Hello,
I am coming from a background of being familiar with 3D animation and am coming to light designing for theatre, specifically for a tracked musical. Something I've found is that there isn't a cue editor screen that helps me program 20-30 cues at specific times after an initial "Go" button is pressed to start the song through MIDI at Qlab. I am able to achieve what I want by using .1-second follows with precise delays, but it's just not an ideal way to work. It's not an ideal way to work because I don't want to think about this like it's a cue list. I would much rather think about it like keyframes in animation. I think the critical difference is that theatre is all about cueing (so live things happening on stage triggers events in the board through direct observation of a human stage manager), while what I'm doing is no different from animation (there is one "go" and everything else that happens is completely predetermined exclusively by timecode). So when your events are triggered exclusively by timecode, you really want an editor that allows you to create and modify events, not snapshots/cues. So a cue is a snapshot, or a look. In animation world, you never, ever want to think about things like separate "looks" (because you want start/finishes of movements to overlap). You want an editor that allows you to manipulate things with exclusive respect to time. What you want is a scrub bar, honestly. A scrub bar is impossible and completely contradictory to the idea of live cueing, but it's a staple of animation.
Is there validity to the idea of wanting to have an event editor specifically designed to think about controlling lights the way you control an armature in 3d animation?
In other words, the exact thing I'm talking about is a dope sheet. I want a dope sheet. What a dope sheet does is it's basically a graph that tells you exactly when each parameter is changed with respect to time. It's unlike the blind spreadsheet because the blind spreadsheet thinks about cues, not timecode. I need something that thinks about timecode because working with cues that are automated to fire at specific times forces me to compartmentalize the song and I definitely don't like doing that. I don't like doing that because that's not how you write music.
I want to be able to think about time like it's a constantly flowing river. I don't want to think about time like it's all these different, separate chunks.
Ideally, there would be an editor screen that lets me set the length of the song, the cue number that fires this entire sequence I'm about to create for this song, and a workspace with a scrub bar that lets me create keyframes. I want to be able to say this channel's intensity should be 0 at this second and it should be at 75% 50 seconds later, and I want the interpolation to be quadratic. And I want that to be completely separate from all other events. This editor would deal with effects by allowing you to just drag and drop an effect to a channel and control whether that effect is off or on at a certain time with a simple on/off button. "Effect on" and "effect off" actions would be represented on the dope sheet just like any other keyframe. There would also be a way to load the actual music into this editor you you can scrub through the light show and the music in unison. The board would obviously need a way to output sound though of course, which isn't something all boards can do, I don't believe.
The advantage of this is that it would make it 10x easier for people to get interested in creating advanced light shows in theatre. I'm noticing that very few light designers seem to do this sort of thing in theatre and I think that may be because the light board software is not at all conducive to this type of programming. It's great for busking and for cueing, but it's clearly not designed for thinking about events exclusively with respect to timecode. This is a very valuable idea to incorporate into this software because I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but there are a lot of theatre musicals that are tracked. Not having a dedicated editing screen to take advantage of tracked music seems to be a huge missed opportunity. Doesn't make sense not to borrow from animation world. This might be a possible reason why lighting in so many theatre musicals is so boring. It's not being thought about the correct way. If the music in your musical is tracked, there's really no good reason not to put on a proper light show.
I see all these super advanced light shows on YouTube with hundreds of movers that are synced flawlessly to music and I don't know what software they're using, but I seriously doubt they're thinking about what they're doing in terms of cues/snapshots. You can only be that effective with your synchronization if you're thinking about it like an animator. I mean think about syncing individual light flashes that happen at the very end of the song—you want to wait through the entire song every time you want to check your timing just for the last part? God, please give me a scrub bar!
