Animate A Digital clock

I tried something similar as a thought experiment about a decade ago. At that time, the console lost time running the cues. It may be better to use Show Control and the RTC to trigger the cues. My example was posted to the "Show us your Magic Sheets" thread.

community.etcconnect.com/.../65685

A few thoughts:
Pixelmapping might be a solution where you ramp up the playback speed of the file. However, syncing it up with an RTC might be difficult. - So not ideal.

The attached showfile contains some examples with the following approach (MS 1): 
Using step-based effects for MM and SS with matching timing and 'Repeat on Go'. A Cue list for HHs. The Cues are triggered by a RTC Eventlist 1. So, every full hour, there is a sync point.

During the play you might need to sync that up in advance. For a speed up, you could simply add a cue inbetween the hours and change the FX rate (The rates have to be adjusted to match the base 6 or 10).

Hope! That! might give you some inspiration!

During my testing, I could not detect any misalignment with the timing when using the effects.

Pixelmap Video File:

Clock Display Test 2026-01-29 22-36-44.esf2

Thanks for your input, show files and the 24h long video...

I should have been more clear about the exact setup. 

Seconds are not needed, we have only hours, minutes and the two dots, blinking for the seconds.

We have 4 acts and each of them starting at a given "inplay" time, e. g. 20:34. So I think at a FX related approach it would be difficult to start at the right time.

With skaters dad's cue lists with macros I can start at a specific time and speed up the clock with a simple macro that change the follow time on the running minutes cue list on the fly, hoping that follow 0 will be fast enough to reach the target time in the given time the set change will last. 

Hey sofad.

as sk8rs_dad mentioned, follow or hang times are IMO not really suitable for accurate timings. Just recently in 3.3.4, I found issues with hang timings being off by several seconds over a long cuelist, which I reported and were fixed in 3.3.5. Still, timings can be off for one second every minute. I would personally try to use an RTC trigger or even just a looping free-wheeling internal timecode to trigger the cuelists. 

My idea on how to do this would be to have a 60 cue long list, which gets triggered by a looping Timecode every second with wrap-around enabled. Every time the list jumps back to Cue 1, you can have a Execute that Goes Cuelist 2 where your minutes live. And every time the seconds wrap around, the minutes get incremented by one.

This way, you can also just disable the Showcontrol list, which essentially freezes the clock. Then you can set your Hours, Minutes and seconds however you want, and then enable the List again to unfreeze the clock.

Hope this helps. 

Excelent idwa. I would do it mostly the same way.

The speeding up is still not solved.

-‐-

while it is still a theater play, you can again go with a follow/hang.

The slightly uncorrect timming should be still ok.

And than yiu can only speed up the Minute-list with rate.

And stopping would just be hitting the stop key on that list. 

We are now in the final rehearsals stage, when also the light programming happen.

My approach now is to have four background cue lists for every digit. The minutes will be the master list with 60s follow times, looping and at the end triggering a go on the next digit cue list via macro. 

I'm using macros to set the needed start time, change the follow times on the fly to speed the clock up and a macro to set the brightness via an inhibit sub.

This leads to several problems... 

1)

I wasn't aware that it's not possible to execute several macros in one cue via good old cue parts. Doesn't make sense to me... 

I could wrap all macros I need to start for several situations in another macro, but I fear it would be far too cluttered with all the different combinations needed... 

2)

Another problem is the fast forward. It works, but it's not precise enough. At one time I need to fast forward from 2:22 to 20:36 in around 30 seconds...  The fastest I can set the follow times is at 0.01s, which leads into around 40s needed.

3)

The macro programming itself is also a question of it's own... 

I need to set the right cue for all the digits, easy to do with goto cuelist/number enter. But on the master cue list I need to run the cue list from that point. Cue cuelist/number fader load enter, followed by a go_sequencerlist cuelist enter works here, but it will only works if the fader load part is in blue (what stands the blue text in macros for?), but not I select fader load from the parameter list. 

Go_sequencerlist I can't find at all at the parameter list, I need to press the go key to get the parameter into the macro programming and delete the unneeded parts afterwards. 

4)

I work in cue_only mode and I need to exclude the clock digits from every cue record manually.

Is there a way to exclude (several) fixtures from recording, like it's possible with sub's? 

sofad said:

Another problem is the fast forward. It works, but it's not precise enough. At one time I need to fast forward from 2:22 to 20:36 in around 30 seconds...  The fastest I can set the follow times is at 0.01s, which leads into around 40s needed.

You might consider just having a set of cues that represent your faster times.   DMX frame rate is only 44 per second, so you cant actually update the display 100 times a second anyway. 

So just have a 6 step cue list to do the 10 second digit increments with the last digit with the segments set to a not full brightness based on what percentage of 0 to 9 that segment would be on.  

Hi sofad.

Lots to unpack so let's get right into it.

1) Yea this is a pretty unfortunate limitation of eos. You will have to fuse all your macros together. This can be done using a master macro with "Macrobutton 101# Macrobutton 102#......). Maybe its possible for you to have all your Macro actions in a single macro and dumb the things down a bit. I assume your Macro should read something like (Goto Cue 1/3# Goto Cue 2/4# Goto Cue 3/0# Goto Cue 4/2# for the time 20:43 right?

2) Since (how I understand it) you separated your clocks cuelists from your main show cuelist, you should just be able to GoTo Cue (like I did in the Macro example above) without needing any speeding up. This would IMO be much cleaner than changing follow times on the fly. 

3) In eos, not all commands can be found in the macro editor directly. Some can only be learned into a Macro. This includes stuff like submaster presses, fader movements, and Cuelist gos. These usually appear in blue and can be edited after being learned into a macro. If you learned a Macro with Go Sequencelist 1, you can copy it and swap the 1 with a 2 to go list 2.

4) You can exclude cuelists from recording into your main list. In Tab 16 Cuelist Index, you can exclude Cuelists from Recording, like you can with subs. Also its probably wise to have a Channel filter on your clock cuelists to avoid recording other Channels into your clock lists. 

Obviously, I'm not aware of your production challenges and limitations. I hope this still helps.

Regarding 1: Macros get executed in the main cue, not in parts, but you can have multiple macros there. They will get executed sequentially.

Regarding 2: As Mike has mentioned output speed is limited by DMX spec (which in turn inspired sACN): You only get a DMX packet sent every 22ms (that's 0.022 sec), in that respect follow (and fade) times shorter than than 0.01 couldn't be represented by output anyway.

Regarding 3: empiire has all the answers

Regarding 4: Ways to solve this: Exclude from Record (on the clock cuelists), channel filters (on main and clock cuelists) and partitions on your cuelists (main and clock cuelists).

How do multiple macros in a single cue work? 

For me it will overwrite the first macro when trying to add another one to the cue? 

If entered at the same time:
Cue 1 Execute Macro 1 + 2 Enter

If entered in separate command lines:
Cue 1 Execute + Macro 2 Enter

Found it. 

It's a simple + and the next macro number. :)