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    David Buffham
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Reference Mark cue-level delay?


I just worked on a show where marking had to be precisely controlled due to proximity of fixtures to the audience and the noise they make when marking, i.e. generally couldn't get away with just Mark Earliest, and marking had to be restricted to specific cues where music covered the noise.

The problem with this was with timing. Any lights that were already out started moving as soon as each mark cue was executed, whilst those going out in the mark cue didn't move until they were each dark. We wanted all lights to mark together, just after the down fade of the mark cue was complete.

Obviously we we able to achieve this with discrete timing on each reference cue, but this was quite hard work since each mark cue was positioning lights to come in up to 6 reference cues. If the down time on any of the mark cues changed, the discrete delay timing on each reference cue had to be updated to compensate.

So a couple of questions:

- is there a better way of handling this with the current software? It seems that marking into a part cue with a cue-level delay on the marking part would actually have achieved what we wanted fairly easily??

- are there are future plans to allow a cue-level marking delay (or similar) to be specified, so that marking doesn't start on any fixture (whether going out in the mark cue or not) until the delay has elapsed? i.e. to achieve the same thing without using part cues? There are other cases where it'd be quicker to delay marking at a cue level rather than applying and maintaining discrete timing on the reference cues, and where marking in a separate part isn't possible. e.g. with Mark Earliest, lights may move too early due to after-glow and a cue-level means of compensating for this may be useful?

Parents

  • As far as the list of things to do goes, Mark Delay seems like it would be very low down as you can already easily achieve what you're wanting the desk to do.

    You actually answered your question in point 1, just place your Mark on a separate part and give the timings for that part a delay long enough to cover the lights which need to fade out. As soon as the delay completes Eos will see that all of the lights are out and they will all mark together.

    Am I missing something?

    Fairly high on the list is Mark Priority which will allow you to specify levels of priority for Marks. Mark Earliest will honour that, so in your scenario you can mark to a noisy cue whenever possible.

    Dan

  • in reply to dsmurfin
    Hi Dan,

    Using part cues for collecting marks would work for me, and I will start doing this on the next show. This means that marking would have to be to specified cue parts - i.e. I couldn't just Mark Earliest anymore, but that's probably a good thing?

    I guess the second part of my question was to be able to add a delay on a mark cue arising from Mark Earliest, i.e. where the mark wasn't applied in a separate part.

    I'm not familiar with the planned Mark Priority functionality - would you be able to expand on how that would work in this scenario?

    Thanks,
    David
Reply
  • in reply to dsmurfin
    Hi Dan,

    Using part cues for collecting marks would work for me, and I will start doing this on the next show. This means that marking would have to be to specified cue parts - i.e. I couldn't just Mark Earliest anymore, but that's probably a good thing?

    I guess the second part of my question was to be able to add a delay on a mark cue arising from Mark Earliest, i.e. where the mark wasn't applied in a separate part.

    I'm not familiar with the planned Mark Priority functionality - would you be able to expand on how that would work in this scenario?

    Thanks,
    David
Children
  • in reply to David Buffham
    Hi David,

    Marking to parts is certainly the easiest way to achieve what you're looking for. It allows you to focus your timing changes on the cue where you are moving the units rather than the reference cue which can always be a bit confusing. I don't use Mark Earliest often precisely because when you really care about where units mark it's not specific enough.

    If you've already created your mark cue on a part in advance, Mark Earliest will use that if it's the earliest mark point available. The current issue is that Mark Earliest will create a mark cue if one doesn't exist, I think that's already planned to throw an error.

    Without speaking out-of-turn (it's still not been spec'd yet) the essential theory of Mark Priority is that you can say this is a high priority mark, this is normal and this is low. When using Mark Earliest the desk could then try and place the Mark on a high priority one if it can then drop down if not. Essentially your loud scene changes could be high priority and your very quiet moments low priority meaning please only move here if I haven't given you anywhere else to mark.

    Cheers

    Dan
  • in reply to dsmurfin
    Hi David, Dan

    The only problem fixing David issue is the delay on Parts. If you Mark in Part 20 (which most people use) and add a 5 second delay to that part, any channels fading out over 5 seconds in part 1, will then be delayed 5 seconds before marking. So David will have the same problem so some channel Marking and then others 5 seconds later. I was 99% sure it worked this way and checking in 2.2.1 it still does.

    Delays on Marking has always worked this way and I don't consider it a bug. It's a way of getting around seeing a Mark, a 5k fading out and making etc etc.

    Something else which will help in the future is Marking to different parts in the same cue. At the moment you can only mark in one part, although sometimes you see more then one 'M'.

    Best workaround at the moment I can think of is doing the marking in a Follow On cue but use a hang time of 0. That way, the follow on will only execute once all the channels have faded out and then move on to the Mark.
  • in reply to Nick Simmons

    You're right of course Nick, I wasn't thinking about that properly. It's what I always use for TWs, or did until 2.3.

  • in reply to dsmurfin
    Thanks, guys. I understand the limitation with the delay time on the part cue, but am not so worried about it. What I was really trying to avoid was running the mark cue and having lights that were already out starting to move straight away. At least the part cue approach ensures that nothing moves until the delay time has elapsed on the mark part. If the lights then mark in two batches it's not so much of a problem. It may not be ideal in all cases, and there are other ways of handling those, but definitely better than what was happening with Mark Earliest.

    One other thing with Mark Earliest is that it seems a little inconsistent as to what it considers the earliest cue to be, for example:

    - Channel 1 is on in Q1, fades out in Q2, stays out until Q5: Mark Earliest on Q5 marks the channel in Q3.
    - Channel 1 is on in Q5, fades out in Q6, comes on in Q7: Mark Earliest on Q7 marks the channel in Q6.

    It's the first case that catches me out because I'd assume that the earliest cue for marking would be Q2. So although I thought I knew where Mark Earliest would apply the mark, I was getting cases where some lights were moving at the start of a scene rather than in the preceding scene change state. For me it's another reason in future to be very specific about where lights are marking, but I'm just interested in the rationale for the difference in the two cases above, in case it's useful in specific scenarios.

    Thanks,
    David
  • in reply to David Buffham

    Hi David,

    That's the intended behaviour, in some ways to prevent the delayed moves you've seen. Where possible the move is placed on the cue after the light has faded out. So in your first example there is time to fade the light in Q2, move in Q3 and restore in Q5. In your second example there is no 'dark' cue for the light to mark in, so the mark has to occur once the fade has completed on Q2.

    Does that help?

    Dan

  • in reply to dsmurfin
    Hi Dan,

    I completely understand why Q6 is used in the second case, but in the first case it seems more arbitrary whether Mark Earliest would use Q2 or Q3. I'm not saying Q3 is wrong, just seems inconsistent - but I'm sure there are good reasons. The Help text for Mark Earliest does state "... earliest possible cue in the show" - which logically is Q2 in that case.

    Anyway, now I know that's the logic I'll bear it in mind in future - though I'm definitely going to move away from Mark Earliest as much as possible, for the other reasons we've discussed in this thread.

    Thanks again,
    David
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