gareth Posted October 17, 2009 Share Posted October 17, 2009 G'day all. Today, for the first time since buying my MagicQ PC wing a few years back, I had a need to patch some scrollers into a show file. This is the first time I've ever tried to do something with MagicQ which hasn't turned out to be simple and intuitive! All I wanted to do was to patch in five 18-colour scrollers. Now I could find a few scroller-based fixtures in the library - but they only seemed to come in 12-colour and 32-colour variants. I suppose this doesn't really matter for simple colour control, as the number of colours only makes a difference in terms of auto-palettes and the display of attribute ranges so the scrollers would still work and could be programmed into palettes as normal. But is it really as difficult as it looks to define a scroller as having a certain number of colour frames and creating its auto-palettes and ranges accordingly? The only way I could think of was to create a new fixture by hand - which seemed disproportionately time-consuming when all I needed to do was knock together a 'quick and dirty' show file which would let me busk away with five scrollers for a couple of hours! Matt - help!! ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnhuson Posted October 17, 2009 Share Posted October 17, 2009 I ended up creating a custom head file for our Chroma Q Scrollers (16 Frames), but I used the generic scroller + dimmer with 12 colours as a base to edit from to create my file, rather than starting from scratch. Having said that for a one off, creating your palettes manually and not worrying about the range table is probably quicker. If there is an easier way of doing it I'd be interested to know! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tvi675 Posted October 18, 2009 Share Posted October 18, 2009 I ended up creating a custom head file for our Chroma Q Scrollers (16 Frames), but I used the generic scroller + dimmer with 12 colours as a base to edit from to create my file, rather than starting from scratch. This would be the easiest way to do it. Go into the VEIW RANGES tab and just add on some more ranges to the end of the 12 colour scroller. Then it's just a case of entering the correct min and max DMX addresses for each colour in your scroll. Setting the Auto Pal column to 1 will create the auto-palette for that range. And of course I'm happy to receive any new files to add into the library! Out of interest, were you using the scroller with the virtual dimmer? We've got ordinary 1 channel scroller personalities or virtual ones which can deal with the scroller and dimmer on non-sequential addresses. Personally I prefer the virtual one because it means you can go eg 101 @ FULL and then have control of the colour on that dimmer, but sometimes people get stuck because you have to address them in the view DMX view of the patch window. Matt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neilalexrose Posted October 18, 2009 Share Posted October 18, 2009 This would be the easiest way to do it. Go into the VEIW RANGES tab and just add on some more ranges to the end of the 12 colour scroller. Then it's just a case of entering the correct min and max DMX addresses for each colour in your scroll. Setting the Auto Pal column to 1 will create the auto-palette for that range. Matt If I remember it involves a bit of maths and head scratching to get it so that the ranges and auto palettes sort themselves out. I started by doing an 11 frame scroller, and then a 16 frame scroller. I started off by editing one of the generic 12 frame scrollers with virtual dimmer, obviously deleting the 12th frame to begin with. Incidentally, I found it easier to find the personality afterwards if I named myself as the manufacturer, so that the software doesn't put it back in the 'generic' folder, putting it in the 'neil' folder instead. The 11 frame scroller was easier for me to start with and understand the maths. e.g on an 11 frame scroller frame 1 is 0%, 2 is 10%, 3 is 20% and so on and so on until frame 11 is 100% (I'm using % rather than raw DMX here, which if you were treating the scroller as in intensity channel, they would be the relevant percentages that would give you a full frame). So to get the scroller to sit in a full frame 10% of 255 is 25.5. So I entered 25 be the value entered in the auto palettes menu for frame 2. For frame three, 20% of 255 is 51, frame 4 30% of 255 is 76.5 etc etc. For the ranges screen, you want the values you've calculated (10%, 20% etc) to sit in the middle of the two values, so that when you scroll using the encoder, or skip through the colours using the encoder button, things line up properly. So half of 25.5 is 12.75. I think what I entered in the max value of frame one was 12 and min value of frame 2 was 13. Then the max value of 2 was 38, min value of 3 was 39. You get the general idea. With a little bit of tweaking, particularly of frames 1 and 11, I was able to get a usable personality. And to get a 15/16 frame scroller you need to work out the numbers to in put in the ranges screen and palettes screen. for a 16 frame scroller divide 255 by 15 (frame 1 is 0%, and there are 15 colours between 0 and 255), and that will give you the value for your palettes, and then your ranges. I'm sure you've worked all this out by the time I've written this Gareth , but it's perhaps an explanation to others who may stumble on this post in a few years time! Hope this helps! Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tvi675 Posted October 19, 2009 Share Posted October 19, 2009 And as I said, drop them to me in an email - matt@chamsys.co.uk - and we can get them into the next library release! Matt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gareth Posted October 19, 2009 Author Share Posted October 19, 2009 Yup, the methods described above are pretty much what I ended up doing - taking the 12-frame scroller with virtual dimmer and adapting it to have 18 frames. It just kinda surprised me that a desk as good as MagicQ doesn't have some sort of cunning in-built mechanism for dealing with a variable number of frames in a scroller-based fixture - it's the only time I can remember sitting in front of MagicQ and thinking "wow, this would be so much easier on a Strand 530!!". ;) When I get a moment, I'll extract the 18-frame personality from my show computer and e-mail it to you, Matt. Heck, I've got a couple of very boring shows to operate this week, so I might even make a few more with different quantities of frames! :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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