I just finished the first of two weeks of tech on a new musical. This is my first Hog III experience and for the most part I am pretty pleased with the console. The show is large, very ambitious, and my lighting designer works at an insanely fast pace. We are cueing much of the show out of sequence, and we are making drastic changes throughout the cue structure daily. The designer also likes to copy cues and insert them throughout the list. A spread sheet function is something that could be heplful. I use the source button in the view cue window, which is great for looking backwards. My Cuelist is very long. We move too fast for me to take notes or label cues at times. The ALD tracks what he can, but again we are simply moving too fast. With a spreadsheet I could have a view of multiple cues and see what is happening in a specific fixture from cue to cue very quickly.
I performed a console clean install last week with v2.1.0 (1618). I reboot my DP every day before powering up, and I perform Garbage collect & Check Integrity before shut down every night
I understand that using 2 xternal monitors with lots of constantly changing info slows down the desk. However, I absolutely need the externals in order to keep up with my LD. I keep output on one and programmer on the other. My default view is to have my cue list on the first touch screen, and View cue on the second touch screen.
1. Cue Next and Back is too slow in View Cue. There is a lag from when I hit the button to getting the proper reaction. If I need to move quickly ( Back, Back, Back, Back) the lag really slows me down.
2. When I return to my one and only Q list from pallets, Follow Cue has to be reselected, View Cue needs to be reselected, and Follow Current needs to be reselected. Time consuming. Sometimes when View Cue is selected the window appears empty with no data. Occasionally fixtures appear out of order, in the wrong aggregated section, and repeatedly in multiple aggregated sections. In these situations, I close all the views and reopen them. Lately, I have gotten into the habit of closing all the views before I reopen my Cue List and View Cue. This solves the problem some of the time. I have played with the additive setting on views, but I can't solve the issue.
3. When I delete a cue in my live stack (not the cue on stage), more often than not, my programmer window on the external, and my view cue window close. So, I have to go through the open view process again. I delete cues fairly often.
4. There is a lag when I use the hard Update button to update cues. I realise that using the syntax Merge [cue#] causes no lag. However, Update Enter is easier. As I said, my LD moves really fast. We will jump through cues (go to next, go to next, go to next) make an edit, update and continue on. It takes an extra moment for me to check to see what cue we are in, and type it into the command line.
5. When I update cues additional values are placed into the time cell of the Cuelist separated by commas. Often 0 times, though there have been other values that seem arbitrary. I often don't have a chance to clean this up before we goto a cue in the newly incorrect time. This annoys the LD a bit.
All said, I hate to harp on the bad. There are many features I do really like about the console. For instance, I love how the indexed/rotating gobos are set up. And I love how I can reverse and match rpm's. The touch, suck, and copy w/ masking features also work really well. Aspects of the editor I too find very useful.
While I'm here, I've got a question. I would like to add one of my old backed up Cuelists to my current show file. I do not want to merge into my current Cuelist. I looked through the manual, but I could not figure out if this is possible. There are some old cues that I have deleted in my current show that I would like to recover.
Thanks for reading,
nick
