Quick Tip Tuesday: Pan Range
This week’s Quick Tip comes from Joe Cabrera of ACT Lighting.
The setup: You select a group of fixtures and recall an existing pan/tilt preset. As they move into position, you see one of the fixtures move in a different direction. They all end up pointing to the same spot on stage, but the transition just isn’t uniform for all of the fixtures.
This is, of course, one of the pitfalls of having a wide pan range on a moving-head fixture; there are often at least three different orientations the head can be in and still point in exactly the same direction. And it’s sometimes very easy to get a few of your fixtures flipped around differently than the rest.
Thankfully, the grandMA includes a very handy Flip function (available in the QuicKey Pool), which will cycle your selected fixtures through the different orientations that all point in their current directions.
The trick becomes figuring out exactly which fixtures out of the lot need to be flipped. In times past, this meant re-running the transition, keeping an eye on the stage to try and pick out the unruly few. But the Fixture Sheet in the grandMA includes a very subtle display that will quickly show which fixtures you might want to flip.
In this image, all of the ACT Spots are in the same USR preset, but one of them is in a different orientation than all the rest. Notice the white square just to the left of the names of the fixtures. This is a very basic indicator of the pan range. Looking at the placement of these dots, it’s easy to see that the pan for Fixture 203 is in a very different place than all of the others. So, we know this is the fixture we need to select and flip. Keep in mind that it may need to flip twice to find the same orientation as its friends.
Quick Tips are exactly what the name should imply. We’re adding these to our blog in an effort to help programmers and operators of all levels. If you’d like to suggest a Quick Tip, drop us a message on this blog, or on our Facebook page, or even via Twitter.
Tags: grandMA programming, tips, Training
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 10:44 am and is filed under MA Series 1 Consoles, Quick Tip Tuesday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.