Rationalisation -
For Next Time
Shows come back - in rep, for tours, for other
productions around the world. Second time round, you
know more: know which lights you didn’t use
much, know which colours the director hated, know
which gobos you never used.
Or, at least, your console knows. But getting at that
information has always been ridiculously hard. A
simple question like ‘which frames did we
actually use in the frontlight scrollers’ can
send someone off on a tedious project of scrolling
through the cues in the off-line editor manually
making lists. This is tiresome, wasteful of time and,
worse, error-prone.
And this is exactly the kind of problem FocusTrack
was designed to help with.
Instead, look in RigTrack. Lights that are never used
will be flagged in red, easy to spot. Switch to the
Useage screen and you’ll see a intensity track
sheet showing you how brightly and how often each
light is used, and a Presets track sheet showing you
which palettes - positions, gobos, colours - lights
are used in. Now seeing which colours are used is
just a matter of selecting a light and looking at a
list.
Switch to FocusTrack, sort by channel and
you’ll immediately get an idea of how hard each
moving light is working, to help you decide which
aren’t earning their keep and could be cut - or
perhaps moved to more useful positions.
There might be more rationalisations, too. On tour,
focussing moving lights can be time consuming. In the
origjnal production, a light might have had five
focuses that were very, very close to each other. For
the tour, it might be better to have one focus that
is right and serves all five functions rather than
five focuses that there’s never time to set
properly. The trouble is, how can you tell which
focuses are really similar? Consoles can’t.
FocusTrack can, allowing you to list positions that
are very like each other, look at the pictures then
decide what to rationalise.
And when it comes time to re-design the rig, changing
channel numbers, unit types, colours, FocusTrack
helps again, with RigTrack keeping the old
information filed away so you can always refer back
to it, even providing a checklist of what
you’ve done and what you’ve still got to
do when working through making changes in your
console showfile.
Plus RigTrack knows about the cues and knows about
the lights - and it can put those together to figure
out how much power each cue needs, or is used by the
show as a whole. Next time you can specify just the
power you need...