Step by Step Guide

Hi everyone. First post!!

I'm a first year student at the Royal Welsh College of music and drama in Cardiff, Wales. I'm very interested in Catalyst, although hae never had the opportunity to use a Catalyst system yet. I was wondering if anyone had written any sort of step by step guide to the basics of Catalyst. I know my way around a Hog2 fairly well, but can't quite understand how you would control Catalyst from it.
I know its a stab in the dark, but if anyones written anything like that, it'd be great to have a look at it. If not, perhaps someone could contribute a very basic summary to this thread?

Many thanks in advance

Peter Kirkup

kirkup_xp - Former HES Forum Member over 20 years ago

Thanks for that. 18.1mb - might take me a while to plough through. Expect some questions!
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kirkup_xp - Former HES Forum Member over 20 years ago

Okay first question. In the demonstration videos, there is text with a flare effect. I've read through the manual and can't see any mention of how to impliment text, so i'm guessing its done as an image. But how is the flare done. Or is that pre-rendered as a clip and then played back?
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sgreen7491 - Former HES Forum Member over 20 years ago

The new version 3 manual written by Brad schiller is excellent way to learn Catalyst from the ground up. If you READ it starting with the introduction it will tell you everything you need to know to get started, and understand the concept. There are lots of good color pictures that really let you know whats going on.
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hpmdw - Former HES Forum Member over 19 years ago

Hi there. I'm an ex-student of the RWCMD - I did the post-grad course there. Controlling Catalyst from a Hog 2 is actually very straightforward. It's just like controlling 4 big moving lights, in terms of programming.
Catalyst has four image/movie layers. Layer 1 is the background layer and layer 4 is the foregorund layer. Each layer is treated as a seperate 40 channel fixture. So layer 1 is Catalyst 1 and layer 4 is Catalyst 4. Doing cross-dissolves is a matter of crossfading between layers.

If you want more info, you can e-mail me at hughd@flyingpig.com.

Hugh Davies-Webb
RWCMD 1991 -1992
European Catalyst bloke
High End Systems Europe Ltd
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kirkup_xp - Former HES Forum Member over 19 years ago

Hi Hugh
Thanks for that analogy - it makes a lot of sense.

You have email.

Peter
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stevefallon - Former HES Forum Member over 19 years ago

The flare is implimented by using the trail effect.
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