Hog1000 / HogPC and Cuelists

[drathbun]

Hi folks! I'm glad I found this forum!

 

I have a question of you WholeHog gurus out there. I'm a college lighting professor and lighting designer of 30 years. I've been working with moving lights (Macs mostly), programming them with a Strand 520i console and a macro tablet for mostly theatre lighting.

 

I'm currently designing a professional production of a musical review which is a major moving lights and projections extravaganza. I have 2 VL 2000 spot, 2 VL 2000 wash, 4 Coemar 250 spot, 2 Mac 250, 4 Technobeams, scrollers, gobo rotators and conventionals. To cap it all off, I have two digital projectors projecting images from a Martin Maxedia imaging system. I have over 500 projection cues, 300 moving light cues and about 75-100 convention cues. I'm running the whole thing off a Hog1000 console.

 

My question surrounds simple operation of the show. There will be NO lighting board operator. The Stage Manager (non-lighting person) will be calling all other cues while operating the Hog1000 (a board he has never seen before). My concern is making the playback as simple as humanly possible. I would like to just give him a series of GO button presses on a linear cue sheet. The HOG1000 has 16 playbacks, unlimited cues and pages. I thought I might organize all the Maxedia on one playback, all the conventional cues on another and all the moving light cue sequences on another. However, that will give the SM too many choices for GO! Is there a way to link between playbacks and pages so I can tie them all together under one GO button but still have programming separation for the cues?

 

I'm an old Lightpalette guy and this HOG stuff is brand new to me.

 

Thanks for any suggestions you might have!

 

:)

Doug

[timmath]

If you make cuelist 1-3 you projection, ML, and conventional Qlists you can then create cuelist 4 which doesn't have any recorded attributes but a whole list of cues.

 

In the comment column you can then put macros for triggering each cuelist.

 

eg: >g1:g2:g3 (go 1, 2, 3 at the same time)

 

It will take a lot of programming but there is no reason why you cant do it this way.

 

although given the complexity of writing a 3rd cuelist of over 500 cues would it not be easier to program everything together in one stack?

 

Regards

 

Tim

[gareth]

This kind of thing is something the Hog family do very well. Comment Macros are the answer in your particular situation.

 

Basically, what you need to do is program the show with a 'master' cuelist, which lives on one of the faders and is the one on which the console op will be hitting 'Go'. You can then put macros in the 'Comment' field of cues in this list which can fire off other cuelists as required. These cuelists can either be resident on physical faders (in which case the syntax is >Gx where x is the fader number), or virtual (when the syntax would be >Lx where x is the number of the cuelist in the cuelist window).

 

As a slight extension of this, if you have a cuelist sitting on a physical fader, you can use comment macros to run a particular cue within that cuelist. To do this would need two comment macros, which you'd enter as >Cy:Gz - where y is the number of the fader on which the cuelist is sitting, and z is the cue number within that list. These two commands are the comment macro 'shorthand' for choosing the fader, and then doing a 'Goto' on that fader.

 

Edit : Damn, beaten to it by Tim! Serves me right for taking so bloody long to type my posts! :)

[drathbun]

Excellent information! I thought macros might be the way to go but had avoided them because they don't translate from WholeHogPC to Hog1000 and I was hoping there was a way I could program the show before the arrival of the console (I've got one day in the theatre before an audience comes in).

 

It will take a lot of programming but I HAVE to put the Maxedia cues in now (already set cues from a previous incarnation of this show) and they are intertwined with the ML and conventionals that will be set later. So I should be able to block in some conventional looks, program a bunch of ballyhoos and then link them together once I have the console in the theatre.

 

Thank you ever so much for your fast and excellent advice! :)

 

Doug

 

BTW... here is the production I am lighting:

 

California Dreaming

[gareth]

I thought macros might be the way to go but had avoided them because they don't translate from WholeHogPC to Hog1000

Oh, but they do! :)

 

The only thing you have to be careful of is the fact that HogPC only gives you 8 physical faders as opposed to the 16 on the Hog1000. It isn't really an issue going from PC to 1000, because you just gain those extra 8 faders to play with when you move onto the console, but you have to be a little bit careful going from 1000 to PC because you lose any assignments of cuelists to faders 9 thru 16. Other than that (and the fact that you loose some of the more in-depth effects engine functionality) the transfer from HogPC to Hog1000 is painless.

[drathbun]

Woohoo! Thanks Gareth! I wrote to someone at High-End in Texas about the compatibility between Hog1000 and WholeHogPC and he said everything transfered but Macros. Sometimes a half-truth can be as misleading as no information at all!

[gareth]

Perhaps they were talking about recorded macros as opposed to comment macros. The fact that a Hog has two different kinds of macro can sometimes lead to a little confusion. To be honest, I don't know whether or not recorded macros transfer between HogPC and a Hog1000, as I've never had cause to try it!