fan delay by group...

I'm trying to work out the best way to fan delay times across a system of Nemos focused in a grid across a giant projection surface.

Lights are focused as follows:

X X X X (4 units)

X X X X X X X (7 units)

X X X X (4 units)

I have individual control of each fixture (X).

I'd like to be able to do color wipes top to bottom/left to right (etc...), but I want each row (or column) to delay at the same time.

i.e. if I do

channel [1 thru 22] [color] [delay] [0 thru 4], the delay time will fan evenly between all channels, and the color wipe will "snake" down the wall per selection order

but i want:

channel 1-4, delay 0
channel 5-11, delay 1
etc...
*but exact time will vary per cue

obviously i can enter this manually one row at a time, but this is a pretty time consuming action to repeat over a couple hundred cues (all of which will end up with different speeds for the color wipes/intensity wipes/gobo wipes, etc...)...

I'm thinking a macro with a bunch of "wait for input" breaks, but then i have to figure out the math all by myself

Any suggestions on an efficient way to do this (hopefully without having do do the math manually each time)

Thank you!

Parents

0 Chaosbob over 13 years ago

Being able to affect groups of channels with fan is On The List, but until then, as a work around, you can use a couple of macros, groups with dummy channels and [Fan] {Cluster}.

So using your graphic above, with channels 1-4 in the top row, 5-11 in the next row, etc I've added some dummy channels (in parentheses) so they line up properly:

(101)	1	2	(102)	3	4	(103)	-	(4 Channels + 3 Dummy Channels)
5	6	7	8	9	10	11	-	(7 Channels)
12	13	14	15	16	17	18	-	(7 Channels)
(104)	19	20	(105)	21	22	(106)	-	(4 Channels + 3 Dummy Channels)

Make group X in the exact order from top left to bottom right going across horizontally [101,1,2,102,3,4,103,5 thru 18,104,19,20,105,21,22,106]

Learn the following macro:

[Group] X {Color} [Fan] {Cluster} 7 [Delay]

Then hit your macro and type in your range of delay (e.g. 0 thru 3) and your top line (1-4) will delay 0 sec, your second line (5-11) will delay 1 sec, etc.

Make group Y from top left to bottom right going down vertically [101,5,12,104,1,6,13,19,etc]

Learn another macro:

[Group] X {Color} [Fan] {Cluster} 4 [Delay]

Then hit your macro and type in your range of delay (e.g. 0 thru 6) and the rightmost line (5,12) will delay 0 sec, the next line (1,6,13,19) will delay 1 sec, etc.

The only caveat is that you will need to make sure those dummy channels (101-106) have values; you can easily go into blind and grab all of your cues and give their color a hard level of 0.

I know that's a little kludgy, but the few minutes of set up will save you hours of programming time.

Hope that helps.

-M

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