strand and etc compatibility

[iamere]

hey all!!!

 

I'm touring with a company and visiting various venues...

 

amongst other smaller desks, I'm going to be working with:

 

etc-

ION

congo junior

express

 

and:

strand-

GSX

520i

LDX

300

 

does anybody know whether any of these are compatible enough to transfer lighting plans via usb if I do the soft patching independently?

 

thanks in advance

iamere

[neilalexrose]

amongst other smaller desks, I'm going to be working with:

etc-

ION

congo junior

express

 

and:

strand-

GSX

520i

LDX

300

 

does anybody know whether any of these are compatible enough to transfer lighting plans via usb if I do the soft patching independently?

 

Short answer relating to your question about transfering 'plans' (I assume you mean show files?) via USB is No.

 

Long answer is that there is a certain amount of conversion you can do between some of the consoles. Do a search for strand showport in the little google box in the top right. This will handle converting strand files from the 300/500 to ASCII, which can then be fed into various offline editors for the ETC desks. (go to the ETC website for the Congo, Ion and Express offline editors.) Showport will also convert ASCII into strand show files (.ssf) The offline editors mentioned above will export show files to ASCII.

 

As for the older strand desks (GSX and LBX) whilst their show files should be interchangable with each other, I'm not sure if showport will produce a showfile that they can read. I've never had to do it, so I'm willing to be corrected.

 

For your info, none of the strand desks will accept a USB flash drive, it's floppy disks only. The Express uses also floppy disks. The Congo jnr and Ion will be able to store to USB flash drives, but even though they are from the same console manufacturer, I don't imagine the show files are cross console compatible. (mainly because the congo has a different history to the ION, it was a product line developed from an existing console, bought when ETC bought AVAB.) Again You will have to convert a congo show to ASCII, and then import it into ION and vice versa for going the other way.

 

 

All of the consoles have offline editors, (though having just tried to search the strand website for the GSX/LBX offline, it doesn't appear to be there, so you may have to ask someone nicely, after a blue-room search of course, whether someone has the download available), so it may be simpler to pre-plot each show on it's respective OLE, rather than having to do conversions many times.

 

 

 

HTH

 

Neil

[gareth]

First question - what console are you going to be originatng the show file on?

[iamere]

First question - what console are you going to be originatng the show file on?

 

that's on the ION...

 

but judging by the response from neilaxelrose, I'm sort of wondering about how much effort will be involved and I'm not really one for relying on computer programs and converting from a to b and back and forth....

[Big Jay]

are you working with Moving Lights or just generics?

[gareth]

Converting between ETC and Strand can be a bit hit-and-miss .. especially if your show file has stuff that's more than the very basic information in it (single-part cues with simple intensities). Once you start including moving lights or effects, it gets even more frustrating.

 

The Ion is a very compact, tourable desk - do you have the option to take one on tour with you?

[neilalexrose]

The Ion is a very compact, tourable desk - do you have the option to take one on tour with you?

 

If it were me in that situation, I'd tour a laptop with MagicQ and a USB -> DMX dongle, assuming you only require a cuestack or two with go button, and not actual faders (other computer control solutions are available!). Then it would be a control surface I was familiar with, and not having to plot on other desks I wasn't familiar with every day. The cuestack would stay the same, and just have to re-patch. Also a time saver in the long run.

If the budget was available I'd hire a PC wing for the initial plotting, giving access to useful buttons, and if possible then look into hire/buy for the tour.

 

Also, as the software is freely avaialble, and cheap replacement laptops/netbooks are also very easy to find, if you run into problems on the road, you have an easy solution for back up and replacement if things go wrong.

 

 

This solution does of course assume that all of the venues are using a DMX system, and not analogue/D54 etc. But then if you have a list of desks for each venue, you must know if they are using DMX or not.

 

Just my 2p.

 

 

HTH

Neil

[AndrewE]

I just encountered this same situation on a recent national tour, and made the decision to tour an Ion as the venues had an astonishing array of desks and each involved a same-day get-in and show.

 

As Gareth says, the Ion very light and compact. If your budget will stretch to accommodate, I would definitely recommend touring the Ion rather than relying on the hit-and-miss conversion of showfiles option!

[Bryson]

Bear in mind that programming time costs money too, so if the PM says they can't afford it, they may be discounting the cost of reprogramming the show every day...

 

 

It's an interesting problem - we're very much in a transitional phase right now, with no clear dominant console in the market. While this is probably good for those in the console making business, it does create this problem for touring companies. 5 years ago, if you had a GeniusPro* showfile, you could be 90% certain of being able to pop in the disk and go. Not so, these days.

