Hi everyone!
I've started today with preprogramming my show on Eos (I'm new to the desk) and I encountered a serieus problem with the personality file for the Studio Due CS-4. The intensity and pan/tilt parameters do not show on encoder wheels, why is this? This makes it almost impossible to program focus and intensity palletes and effects. Is there a better personality file available for the Studio Due CS-4?
How can I make this work? Please reply to this post, I'm on a production deadline.
Kind regards,
Mike Evers
There is a bit of learning curve involved, but you can make a custom profile for the fixture. Fortunately, there is no color or beam info to deal with, but the multiple Pans might get tricky.
I am assuming from the website pics that there is one Tilt and four Pans. Is that right? How many DMX outputs does it use?
Because I'm new to the desk, I would really appreciate a solution for this problem from ETC. I think more lighting operators will face these programming difficulties so it would be nice to get a solution for now and in the future! Could ETC develop a new personality file for the CS-4 and mail me?
I encountered exactly the same problems with CS-4s on Eos, and needed to created a custom profile for them to be controllable:
1) I mapped the Intensity channels to Color R,G,B & W. Although this sounds weird, this worked out OK because the console provided mastering of the RGBW outputs via the intensity encoder. So for each CS-4 channel the intensity wheel controlled the overall output of the 4 lamps, and the RGBW parameters give me individual lamp control when I needed it. It also meant that [Select All][Out] commands, etc.., did black-out my entire rig. It also meant that I could run a lamp chase using the RGBW parameters, and use the intensity wheel to control the overall level of that chase.
2) I mapped the 4 Pan channels to beam attributes, just so that they appeared on the Beam encoders. (Interestingly, Ion has a Focus page of encoders whereas Eos doesn't). Global Pan / Global Tilt were just mapped to the normal dedicated pan/tilt encoders.
The custom profile we created did make the fixtures infinitely more controllable, and I would guess this is probably the best way forwards in the short term. I've attached a screenshot of the profile we created for the fixtures. The attribute mapping and home values should largely make sense. The higher DMX channels (17-20) are just mapped to random attribute names, and to be honest I didn't change these attributes at all - though they were also available on encoders if required. The virtual brightness, saturation, hue & intensity parameters are added in automatically by the console.
Hope this helps - I'll also try finding you a show file with the profile in that you could import if you wanted.
Hi, I've attached a 1.4.1 show file that just contains a customised CS-4 personality as described above. You may want to try this file and see if it makes controlling the CS4s any easier, and you can always tweak the fixture profile as you need to. If it works for you should be able to import the fixture from this show file into your own show file, but I'd be cautious with this and make sure you have adequate backups of your show file before you try importing anything into it.
This is very much a workaround rather than a solution, particulary for the multiple pans - but I have used it on a show of my own and it did work out a lot better than the default CS4 profile would have done.
David, thanks much for your help. Guys, just to let you know, issues like these are being addressed in an upcoming release. Primarily intended to address multiple intensity fixtures, that release will add a solution of fixtures that have multiple instances of the "same named" parameter.
