Manual controls fade timing

Question

Hi all, 
 My school is currently going through it's Christmas assemblies and due to their ad-hoc nature I don't have the ability to program anything beforehand. I have built a magic sheet with a load of groupings, palettes and effects which allows me to busk, but I am having issues with timings. 
 I would like to have the ability to hold my changes until a point. and then play them when I am ready. Currently I tried to do that using macros to change the manual controls, but what I found is that the changes in the manual controls timings don't follow, so say I 'cue' up a colour palette with a fade time of 10 minutes then change it to 3 to fade it in, they are still controlled by the 10 minutes one. 
 Any ideas on how I can implement something similar to this? 
 Thanks, 
 Matt

Bartfly · Accepted Answer

Hi Matt, What I do to get around this (though this can end up being quite complex) 
Is set up a Q list that contains Lights in a selected Preset, sharing the same number for Palettes (ie Preset 999 contains I,F,C & B Palettes 999) and in Q 2 of said list have the lights stored in a Preset 998 (or whatever) and have a magic sheet with the standard Palettes you use underneath Macro (MS Object) buttons that copy say ColorPalette 1 to 999, or Focus Palette 3 Copy_To 999 (or 998) 
You can even just have macros that say Copy_To 999 (or whatever) under or above your palette selections, so you can use same magic sheet for driving channels manually or use the copy to function to 'set up your next GO. 
 
Hope that makes sense, as I said it can end up being quite complex but if you only have 2 Q's and a myriad of Palettes you can busk a look onstage before it gets there. 
 
Timing on Cues set too how you like it (or utilise the up/down fade of the master)

ChrDuda · Answer

I think I once set up a system that does what you want. I never finished it though and never used it. I just wanted to see if it was possible. 
 It looked something like this: 
 
 What I did was set up some color palettes that were applicable to all my fixtures and also a number of groups (say Back/Sides/Backdrop/etc). 
 I then set up the Magic Sheet you see above, where I would choose a color palette (1.) and the group I wanted to apply it to. (2.) The group buttons where actually macros that would copy the color palette I chose to a "placeholder" palette. Those placeholder palettes would then be applied to the groups in the specified sneak time (3.) all at once. 
 So I would choose green for group 1 for example. The green palette would be copied to the placeholder for group 1 (say CP 101). Red for group 2. The red palette would be copied to the placeholder for group 2 (say CP102). And so on and so forth. 
 When I pressed one of the Sneak macros, they would apply CP101 to Group 1 in the given time, CP102 to Group 2 in the given time, etc. 
 I never got to expanding the system beyond color palettes, but it will be applicable to any other palette as well. This way you should be able to prepare a look with all the palette-types the board offers and then make it happen with the sneak macro. You might reach a point though, where applying all those palletes creates a noticable delay. Can't confirm that though, as I've never tried it. Just a thought.