Quick Tip Tuesday: Lowering your Showfile Size
This week’s tip comes from Joe Cabrera, Director of Software Support at ACT Lighting.
Lately, we’re seeing more and more show files of bigger and bigger size. It’s not unheard of when you have an extensive rig (especially a large number of LED’s and/or media servers) and a band with an extensive catalog of songs. At a certain point, multiplying lots of parameters by numerous cues starts to add up.
Building habits for effective data usage can help stop your file size from spiraling out of control. Two big keys (when used efficiently) that will help you to keep your show size down are the Tracking and User Profiles.
Unblocking any unnecessarily blocked cues (trusting tracking to maintain the correct stage picture) can remove quite a bit of excess data from the show file while maintaining all of the truly necessary values. Unblocking can be done directly within the Tracking Sheet (right-click on any value in the sheet) or with Commandline syntax (look for the Unblock key in the QuicKey Pool).
They may seem pretty innocent, but User Profiles (especially their Views) can take up quite a bit of space. If you imagine that the setting of every possible display option for any sheet on the screen must be saved within the view, and that you can have multiple sheets on a screen, and that a view can contain all of these settings for up to all five screens, you can see how this data starts to pile up. Deleting any unneeded views from within your profile, and of course any unused profiles altogether, can also save quite a bit of space.
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.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 12:47 pm 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.