Avolites Titan

[djandydee]

I have just received and installed the Titan upgrade hardware and software kit supplied free of charge by Avolites for my Pearl Expert.

 

The hardware upgrade was relatively painless with having to add a few SM and Inline resistors to the fader boards, a bit of new cable managment, some extra earthing, extra memory and a cage to keep in the dragons and hold the dongle.

 

The software installed inself with the odd simple question along the way as expected.

 

Once complete, some of the firmware had to be uploaded into the USB boards again relatively painless.

 

 

The new features which impressed me - the ones I can remember

Ability to drag and drop universes one to one or one to many DMX outputs - Allows the outputs to act as a DA.

Ability to run a simple visualiser which graphically displays fixtures on handles to a single truss in a virtual theatre on VDU

Ability to run a more advanced visualiser with a real show layed out......works best using a home cinema setup

Ability to apply individual LTP fade time to playbacks allowing position, colour and beamshape attributes to happen at different times.

Ability to apply Fixture fade where each fixture waits before changing LTP attribute

The View menu is much better as it allows view of stage intensities, fixture layout, active attributes in the programmer

The HUD or heads up display elligantly shows fixture patching, pallets and playbacks which are all nameable.

The Ability to enter show names using keyboard and LCD

Autosave

Palet record mask

 

The new features which need a bit more work -

Wheel acceleration - coming in later version

Channel mode - 1 through 36 @ 100%

Attribute value entering - magenta @54%

Fixture ID when entering multiple units - random

 

As I said - This is not a rant. Well done Avolites

[niclights]

Well that was nice!

 

Although a few of those things are not actually new to Titan - Universe routing and Vis are the same as far as I can recall. Palette record mask did also function in Classic but not the same way and without the record modes. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'home cinema' for Vis though?

 

Other improvements are playbacks on presets, fixture exchange, virtual dimmer, groups on palette keys, copy/move on all items, menu latching, key profiles (defines blue/grey key function for different memory content) & playback curves.

 

Next version brings in all items you mention along with improvement to HUD, cue-lists & shapes.

 

I haven't noticed any problems with fixture ID's. Are you sure they're not just following on from last used? It is true that they don't automatically change to ID's freed after deleting.

[djandydee]

Hi Nick

 

Yes how could I forget - Memories on Playback and groups on grey keys - Excellent

 

Home cinema - Bringing one's desk inside the house, having a nice warm cup of tea, sitting on the sofa with desk on foot stool, running visualiser on a 100" screen........only trouble is small children want to "help"- weetabix in keyboard, orange juice in master fader and missing key - only joking.

 

Now that so many things are on the VDU, I have started using one - maybe that's why I didn't notice some of the items before.

 

What improvements are you planning to HUD? What happens if the new fixture has a different number of DMX channels in fixture exchange?

 

Fixture IDs - I tried patching dimmers on handles 31-60 and only some got an ID. This looked untidy on HUD. Yes the IDs don't get released which makes rejigging a layout a bit of a mess.

 

ta

 

Andrew

[niclights]

And there was me thinking you were plotting in 5.1!

 

The ID thing is odd, although I wonder if it was just a HUD display issue. If you ever find legends don't appear correctly, simply switch fixture page and back. Hopefully if any of those issues do still linger in 1.1 they will be fixed in the next version.

 

I have difficulty remembering exact details of each version, but you might be able to edit ID's through [view]/fixture patch to tidy up? Next version allows edit via [set legend] which does a lovely auto-increment across a range. So you can select all of a particular fixture type and just enter the first ID, rather than have to input each one individually. To avoid conflicts with existing ID's it can be useful to initially select everything and bump it up into the 1000's.

 

Fixture exchange is now an automatic option if you attempt to patch on top of an existing fixture (rather than needing to use the separate D4 utility from the drop-downs). Therefore, just as with a normal fixture patch, it will not permit if there is an address conflict. In such a situation you could obviously just patch to a higher address or another universe, but this probably doesn't fit the typical application where the idea is to adapt to a house rig.

There is a two-part solution. Firstly, the known 'fixed' parts of your show (ie. touring) could be set on their own universe and/or at high addresses. The second would be to park the 'variables' before exchange.

Note that you can perform exchange across a range in just the same way as normal patching.

 

I don't make the changes, I'm only a test monkey. But, given that many LD's have used my console I guess there is no danger in revealing the details. Next version of HUD brings better distinction between memory types using colours rather than icons plus numeric and visual feedback of fixture intensity level.

 

Oh, and we forgot about the 12 logical outputs :wub: