ION Ecoder wheels and MAC 700's

I too have experienced this problem with 700s (although I suspect it may not be limited to this fixture?)

It happens if you select a channel, hit "form" (or otherwise) and then use a next/last function on an encoder, as pawpaw said in his post.

The desk seems to be sending the "next" command to the overall form category (or possibly even the whole unit) so every single attribute advances by one step - placing a gobo in, strobing, iris, animation, prism...... giving the wierd effect you have seen.

Perhaps this situation has been fixed in a more recent software version though - mine is a little old. It can be avoided by pressing enter after selecting channels so that you aren't calling up commands when you hit Form/Image etc but it's still odd that it doesn't realise you want to just "Next" the one feature.

Cheers!

Leo

What software release are you all working with?

a

It happens in the latest release for me.

Hi everyone.  I'm assuming all (or at least most) of you are using ION, and this problem is occuring when changing encoder pages, specifically beam pages?

When you press one of the encoder pages, the LCD screen re-populates to the selected page of encoders (as we all expect).  There is a nifty trick that you may or may not be aware of where you can use the encoder keys to post their respective catagory to the command line.  ie, pressing the encoder [focus] button will post "focus" to the command line, [colour] will post colour, and [image][form] or [shutter] will post "beam" to the command line.

The advantage of this is it saves having to use the mouse, or reach that extra bit further to the touch screens to select focus, colour, or beam and is the equivalent to the catagory hard keys on the eos which are located just above the key pad, at the base of the right hand touch screen. 

This is also the case with the encoders themselves.  Say you want to send the iris home and one of the encoders infront of you is posted to the iris, a short press and release will post [iris] to the command line.  Again, I find myself using this alot to save having to reach to the touchscreen or reach for the mouse.

There are two ways to use this feature.  Firstly, having a channel posted to an unterminated command line, and then tapping and encoder, or using an encoder paging key will post the parameter or category to the cmd line.  Alternatively, having a channel selected and pressing the paging key twice will post the category to the cmd line.

While this is a handy feature, it can sometimes trip you up (well... it trips me up from time to time).  Say you have a Mac700 selected and want to change the animation wheel, and you currently have pan and tilt on the encoder.  You will press the [image] paging key once and probably get gobo or some such, and so will press the button again.  This WILL post [beam] to the command line.  Same goes if you accidently tap an encoder.

I have found I will press [image] or [form] and especially [shutter] several times to get to the page I'm after and will have posted [beam] to the command line without noticing.  I might play with the shutters, or change the iris and then the LD will say "na, don't like that. Can you open the iris up please".  I'll have iris on the encoder so will press the encoder and then press the home key.  Because i have unknowingly posted [beam] to the command line i will not only clear the iris, but also the gobo, the shutters and any other beam data. (yay for undo).  After I do it once or twice, I pay more attention to what's on the command line, especially after playing with encoders

Could this behavior be the cause of your problems? 

Cheers.  BFJ

Good input Brent.  An FYI about 1.5.  On Ion, if you use the encoder to access different functions, or if you use the paging keys, the function posts to the command line (this is done so that if you were trying to access a parameter or parameter category for timing or manual control via the command line... you don't have to use the CIA tiles....  If you move the encoder, or access any of the functions provided by the action, we will clear the parameter from the command line.  So you won't get tripped up so much by having "dangling" commands.    That should help a lot.

a

Good input Brent.  An FYI about 1.5.  On Ion, if you use the encoder to access different functions, or if you use the paging keys, the function posts to the command line (this is done so that if you were trying to access a parameter or parameter category for timing or manual control via the command line... you don't have to use the CIA tiles....  If you move the encoder, or access any of the functions provided by the action, we will clear the parameter from the command line.  So you won't get tripped up so much by having "dangling" commands.    That should help a lot.

a