 

 

* = in the UK. Substitute ETC Express/ion in North America.

[eamon]

If you are going down the route of touring show disks, invest in a good box of disks and a USB to floppy drive. These will proove essential. Floppy disks are getting harder to find on standard office pc's.

 

If you going from a gsx-lbx, bear in mind there can be some quirks...! There are different generations that would only accept DD (double density) disks. Your standard disk today is HD ( high density). If you are getting this error message, the trick is to stick some PVC tape over the slot opposite the disk lock tab. As daft as this sounds, it does work! Tricks the desk into reading the HD disk when it really only wants a DD disk. Don't use gaffe. I have used this method and it has saved me bacon.

Expect to have to plot the gsx-lbx versions from scratch but the use of show port & ASCII files as described above, is the way to go.

As has being said, the chance of touring a desk will make things easier and you have a lot of options in terms of cost/affordability. Any of them except the gsx/lbx will accept the ASCII work around.

 

Cheers

 

eamon

[Chiefy]

Talk to a reputable hire company company about the hire of a desk and they should be able to do you a good deal, please PM me if you would like more information on a reputable hire company!

[neilalexrose]

Bumping this topic from a year or so ago, I now find myself in a similar position to the OP. In this case the show will be plotted on an EOS, and the tour goes to many ETC houses, but there are 4 venues with a Strand 500. I have showport, I have both OLE and I can get a basic generic cue list from EOS into strand with levels for generics and the generic patch. (For those who are interested, when exporting ASCII from EOS you need to turn off the manufacturer data and hex, and then in a text editor delete some of the eos specific data behind the $$ signs at the beginning of the text file. Once this is done, change the extension from .asc to .txt and run through showport to get your .ssf file.)

 

What I am struggling to do is get moving light data over from one to the other, the two desks aren't really talking the same ascii language! I'm heading towards the point of editing the .csv spreadsheets, but it's proving to be a bit of a head scratcher, how to get the information to easily translate using formula and copying and pasting, as the two desks handle attributes in different ways (the EOS for example seems to output pan and tilt info in -180 -> +180 instead of 0 -> 255)

 

Thankfully the show (once plotted) will only have 2 moving lights, and it's a theatre show, so I'm not concerned with shape generation/effects/chases. I know that these don't translate at all. There is no option to tour a desk (already asked that questions), and the show hasn't been plotted yet, and once plotted I'll have about a week before we reach our first strand venue. I realise the simplest way to solve my problem will be to sit down at a desk and programme in the missing information, which may or may not be possible with time and budget constraints.

 

My main question was has anyone else has succeeded in this task, and whether there were any simple tricks to get the job done without to much of a headache? Can anyone give me any pointers please?

 

My second question relates to the Strand OLE writtne by Mac.Calder. I can get files into the OLE by mapping the D drive in Qemu to a folder on my C: drive and dumping the files I want to open in there. I cannot however get files out of the program, or discover where the program is saving the shows when it says it is saving to C:\shows (and I have looked there!) Should probably add that its a bootcamp winXP formatted to NTFS (for WYSIWYG purposes). Also when mapping a USB stick to the A: drive it throws up an error saying it couldn't write to disk.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Is it not saving to the faux D: drive because I've formatted the hard drive in NTFS no fat32?

 

Any help greatly appreciated!

Many thanks

 

Neil

[mac.calder]

C:\shows is stored inside a virtual hard disk image (the freedos image). You can exit out to the command prompt from within qemu, then do the following:

 

c:
cd \shows
copy * d:\

 

The format of the partition should not matter.

 

As for usb keys... Interesting. Never had an issue before.

[timsabre]

Regarding mapping a USB pendrive to A (or B) drive, this is fraught with difficulty due to the way the BIOS works. Your PC is probably still trying to write to a floppy drive even if it hasn't got the hardware to connect one.

 

edit... sorry just seen "Bootcamp" which I presume means you're on a mac. Though it might still be some weird low level driver thing.

[Tomo]

What I am struggling to do is get moving light data over from one to the other

The USITT Ascii Light Cues format was only ever designed for intensity data, so everything 'above and beyond' is done through console-specific extensions to the standard.

 

This means that Strand GeniusPro to Eos works very well, because ETC has been able to study the ASCII export of ShowPort and reverse-engineer how it works. (Though it's got some annoying limitations - like it never actually says the name of the fixture, so Eos has to guess from the attributes)

 

Eos to Strand GeniusPro will only ever get the intensity data as that's all ShowPort ever expected to need to understand.