Step Effect Philosophy

what type of fixtures are your channels 1 thru 5? if they're regular tungsten they simply might be too slow to do what you told them to do.

and how did you start the effect? for a step based effect there are two ways:

[RecallFrom][Effect] 1 [Enter]

or

1 [Thru] 5 [Effect] 1 [Enter]

Channels 1 thru 5 are simple dimmer/tungsten. And, I saw them changing values as expected after selecting those channels (yellow) in the [Live] "Tombstone" display. I started with [Effect] [1] [Enter] and stopped with  [Live] {Fader Control} {Stop Effect} [Enter]

My real question is why do I enter the channel numbers in each step only to have to select the channels in live. Seems sort of redundant but I know there is a logic there if I can find it.  

Step-based effects are a bit of a holdover from the old Obsession/Expression systems, but they do provide some nice functionality (mostly because you can specify which channels do what actions in each step).  To quickly apply your effect to its channels, use Ueli's suggested syntax of [Recall From][Effect][1][Enter].  It may seem redundant, but it is necessary.  In live, the syntax [Effect][1][Enter] just selects the effect for editing its overrides (if it is currently running).

With absolute effects, you always need to specify a channel range.  You could rewrite your step-based effect as an absolute effect with almost the same output, and that could be applied to any channel range. (See below, and make sure you set the Trail to "Solo").  This way, you could apply it to channels 1 thru 1000 as easily as you apply it to channels 1 thru 5.

It is kind of useful that you can pick the channels it will run with even though you put more channels in it.  It does depend on the effect eg if the effect is with a moving head turn the beam on move for postion 1 to 2 turn beam off and move back quiclly to positon 1 you could out all you moving heads in each step and then choose the ones to apply the effect to.

As a side note your effect in the opening comment of this post looks a little bit strange as you've set the durration of each step to 1 second but then only had the lamp on full for 200ms of that off second,  and then its off for the remainder of the step and the other 4 seconds of the 5 step pattern.  Maybe that's what you were after but maybe not, especially if they were tungsten it might well be too short a pulse to make them very visible.  Often you overlap them with the step time less that the total of the in+dwell+out

Nice answer(s) Mike. I do read and view a lot but find the videos go very fast and I stop and rewind a lot. The manual and auxiliary texts from ETC are tremendous but I often get through a ton of stuff to see "However, the Element 2 . . . " So learning to look at the end 1st! 

I will cut n paste your 1st part and experiment today (Eos on a home machine is absolutely terrific). Your points make good sense and my failings are due to my legacy light background. I'm constantly reminding myself these boards handle a lot more "stuff" then I know about.

Your comments on the step, dwell etc are noted. I was frantic to get something to work. Today is more experimenting and tuning. Might add that I'm looking at the Tombstone in Live and able to see the values ramp up and down so I feel I'm on the right track. Now, back to the program! Thank you

Oh woops. I really should have posted this in the other Eos forum. Sorry!

As moderators, this is a quick and easy thing to fix. We'll go ahead and move this to the main forum. Not a problem!

Really excellent morning! Thanks to you all I now have a very 'simple to follow' pdf I can go over with our operators. It's for simple dimmer/lamps but will increase our confidence to move onwards. It is attached just in case it could be used elsewhere or there is a glaring mistake. It's for an Element 2 board. And now onto ABSOLUTE! 

SimpleStep.pdf