Let me begin by asking readers to forgive me the length of this post. I believe it is necessary to fully explain our situation.
I lead the Lighting ministry for our church (so yes, I'm a volunteer). Up until now, we have used an ETC Express 48/96 console, with a couple dozen conventional fixtures and 10 K-9 Bulldogs (BDs) for color changing on our backdrops and stage props. Each BD has been set up in 5-chan mode and programmed in the console as a 5-chan fixture. Our cues have no BD channels in them (tracking is off). Instead, we have created pile-on submasters whereby each sub is a full color scene, i.e., that has only BDs (all 10 BDs, i.e., all 50 channels) in it, and named for the scene (e.g., "Sunset" or "Daylight"). This allows us to effect different color changes by hand in concert with the feel and rhythm of each worship song. Color blends are achievable with this setup, and there is no need to worry about which sub "has control", because every channel in a sub is HTP.
Planning for the future, we recently purchased an ION console and my team underwent ETC-provided training for it. We have migrated our weekly show over to it, mostly. Fixture management, as anyone familiar with both consoles knows, is very different from that of the Express. Whereas the Express co-opted the channel paradigm for management of fixture attributes, and required consumption of a channel for each DMX address, the ION assigns a fixture type to a single channel, and manages the addresses associated with the attributes in the background.
On the ION, we're using our standard Bulldog-free cues to control our conventionals. We then have 10 channels each defined as an 8-chan BD type (the BDs are now in 8-chan mode). We have constructed the building blocks of groups, color palettes (by Type), and presets using these channels, whereby each preset is a group of BDs in a given color scene. Submasters have then been created using combinations of presets, and assigned to virtual faders, which we then control using our fader wing. The subs are all Additive, Proportional, HTP, Exclusive, and Independent. Again, tracking is off.
To clarify, a given BD sub on the ION has levels for ALL intensity and color attributes for ALL 10 fixtures (channels), similar to the Express.
The problem we have is that we can no longer blend or cross-fade our color scenes with the same freedom we had with the Express. There are a few anomalies we need to resolve:
- With one color sub active, introducing another into the mix blends to an extent, but not to the same level as we saw on the Express.
- A complete cross-fade to another sub leaves residual color from the now-out sub in the Live display.
- After introducing a second sub into the mix, if the first sub is lowered even 1% (and still above the intensity of the second), the second takes control. If the second is then removed from the mix, all color goes out completely, even though the first sub is still "active."
On the Express, with multiple subs active, none of them had "control". It was always an HTP scenario; the color combo/intensities always reflected the highest channel in effect for that attribute. Blending was very smooth and the order of introducing a sub into the Live scene was irrelevant.
I have a feeling these differences are due to the all-channel (HTP) fixture model of the Express vs the Intensity/Non-intensity (HTP/LTP) attribute model of the ION. Is there anything I can do, in terms of configuration and/or procedure, that can effect Express-similar behavior on the ION to resolve these issues?
There was a suggestion in the ControlBooth forum to abandon using fixture types on the ION and simply dedicate a separate channel to each fixture attribute as was done on the Express. But doing so completely negates one of the primary reasons we moved to the ION: ease of programming multi-attribute fixtures.
Greg Lacefield
