Blocking and All fades

Question

Hi, I know what both of these do from experience but thought I'd post this as the manual is very confusing (to me at least). 
 In order to create a blackout (say) and have it maintain as a blackout no matter what I know to Block the entire cue. This works fine and any channels that I add later in previous cues won't track into my blackout cue. 
 However the manual confuses me as it states "Parameters that are not included in the cue are not impacted by the block instruction." This seems to suggest that any channels added afterwards (ie weren't in your blackout cue at the time you made it a Block cue) would be unaffected by the block flag and thus track into your blackout. 
 It seems to me that the manual should state that it will record a hard zero for every intensity channel that is not explicity another level for a cue block. 
 All of this is a Cue Block and not a Channel Block. 
 On the other hand All Fade seems to suggest that it WILL protect a recorded cue (say your blackout cue again) with hard data and never let any later added level track through into it when it states - " An allfade sends the intensity for all channels not included in the cue to zero." 
 In fact it appears (I think!) that All Fade will only fade out channels from OTHER cue lists to zero, or manual channels that are not captured 
 Similarly " The allfade instruction is useful as a quick cleanup, to get back to a known state on stage, without having to worry about what channels need to be set to zero." - I don't understand this as actually any channels subsequently added previous to an All Fade cue will simply track through that cue as normal. 
 I am sure that all these behaviours are exacly correct and as expected but for such an important concept on a tracking console they need to explained more concisely in the manual (certainly better than I am trying to explain it!) 
 Any others share my confusion or indeed use All Fade on a regular basis? 
 Cheers, Liam.

Druuka · Accepted Answer

I will try to make this as brief as possible. 
 Blocking is for recording. 
 A block cue will not let information travel(track) through it. 
 If a channel is not owned (used) by the cue stack it will not be affected by a block cue in that cue stack. If that channel is added in an earlier cue the block cue will populate with a hard 0 automatically. 
 Assert is for Playback. 
 An assert cue will make all channels contained within it playback. 
 
 Allfade is useful when you are using multiple cue lists and you want to take ANY channel NOT IN your allfade cue to 0. 
 If a channel is at 0 IN an allfade cue it will also go to 0. 
 
 Assert and Allfade become useful when you are using more than one cue stack. 
 
 I would suggest you try watching some of the online training tutorials that ETC has in their training center. 
 http://www.etcconnect.com/training 
 or you can look at their tutorials on youtube at 
 http://www.youtube.com/user/ETCVideoLibrary 
 
 I hope this helps clear things up.

jselander · Answer

I wanted to take this a step farther--Something that has become very confusing for some customers is blackout cues. 
 Lets say that I have three cues- 
 Cue 1: Channels 1-10 are at 100% 
 Cue 2: Channels 1-5 are at 0% 
 Cue 3: Blackout 
 Now lets say that Cue 2 has a time of 30 seconds and Cue 3 has a time of 0 seconds. 
 When I playback these cues, if given the full time to playback, then Cue 3 will blackout as expected. However, what if Cue 3 is called early. What if Cue 2 does not finish playing back? If Cue 2 has not completed before Cue 3 is executed, because those values are tracking, they will not blackout with everything else. 
 The solution to this common problem is to use the Assert function. As Andrew stated, you mostly use Assert with multiple cue lists--but it's also a way to verify that your blackout cues will always be a complete blackout. So if I put an Assert flag on Cue 3 (Its a softkey on Ion) then I go back into Cue 1. When I press go for Cue 2 and only let it play for a few seconds, then press GO for Q3, you should see that the blackout cue plays back correctly--everything goes to 0 in 0 seconds. 
 Make sense?