Cues Out of Order

I'm designing and programming a dance show starting tomorrow on an iPC, and I have a thought that I wanted to run past everyone here.

We have four days of TECH, however more often than not, all of the 30+ dances in the show are rehearsed out of order. (Last year, I had to quickly adapt to using virtual masters with single cues and "release at end" enabled since I had no idea if I'd see a specific dance more than once). Obviously I don't want to have to do this again.

Most of the pieces will have a single "base look" with LTP / HTP elements layered on top, however there are a handful of dances with 10 or 20 cues in them. So, my thoughts are: Since I know the show order, my initial urge is to make blank "place holder" cues in a master cue list with each cue labeled as the base look for a given dance and just record them as needed during rehearsal (I'd use point cues for pieces with more than one cue).

My concern is that if the dances are rehearsed out of order, and I record out of order, I'll create all sorts of nasty tracking interactions. I know that I could just deselect "track forward" to make sure that all base cues for the dances have only hard values, but what are the implications of this (other than the obvious)? I usually only do this when I'm updating, so any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

Jason
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    I thought about using pages in that manner, however I'm already breaking my LTP and HTP faders down into pages via what "section" or "theatrical location" of the show I'm in. It's kind of an odd situation having to somewhat busk a dance show but given the rehearsal period and method, it's really the only way.

    I spoke with Cat this afternoon (who was extremely helpful) and she recommended a rather brilliant solution. She said that I should place hard values for every single fixture in it's default setting for every single "place holder" cue. That way any point cues I add afterward will track, but the main "dance look" cues will always block tracking regardless of their location in the stack. Now I'm aware that there may be some undesirable things that can happen due to tracked values being forced back to their defaults, but this can be corrected with an extra point follow cue or something.

    Anyone have any other refining thoughts on this?
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  • 0
    I thought about using pages in that manner, however I'm already breaking my LTP and HTP faders down into pages via what "section" or "theatrical location" of the show I'm in. It's kind of an odd situation having to somewhat busk a dance show but given the rehearsal period and method, it's really the only way.

    I spoke with Cat this afternoon (who was extremely helpful) and she recommended a rather brilliant solution. She said that I should place hard values for every single fixture in it's default setting for every single "place holder" cue. That way any point cues I add afterward will track, but the main "dance look" cues will always block tracking regardless of their location in the stack. Now I'm aware that there may be some undesirable things that can happen due to tracked values being forced back to their defaults, but this can be corrected with an extra point follow cue or something.

    Anyone have any other refining thoughts on this?
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