

    That might be a good idea and could work for us -although there would be quite a lot of work in re-writing all of the profiles !

    The only thing that might scupper it would be when you introduce things like Media Servers which have dozens of parameters in te 'Beam' Group -maybe a more effective use of the U1-U3 groups... but if the U1-U3 groups could be mapped fixture by fixture...

    Thanks again

    Richard 
    (laughing at myself, again...)
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