This probably won’t be of use to many other situations Eos finds itself in, however in the TV studio situation I work this would be really useful!
So let me explain the setup. 3 lighting galleries with Ion XE’s in. 7 studio spaces, all with different sets. 7 show files, a file per space. There is never a situation where more than one console is working in the same show file or to the same studio space.
Our new consoles went in over Christmas and we love them, there is a network storage drive up and running as previously I would have to run around 3 consoles across a large site with a usb and update the show files. So the ideal situation would be to power on the console in the morning, go into the network drive and open the show file for the studio space that team are working in. That is all achievable, however whenever a shift+update happens the show file is then saved back onto the console into the show file archive. The feature I would love, is either to be able to re-direct where the save command saves, or, to be able to have the show file archive as the main save location but to also save a backup to a specified location. In this instance I would set the backup to save onto the network drive.
I know the straightforward way around this is simply use save as, and save onto the network drive, however many of our vision supervisors that operate the consoles aren’t necessarily operators and to keep the process as straightforward as possible for them would be best!
The use of all this being that we continually work into one show file per space. If today I am working in one gallery and we shoot 4 scenes, the next day we are in a different lighting gallery and we re-shoot a scene from the previous day, I have the cues and groups there that I created on a different console yesterday. There are work arounds for all of this, such as 'why not carry a USB with you’ but for absolute ease of use and with a mix of many operators coming in to be able to turn the console on and load the show file from the network drive for that particular studio space that loads up with the most recent patch, palettes cues etc etc.
I appreciate there maybe some show file corruption concerns, but I think in the example above I can’t see a reason why a show file would become corrupt. No more than one desk would work from and save into the same show file at one time.
Thanks! Matt