Chapter 3: Control Your Lights

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1 Connecting to a LanBox
2 Rigging a Stage

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         4 Cues and Chases
         5 Live- and Automated Shows
         6 Create and Edit Fixture Definitions
         7 Keys, CLI, keystrokes and macros
         8 UDP networking usage
         9 DMX input and MIDI usage

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Manual control

After placing the fixtures on the stage, you surely want to check if your lights are working. So grab the big intensity wheel on the control panel (see picture right), and slowly drag it to the right. Several things happened: The grey DMX values of the channels became black (they are activated), and with your mouse dragging you can set all channels to a value (use10%.) There are many ways to set your lights, so here is an overview of most common ones:

• Grab & drag the wheels, note that the big intensity wheel changes -all- intensity channels of the selected group. You may enter e.g. +20 to raise all channels with 20%.
• Enter the setting by typing the value, ending with the enter key. A signed value raises or lowers channel(s) relative to previous setting.
• Use Tab and shift Tab to move the focus (blue, where you can enter values) from channel to channel. New in v3.3: You may copy/paste or drag a picture into the fixture controls, and with RGB fixtures even the color(s) is set to the picture!
• Use arrow up/dwn to in/decrement the value, with pressed shift key coarse steps are taken.
  

Using presets

LCedit+ has many fast shortcuts to set your channels to a certain value, one of them is presets. There are four groups of presets; ps (shutter), pb (beam), pc (color), and po (other). If you want to set your group to "Full", you could use ps2 by using the ps preset popup.

Even a much faster way is just type ps2, which is a so called CLI (command Line Interface) command. The chapter Keys describes all short cuts, CLI commands, and single key definitions, but for now it's handy to know that a "v" selects the group intensity, "x" and "y" the pan/tilt fields, "u" the "Go" field. Presets may look a bit overdone for simple lamps, but remember once you are going to use color scrollers, moving heads, etc., you will be very happy to have e.g. a "pb1" to center your beams, or a "po1" which sets your complicated fixture to default.

Presets can have been made as part of the fixture definition, but also for a project. Lets make a preset only for this project, which set this group to 50% intensity. First set the Intensity wheel to 50%, so all channels indicate 50%. While holding the option (alt) key, click and hold on the ps popup, so you get the picture as shown right. Now select Make Preset, and you get a dialog like this:

Name it "Intensity 50%", and click on OK. Note that in this case you made the preset for multiple fixtures, but if you select just one fixture you get the choice of whether it should be made for the fixture in the library, or for this project. Note: Be careful to add presets to the library, as they will be active in -all- current and future projects! When in doubt, don't put them into the library ;-)

An instant preset on the fly; i-cue

As we have shown, you can easily change a group of light channels to another setting with presets. But what if we want a new setting of several lights in -one- action (such as a black-out), and do not have a preset? Use the "i-cue" button. When you click on the i-cue button, you disconnect your channels from the mixer, so you can set your channels without disturbing the current lighting. Now, set your channels to the required values, and hit space when you want to "insert" this temporary cue, or shift-space to cancel the i-cue mode.

What are active channels and what are layers?

In order to understand how cues should be created and edited, the concept of layers and active channels must be clear. As an analogy to the concept you can see it as a big video screen (the LanBox mixer output), which has been divided into 512 squares (light channels). This screen is connected to e.g. a stack of 8 special DVD players (layers), which have the capability to output video to any of the 512 squares in a controllable way. The working is simple; If you turn on the output of a square of a player, it comes on the screen, otherwise you will see the output of a lower player of the stack. So whatever you do, the top most player has the highest priority, any lower players have a lower priority in that order.

The nice thing of this concept is that you can e.g. play two movies, and show 4 pictures independently on any place on the screen, as long as you turn on the right squares on each player (and the movie/picture must have been made so it fits in the assigned square). Even better is the fact that if you put e.g. a full size (all squares) picture in the lowest player, you will see this picture (or parts of it) once the other players stops, and turn off their output squares. In lighting it means that you can run a chase (movie) independently from e.g. some static cues (pictures), but you can even separate the moving actions of a moving head from the color choice of the same fixtures. It's a matter of using the right channels in your pre-made cues and chases.

How do we activate and de-activate channels?

Well, we already said that inactive channels have grey values, while activated channels have black values (see pictures right). As most of the times in LCedit+, there are many ways to activate channels, here are some:

• Set the value by key, wheel, up/down keys, presets, etc.
• Press return to activate the selected channel(s).
• Press v, return to activate all intensities of this group.
• Press v, option (alt)) + return key to activate -all- channels of this group.
  

In order to de-activate one or more channels:

• Press backspace on selected channel, to de-activate the channel.
• Press v, backspace to de-activate all intensities of this group.
• Press v, option (alt) + backspace to de-activate -all- channels of this group.

Note: The green square indicators have nothing to do with active, but indicate if a channel is "connected" to the mixer.

More about layers

If above is still not enough for you, the LanBox offers even more advanced operations on the layers, like mixing two layers with Highest Takes Precedence algorithm (HTP), or blend it with a certain amount of lower layers (transparency), etc. It must be clear that once you fully understand the working of this concept, you can create very complex lightings by hand, but you still miss a way to automate your show. Luckily we even did foresee that

In the LanBox you can create not only cues/chases with lighting information (we call them scenes), but you can also create cues (or part of it, called cue step) with just control information. This makes it possible to create e.g. a cue (or complete show) which starts a certain cue/chase in a certain layer, or output a MIDI command in order to start a digital audio recorder with a certain track, or reacts on an external connected switch, etc. It's clear, with the LanBox you can also automate complete shows, and it can do it completely stand-alone as everything is built-in!

A LanBox can handle 31 layers (8 in a LC) on which a cue can be loaded, sequenced, chased or edited. The layers work as described above, but have several more mixing modes besides simple copy from the predefined scenes. Layers of the LanBox-LCX, LCE and LCM can even be reordered, dynamically created, custom labeled and deleted. In LCedit the channels of a layer (the squares) are off (inactive) if their values are gray, while black values are activated channels set to a value. So if you ever get confused about our layer and active channels concept, just read the DVD players story again and you will understand;-) OK, let's start with creating some cues.

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-- FokkoVanDuin - 17 May 2007