Building a show on Ion XE20

Question

Hello, 
 The school I teach at recently had a renovation of the auditorium complete with 100% LED fixtures and the Ion XE 20 desk. I had a few hours of training last summer (2023) all of which left my head so I recently dug into the EOS tutorials on the ETC websites. I believe I understand a lot of the basics but the idea of building a show is a little daunting. 
 I'm starting from a show file where all the fixtures are patched. I haven&rsquo;t had a ton of time to spend at the desk - just spare moments. I&rsquo;m at the point where I need to start building the show. I&rsquo;ve been making some desired looks but need to decide how to store them since I&rsquo;m not really ready for a cue list. 
 Can anyone suggest a work flow? I thought maybe I should record my looks to a secondary cue list then use those cues to start building the actual cue list that will follow the show. Is there a better way to do this? It is for a stage play. 
 Many thanks for your help! 
 Eric

Geoff Crisp · Answer

Hi Eric and welcome to the dark side or should that be the light side. 
 There are a quite a few ways to do this and there is no right way as long as you get the desired outcome. There are some better ways and some not so better. 
 One way is to just record cues in to a cue list. Maybe use the cue only setting and not tracking mode when learning as tracking will mess you up a little bit at the start. 
 Another way is to record the looks into a sub. To do this make the look with your fixtures and then (i would reselect them by using [select active] [select active] (yep twice) which will put select active nonsub on the cmd line the record sub XX. You can assign that sub to a fader. bring up that fader and then record a cue. then pull down the fader and raise the next one and record that as the next cue. 
 If you go down the recording cues as you go, remember that once there is a cue in existence you can copy that to another by [cue]x [copyto] y 
 If you want to change a cue once it is recorded either adding something or removing something then use the [update] button. This will bring up a table of the changes you wish to update for review before pressing enter to confirm. 
 
 I hope this helps you to get started. I am sure there many other ways to do what you want and the best way to learn is by spending a little time each day watching videos, reading the workbooks and trying things. After a little while it will become easier and then you can dive into the software deeper and get confused all over again 
 Regards 
 Geoff

Building a show on Ion XE20

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