I have just plotted a Christmas studio comedy show on a CS20AV software v2.5. To supplement the rig and stand in for multitudinous coloured specials that the 12 dimmers can’t support I have hung an Equinox 120 zoom moving head. Running through the cues I notice the head moving far more than needed to Move Dark to the programmed positions. Quite often the spurious movement is to X=0 Y=0 and can cause the head to bang against its end stop enough to rotate the base relative to its hook clamp, upsetting its aim for the rest of the show. I have sent the show file to ETC but have yet to hear from them. Slowing the Move Dark in Settings is a work around but leads to instances where the head hasn’t reached its position before coming on.
This show makes extensive use of the CS20AV, with a stack of over 80 cues, effects, follows, sound effects and even a still and a video toy projection, so the cue stack isn’t easy to fault-find. It is extremely irritating not to have ‘random access’ to cues. Having to step back and forth using GO and Back can be very tedious and the cacophony resulting from stepping back through sound cues is highly annoying. I appreciate that to achieve Move Dark correctly one has to step back at least as far as the previous cue with XY values which is why it it isn’t good that the Cue List cannot be scrolled back more than one past cue. You have to scroll on and round. The Edit Cue List involves scrolling back from the very end, so reaching a cue you want to view and change can be very time consuming. The other annoyance is the way editing a cue’s look can drop any media attached.
I feel I could do better if I could export the show file to a spreadsheet, amend it and reload it. Then I could use copy and paste to ensure lighting doesn’t change on sound cues, ensure media references don’t get dropped, moving lights don’t get 360 degree displaced values, or as in my original issue, false values aren’t inserted.
