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Does the solution exist to dynamically scale a show according to stage size?


ko stradivarius

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Hey all, I haven't been on here in some time. The gig I've been doing plays the same venue with house lighting so I haven't had to mess with lighting in a long time.

 

But, now comes another project.

What I'd like to figure out is how to play different venues(stage sizes) and easily adapt the same scenes/show to each venue.

The trusses and lights are setup/aimed for lets say an 18' wide by 10' deep stage. We used vertical truss so we can position them where available stage space is.

I'd like to be able to find some way, without having to completely redo 100s of scenes, to scale the show down or up to different stage sizes. I thought I saw at one time a dmx software package claiming to be able to do this. Currently we're using DMXIS fired from backing tracks.

I may be dreaming but I'd like to be able to take our show to any venue, set up our vertical trusses pre-hung with fixtures and video monitors, and be able to scale the show so all the moving heads are not firing off into space. :-) I'm not looking to be exact, spot on, but close would be good.

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There are software programs that will allow you to set new home positions, i.e., Lead Mic, Key Boards. Drums, etc. Once the key home positions are entered, the software will automatically scale the programming. I'm not a computer guy but I know it is available somewhere.

 

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What Bill is talking about are Position Presets. Most professional lighting controllers & associated software programs have a feature called "Presets" or "Palettes", which are data that is referenced by the cues for a certain feature of a light. A Position Preset is Pan/Tilt information that is referenced by a cue. So if you narrow down your positions to about 10 good positions (one for each person on stage, a few symmetrical stage wash positions, audience & above audience positions, &c) you can just update those 10 position presets in each venue and then all of the cues will reference those positions. I generally have about 10-20 position presets for a normal show, sometimes more than that depending on the show. It's very easy to touch these up. What you then need to do is make sure that all of your cues reference those positions - so when you're programming your cues you don't just set a position with the pan/tilt encoders/individual data entry, you select a position preset and then that cue will reference the position preset in playback. This is a fairly fundamental concept of how most modern lighting control consoles work. I hope that makes some sort of sense!.

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