I have just finished teching my first show on the Ion/Eos (an Ion in my case) and thought that an LD's thoughts about the product might be helpful.
1. In general, I like the consloe a great deal. It has a number of cool new features that will prove to be powerful and time saving tools as I get to know this product. It also retains enough of the functionality of the Obsession line that I felt pretty comfortable.
2. The Auto-marking feature proved to be very useful for me. It seems to work just as it should and prepped my fixtures in the previous cue with no effort. Bravo! One suggestion however would be the option to specify the cue that Auto-Marks or at least to force it one cue further back in the stack. It is quite concievable that 2 cues might be close enough in time that a fixture might not have sufficient time to prep before becoming live. I know that I can record the focus parameters in an earlier cue but then updating in the live cue doesn't seem to update the Mark.
3. I like the independent time feature much more than I thought I would. It will eventually probably eliminate my need for part cues which I never much liked anyway.
4. I only began to explore the Palettes, Focus, Intensity, Color etc. Seem like very good tools. However, I wonder if I place them in a cue, then alter the settings in that cue and then Update the cue, have I altered the Pallette in all of it's occurences? That would seem to me to be a mistake.
5. There are enough new features and concepts in this console that LD's are going to need some help getting on top of the capabilities. While that is not a bad thing, we could use a little help. The fact that channels now have multiple parts really condenses my hookup and I like that. A simple glossary of terms and ideas (a "hot sheet") would be helpful as would a brief tutorial.
6. I have a couple of seemingly trivial, but significant (to me) gripes. The first is that the displays that I have at the RVI don't always mirror what the board operator is seeing. I realize that I can go to my own displays from the RVI but my point is that I want to see what the operator is doing in real time. I would learn the console more quickly and would have the comfort that I might prevent an error if I could see what was going on. The operators DO NOT want the LD to be making changes on their own, so the lighting table philosophy will probably be "hands-off" for the LD.
7. The second gripe is the hard-to-read color that has been chosen for tracked levels. I find that I cannot distinguish between 30 and 50 from more than about 2 feet away. Could we PLEASE get a slightly brighter purple color? PLEASE? I should not have to ask the operator, "what level is 27 at?". I just do not have the time in tech to spend on this. Either a brighter color or a way to customize colors would solve this. I think you'll find a lot of LD's having trouble with this one.
8. I miss the +10/-10 keys from the Obsession. Is there a way to do this?
RPaulsen: