Mark on the Hog 3

[Jimbo The Wiz]

Our uni has got a hog 3 and I am used to using the hog 2 and the hog PC. both of these have as mark function to preset the positions of intellegent lights before turning the intensity on. I cant find this function anywhere on this desk and need some help!

Does anyone know if there is a button on the hog 3 that does this and if not how do you do the same thing without it?

[mac500]

The hog 3 doesn't have that option working at the moment.

[gareth]

Look upon it as a blessing in disguise - it means that you're going to have to learn how to create mark cues manually, and that's a very useful thing to know.

[MattH]

Mr Wiz,

 

Gareth is right. Just finnished programming the 3's first big theatre show, and its boring but there is a work around:

 

Assuming one active (all others released) cuelist is on stage, containing fixtures:

 

- Select fixtures you need to mark.

- Select parameters to be marked: Position, Colour Beam.

- Select Suck from on screen toolbar.

- Record Merge into previous cue.

 

Probably best to check your marks, esp if you are beta testing as they don't always go in first time. (If you are running betas, visit the FPS website and subscribe to the Beta Email for updates of new features and release dates)

 

Most Broadway Hog programmers actually do all their own marking so they have complete control of the process.

 

Regards

 

Matt

[David Buffham]

I agree with both Gareth and Matt here - its not the end of the world not to have this function.

 

On the Virtuoso consoles there isn't any kind of auto-marking facility, but that is not such a bad thing as it is very quick to Selective Recall / Selective Store attributes, but more importantly it does give you complete control over what each of the lights are doing.

 

I saw a light show last week that was programmed on a Hog II with automatic mark cues. The lights were very much in sight of the audience so you could see the lights moving when dark - except that you can always see some white light through air vents etc. So on one cue, for example, something dramatic happened SR but all the moving lights SL spin round to their next position ready for the next cue - with the momentary flashes of white spill light drawing attention away from what the audience are supposed to be looking at. The SL movers could & should have been marked into position much earlier to avoid this distraction. Its also useful to keep control over how quickly each individual attribute marks or to program a staggered mark, particulary if the change is noisy and the production is quiet.

 

You can't always avoid this even with manual marking, but if you are forced to think about every transition whilst programming then the chances are you can eliminate most of the nasty moves. Whereas if you don't worry about marking at all because you think the console will kind-of do it for you then the result may be less neat than you'd hoped!

[colinmonk]

You can select how long it takes for a mark cue to execute on the HogII, so you could make it move as slow as you like...

 

Also without the Auto Mark Feature it is very easy to create Mark Cues on Hogs anyway with the use of "Record I F C B" and "Merge"

 

I guess the use of Auto Mark has its uses, and sometimes its just best to program them yourself. For concerts etc it probably doesnt matter how quickly the fixture moves, or when. And in all fairness the HogII was never launched as a theatre desk although it does fair up well in that environment.

 

my 2p

[David Buffham]

Hi Colin, good point about the use of Hog II in theatre vs. concert, and where it has evolved from. I also agree that automark has its uses in a lot of situations, but my main point is that its not the end of the world if it isn't there.

 

What I meant about the timing was that its good to be able to set the time & delay of individual parameter changes, and I'm not sure that an Automark cue on the Hog will allow that (Automark cue time applies to everything, right?) For example if you're using VL1000s they can be quite noisy if every parameter in every light changes at once, especially the shutter gate rotation - so it may be better to change pan & tilt, colour, etc. first, and delay the shutter changes and make them as slow as you can get away with, and maybe delay some units more than others. This may seem extreme, but I was doing a play with VL1000s quite close to the audience and marking the changes was very difficult to avoid too much mechanical noise from the rig.

 

Obviously you can program something this on whatever console you're using; the point is that this is a situation where Automark is probably not appropriate and, as Gareth said, its very useful to know how to do it yourself.

[gareth]

In fact, in some situations it's totally impractical to use Insert Mark - i.e. if you have a mixture of moving heads and LED fixtures (e.g. Chromabanks). The LEDs have colour parameters which are actually intensities, so using auto-marking and allowing the console to mark all colour parameters across all your fixtures will result in your LED fixtures coming up in the console-created mark cues instead of where they're supposed to come up. In this kind of situation it's essential to know how to create your own mark cues, so that you can just mark the fixtures you want (i.e. the moving heads) and ignore the ones you don't (i.e. the LED stuff).