Repatching an Entire Show

As ueliriegg says load the old show file and remove the addresses.

Then depending on what you've been changing, rather than re patching it from scratch you can then merge in patches from a current show file. You can either just do a simple merge of the patches or if you use the advanced option on the file -> merge you can pick the channels you want to merge in and give them different channel number eg you might do advanced merge patch start 1 end 500 target 1001. To load up all your channel patches into channels 1001 thru 1500.

That would leave all you original channels just as they were and you can then use the swap address soft key in patch to copy the patch data for the channels ie 1 swap_address 1001 should take the patch info from the new show file we imported into channel 1001 and put it in channel 1

This is all great, but I was hoping for a non-data-entry way of working. Since when I patch a new show I import LW and it takes all of 30 seconds. Repatching a 500+ channel rig by hand takes considerably longer (which is what I ended up doing).

The best work-around was to patch a blank show file with the new LW and then merge in everything other than patch from the old show file, but since I had used some custom profiles I was too worried about missing a step.

Yes what I was trying to explain is how you can do it without having to do anything manually

Open your old show, clear all the patch addresses as ueliriegg said "Chan 1 thru 5000 At Enter"

Then just use merge from your new patch file and choose only to merge patches. If you just do that you would achieve something better than your work-around as you wouldn't loose your custom profiles (you would just have to select them on the fixtures they applied to if they were not used on those fixtures in the new profile)

I was then giving you an additional option if you wanted to manage the process more carefully where you could merge in parts of the latest patches and see what you were doing in each step.

In my example you were not having to do each channel separately you could type in patch 1 thru 500 swap_address 1001 and it would have copied in the addresses for all 500 fixtures. In this command it wouldn't overwrite the types so the custom profiles would still be on the channels they were before.

Yes what I was trying to explain is how you can do it without having to do anything manually

Open your old show, clear all the patch addresses as ueliriegg said "Chan 1 thru 5000 At Enter"

Then just use merge from your new patch file and choose only to merge patches. If you just do that you would achieve something better than your work-around as you wouldn't loose your custom profiles (you would just have to select them on the fixtures they applied to if they were not used on those fixtures in the new profile)

I was then giving you an additional option if you wanted to manage the process more carefully where you could merge in parts of the latest patches and see what you were doing in each step.

In my example you were not having to do each channel separately you could type in patch 1 thru 500 swap_address 1001 and it would have copied in the addresses for all 500 fixtures. In this command it wouldn't overwrite the types so the custom profiles would still be on the channels they were before.