Howdy all...
Just ordered a Smartfade 24/96 for our new black box theater. It's primary use is as a dance studio but will be also used as performance venue, mostly for intimate dance, acoustic music and theater.
The majority of time, the board will be used without the stack as often the performances are one off's. The most we'll get is a general request for a certain 'look'. Warm, cool, intense, etc. The board operator becomes one of the performers. BTW, usually the person running the light board will also be running the sound board so being able to do things with one hand is an advantage
My impression from reading this forum, playing with Smartsoft and reading the manuals is that there are three general ways we can go when doing stuff on the fly.
1) Use the two scene mode. Softpatch dimmers to channels (believe there's a five circuit limit per channel) such that similar functions are aggregated into one channel. This approach has the limitation of having to decide how to map the plot to channels in advance. In other words.... If I patch all my downstage cools to Channel one, there's no way to isolate center stage only. If I patch both warm and cool to three areas (center, left, right), there's no way to have warm or cool only across the stage. It does however have the advantage of easily setting up the next look and cross fading to it.
2) Use memory mode. Record different 'looks' to memories. Use the memory intensity control to bring looks in and out. The disadvantage here is that you need two hands since "NEXT" isn't an option. This also eliminates the option of using default up, down, wait rates.
3) Use the stack. Assign the memories defined in option 2 above into the stack then, instead of moving sequentially through the stack, use the stack Jump function to pick the next look to move to. This seems like the best alternative but the user interface is less intuitive. This could be made easier if there were a function in Smartsoft that allowed one to select the 'next' scene rather than having to use the wheel to select it.
In my perfect world, I'd have the ability to assign memories to the A and B sections of the Two Scene preset. Then I could take advantage of the board's Live and Next functions plus the fade in / out rates. I'm guessing that there's inherent hardware / firmware limitations that prevent this but I can dream,
Or..... is there a better way to do this that I haven't thought of?
Cheers!
