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We just went through our first production using and ION, and we were generally quite pleased with the console.
However, we still have to figure out the most elegant way to deal with moving lights in cues. We had about 120 conventional fixtures, 6 with scrollers, plus 4 VL-1000s and 3 Studio Colours. Patching, palettes, cueing, and moving effects were all quite easy and straightforward.
However, both the designer and myself are used to lighting software (AVAB Safari in my case) that automatically discards attribute changes (NIPs in ETC-speak) that are not saved with an intensity level. In other words, when setting a cue one can bring up a moving light, move it into a position, play with colours and gobos – and then decide not to use the ML in that cue, returning the intensity level to zero. In such a case, the NIPS are not recorded with the cue – unless one deliberately decides to record them. The same thing happens if one tries out the scrollers in a cue and then discards them. This avoids a lot of unwanted noise from the rig.
We discovered that the ION records all NIP moves – even when the fixture is ultimately not on for the cue. We wound up with a lot of ‘blind noise’ and spent a long time in spreadsheet mode cleaning out these unwanted moves, gobo and colour changes in dark fixtures.
How do folks usually deal with this? From perusing the manual, it looks like selecting the movers and scrollers and issuing a SNEAK before recording each cue would deal with this. Any other advice would be welcome.
I should mention that the basic cues were laid in with Tracking on, but many intervening cues were recorded later in Cue Only mode. We do a lot of plays in which the script is developed in the rehearsal process, so there is a lot of tweaking during the production period.
Your advice will be welcome. Thank you.
Paul Court
Humber College, Toronto
