Partitioning Ions

Hi!

This summer I am working for an opera rep company that only has a four week tech for four operas. Because of our hectic tech schedule we have decided to partition two IONs. We have rented one and have the theater's console. We are wanting to have someone on one board programming the conventional lights, and someone on the other board programming our movers. After tech, we are wanting to merge the two boards together and run all the shows off of one console (and return our rented one).

I have read the manual and i called ETC tech support to make sure i was going to be doing this right (and was told to read the manual and call if it doesn't work), but I just want to make sure that when it comes time to partition and program the boards that there won't be too many surprises.

~I know how to do it, I need an ethernet cord and hub to connect the boards. I go into Settings and Enable partitioning and select the channels that I want to be used on the other board.

But here are my programming questions.

~Since we have four operas (and many concerts) we use a different cue list for each show.

Last year instead of using another Ion, we used a Hog PC and ran the two boards together with midi. When making cues I had to record "empty" cues in the Ion when there were moving lights cues in the Hog. Do I need to do that for the partitioned boards? ie. cue 1 is a conventional light cue. cue 2 is a moving light cue. cue 3 has both conventional and movers.... In the conventional board (the main board) do i need to make a cue 2?

~For playback during tech, can one person push "go" and the lights on both consoles run?

~When it is time to merge the shows, what is the best way to do this? Can I simply save the show on the partitioned board, and upload it to the main console and "merge" the cues, or is there another way to do it?

~Is there anything I am missing, or "quirks" people have come across when partioning boards?

Thanks so much for your time!

tdrga over 14 years ago

Hi!

You'll need to network the two IONs together as you have said (i would use a switch instead of a hub, but for only 2 devices it doesn't matter that much). The concept that I think you're not clear on is that you're not working with two different show files, you have both consoles working on the same show file. So you would set one console to be a Master (likely your existing console) and the other to be a Client connected to the Master.

On the console you will be using for programming conventionals, set its partition to include those channels. Same for the console that you'll use for ML's.

You can record the conventionals and ML's into a single cue list if you want. I have also used two different cue lists, one for the conventionals (say List 1) and one for the moving lights (say List 2). Then when it comes time to change to running on a single console, you can have list 1 trigger the matching cues in list 2 by placing a execute instruction on the first cue of List 1 (i.e. Cue 1/1 Execute 2/ ). If you do this, you will have to insert "dummy" cues into list 1 to trigger any cues in List 2 that don't have matching cues in List 1.

For tech, if you have recorded everything into one list then either operator can push GO to run cues. Because we used separate cue lists, we had each operator take the cues on their own so that if the ML's needed tweaking they could sit in a cue while the conventionals moved ahead.

When you need to get rid of the rental console, you simply disable partitioning on the Master and it will have control of everything. Since you've been working in the same show file, there's no need to merge anything.

Hope this helps-

-Todd
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