code based Lighting

[dbuckley]

Yep, I'm with the crowd, I'm still not getting this. Going back a couple of posts...:

 

I imagine having a physical lighting desk with a few (20 or so) faders and some buttons, you can then plug this desk into your computer, you then have a program on your computer that you can use to assign every thing to your desk,so that you can set which buttons do which and which faders do which.

If you accept the desk as being a MIDI control surface, and include the products that have dedicated control services, then I think its fairly safe to say that by and large all computerised desks do this.

 

You use your computer to create your cues, using a basic drag and drop sytem,...

Well, I know in PCStage you create a list of presets (what you might call memories) and you can drag and drop them into the cuelist to create cues, and then you can further edit your cues to set fadetimes and a zillion other things. I'd be gobsmacked if that ability was unique to PCStage, it seems sorta obvious. So that classes as do-able.

 

If you choose to you can go into the coding side so that you can make more complex functions for the buttons on your desk

Back to this "more complex" and "coding" thing. More complex that what exactly? In the first item above we already agreed that we can program what buttons do, so presumably a button can execute any function the pseudo console is capable of having assigned to a button. Shurely (and dont call me Shirley) if there is a function the desk can do, it has a method of it being invoked, and surely that can be "triggered" using a trigger assignment mechansim...?

 

I really want to get to the bottom of this, 'cos if there is something there I probably want a piece of it

 

I have read somewhere that you can place formulas into some moving light desk's effect engine, which sounds fun, and achievable, but most folks would rather pick from the patterns available or record it as a sequence of steps, as that is more natural to those of us whose first language is not transcendental functions.