EOS/ION and Hippotizer

I have programmed the Hippotizer v3 with the ION. There is alot to be said on the side of knowing your way around the Hippo itself to help with understanding what the console is actually DOING.

Aside from that, on the console side, remember that each master and each layer is it's own fixture, not just one hippo fixture.

Specifically to programming, if you are just running it through the functions without a bunch of presets, for me it was most helpful to know how to page the encoders with the number pad since you will have around 15 to navigate through to get to all the functions. What i'm talking about here if you aren't familiar is holding the NIP button (color, focus beam) and pressing the page number you'd like on the number pad to jump to that page. Once you start playing with it you'll start to remember pages you need to use frequently.

Other than that, I didnt really have any hangups with the console controlling the hippo. Be aware which DMX mode the hippo is in as well (Always update or not), because you can override console control in the GUI in one mode.

Best of luck.

-J

Thanks for your reply.

It appears the demo is now called off, as the purchase price for the HIPPO is out of his range at this time.  I do look forward to playing the with this device in the future, with the ION or another console.

I am still interested in other peoples hints/tips/tricks to running the HIPPO on an ION, as it may come up again in the future.

Hi, I've just finished working on a show with Eos and Hippotiser and got on OK with it. I would echo what has been said before and try to get your most regularly used attributes onto Beam Palettes or Presets to save a lot of time navigating through Encoder pages. On my show I had 14 pages of Form encoder, which was a nightmare. The tip to shortcut to specific page numbers is good, however the page numbers do change as other fixtures get added to the patch...

Other than that it was a simple as programming any other multi-attribute fixture. The Zoo Keeper interface to the Hippo is very good for figuring out which attribute on the Eos maps to which attribute on the Hippo and what the attribute value 'means' to the Hippo, as not all of the attributes are properly labelled within the Eos profile. I did find that there are a couple of attributes in the Hippo's shape generator that don't seem to be controlled by DMX - namely parameter 4 & 5 (I think). We had to set these on the Hippo GUI rather than the Eos. I'm not sure yet whether this was a Eos or Hippo issue, and we were running 3.0.12 on the Hippo and 3.0.11c profile on the Eos (which was the latest one in 1.4.4) so it may be something to do with that.

Control of Hippo over Art-Net was straightforward to set-up and patch on the Eos - one channel for master and one channel for each layer. We had one problem with one item in the show where the Hippo was very, very slow to change it's output upon an Eos snap cue, and we need to look at this in more detail back at our office to see whether it was a Eos, Art-Net, Hippo or media issue. Other than that it was all very solid.

The hardware variant of Hippo that we were using was the HippoCritter, which although compact worked really well driving Color Web and is ideal for large scale pixel mapping. I would think that Ion and HippoCritter would make an ideal combination for small scale video control and any pixel mapping tasks.

Did you use and custome encoder pages? This has proved to be a useful tool when using a media server on an ION/EOS.

Ben