If you or a show electrician already has rig information in Lightwright, you can easily import that information into RigTrack. You can also combine this information with information from other sources - for example, importing the Lightwright data then merging in the patch from the lighting console to give you an absolute record of how things actually are.
To get the data in from Lightwright, you must first Export it from Lightwright as a text file. To make sure that your exported file is in the format that RigTrack expects, we have created a Lightwright 'Automated Action' file that will add an 'Export to RigTrack' option (and an 'Import from RigTrack option) to Lightwright's 'Automated' menu. You can download this file from the Downloads page. Once you've downloaded it, uncompress it and drag the two files it contains to the 'Automated Actions' folder inside your Lightwright folder.
Unfortunately, this action can’t control the DMX export format - in Lightwright be sure to go Setup > Use Universe Format so that the DMX patch data is exported in the format RigTrack expects.
Once you've done this, go to the file menu and select Automated > RigTrack Export...
Lightwright will ask for a file name and a place to store the file; pick a name and location that are convenient, just make sure that the file name ends with .txt.
Once you have that file, switch to RigTrack. If you are starting on a new show, make sure that you clear any current RigTrack data. Then from the Main Menu screen, press Import.
There are many places you can import from, but for now press Import from Lightwright Text File. RigTrack will ask you to find the file exported from Lightwright. It will then import the show data from Lightwright.
Once you have imported the information, you should to a RigTrack Data Entry view and just check through it. You may need to do a little tidying up because of the different ways that RigTrack and Lightwright deal with moving lights and accessories. RigTrack’s ‘LW Tidy-Up’ display provides some tools to help with this.
Things to look for in particular:
- Dimmer addresses vs Unit addresses: RigTrack can have an entry for a unit universe/address (intended for the address set on a moving light), a dimmer universe/address (intended for the dimmer of a light, whether a conventional light or a separate dimmer for a tungsten moving light) and a CC universe/address (intended as the address for an accessory such as a colour scroller). Because Lightwright keeps separate entries for each of these, with one address for each entry, all of the imported addresses will appear under unit universe/address.
If you prefer to move dimmer addresses to the dimmer universe/address fields, you should select only the lights that have dimmers (by finding their channel ranges or clicking in lights you don't want and selecting Fixtures > Omit Fixture). Once you have the correct lights selected, hit Move Fixt to Dimmer, which is available in Data Entry views.
- Multiple entries for the same light: Lightwright will often have one entry for a light and a separate entry for its scroller, or one for a tungsten moving light and a separate one for the external dimmer for that light. RigTrack has a tool for merging lights and scrollers into one RigTrack entry: go to LW Tidy-Up then select Merge Scrollers Into Channels.
You may have to do some manual tidying up for moving lights to suit your preferred way of working, but this should be relatively quick since the data is all there.
- Lights showing in red: if you have old show data in FocusTrack, RigTrack may be trying to show the new channels as unused based on the old show data. Clearing FocusTrack will fix this; alternatively, go to RigTrack Preferences and uncheck Highlight Unused?.
That should get you going with rig information in RigTrack. Ideally you'd add some of the extra information that RigTrack can store, particularly the Unit Type information (Conv for conventional lights, ML for moving lights), since this makes it easy for you to select conventional or moving lights using the selector buttons later. The quickest way to do this is to go to Data Entry, press the QF QuickFind button next to Chan, select the channels that are moving lights, click in Unit Type of the resulting list and select 'ML', then press cmd-= on a Mac or ctrl-= on a PC to set the type of all of the other selected units to be ML. Then do the same for conventional lights.
If you need to do a more selective import from Lightwright, you can choose which Lightwright categories get imported to which RigTrack fields by using RigTrack's Merge from Lightwright text file option instead, but that's a topic for another time!
You can find out more information about Lightwright from the Lightwright website.