New ETC Consoles

[Bryson]

ETC Eos Apex range:  https://www.etcconnect.com/Products/Consoles/Eos-Consoles/Apex/Features.aspx?utm_source=Hero&utm_campaign=Apex

3 Consoles in different sizes.

Apex 5:  1 Big Touchscreen, 5 Playbacks, replaces ETC Gio

Apex 10: 2 Big Touchscreens, 10 Playbacks, replaces Eos Ti

Apex 20:  2 Very Big Touchscreens, 20 Playbacks, very large, no direct replacement.

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Thing I mused:

I was surprised to see Force Touch disappear from iPhones and then show up on an Eos console...

Those scroll wheels over the faders give me Fat Frog vibes.

The "IO Garage" concept looks nice and flexible, but I am concerned it'll be a pain to specify what you want.

RIP the Rate Wheel.  No-one ever used you, so I'm unsurprised.

 

[alistermorton]

All very "new shiny", a lot that I've wondered why they hadn't done it already (like the OLED keys). They're going to be lusted after, I guess.

[Glyn Edwards]

1 hour ago, alistermorton said:

All very "new shiny", a lot that I've wondered why they hadn't done it already (like the OLED keys). They're going to be lusted after, I guess.

Lustr'd After?

[IRW]

No more normal Gio? Well that's very disappointing 😞 The standard Gio is my preferred console of choice, mainly down to ergonomics, as I find the Ti puts things a bit too far out of reach, and that new Apex jobby looks like an anthropometric nightmare with the reach to those screens!

I bet you still can't sort direct selects by alphabetical order, so I'm not going to retire FocalPoint as my left hand operating area just yet. That reminds me, I must get the latest version (including aforementioned alphabetical direct selects, relighting module and MA support!) published at some point!

[gareth]

The OLED keys I like. They'll do nicely to replace the labels I have to stick next to the inter-screen macro buttons (so very 20th-century!), or the thin strip of direct-selects for my important macros which always eats away annoyingly at the side of one of the built-in touchscreens. I can see myself finding some really useful things to do with the new little touchscreen just above the keypads, too.

Force touch - well, yeah, sure, but who actually touches a touchscreen without wanting it to do the thing it's supposed to do when you touch it? Why would you need to touch it, then touch it harder to make it do the thing? (This is where someone tells me the reasons why they'd want it to do exactly that - but I can't think of a situation where I'd find it useful.) What I want to know is, can this be disabled? Or at least have its sensitivity varied? The way I interact with a touchscreen on a console tends to be quite gentle, and the briefest of touches (which is surprising, considering I'm sometimes told I sound a bit brutal when I'm going at a rate of knots on the hardware keypads!), so I'd be annoyed if I had to modify the way I move to make my touchscreen presses more deliberate and forceful than I do now. I'll reserve judgement until I have a go on one...

I like the new mini-encoders - will be especially good for colour mixing, framing shutters, multiple indexing gobo wheels.

Bigger touchscreens. Yes. What's not to like there?

Shame to have lost five faders off the model touted as the Gio replacement. Yeah, I know the new Frog wheels (thanks, Matt!) are going to acquire the ability to become discrete faders - but sometimes it's nice to have a page of 10 right there under your fingers.

I'm a bit more excited than I probably ought to be about the little 'book lights' in the console end cheeks!

Looking forward to getting my hands on one.

[IRW]

2 hours ago, gareth said:

Force touch - well, yeah, sure, but who actually touches a touchscreen without wanting it to do the thing it's supposed to do when you touch it? Why would you need to touch it, then touch it harder to make it do the thing? (This is where someone tells me the reasons why they'd want it to do exactly that - but I can't think of a situation where I'd find it useful.)

......

Bigger touchscreens. Yes. What's not to like there?

Point 1- Maybe hard press instead of shift-press for a direct select key? 😛 (although I'd want it the opposite way round- soft press to post to command line, hard press to 'action')

Point 2- Bigger Touchscreens 😕 . If EOS displays worked like MA, where you can 'drag' a window out on a grid whereever, then yep, great. However (and admittedly I don't know if this is still the case with Apex), the way I like to lay things out lends itself well to more smaller screens rather than fewer big ones (hence my preference for the normal Gio- I run the onboard screens as UI, eg, direct selects, and my 22" outboard screens stacked vertically to the left or right as output, eg, live and PSD). Now to be fair, it might be that many of the new 'bits and bobs' on this desk would help mitigate that, but I'm not completely convinced.

Here's how I last had a console set up: the FP laptop on the far left cycles between FP positioning window, alphabetical direct selects, and colour picker using the 'blank' button in the middle of the EOS keypad.

Don't get me wrong (I feel like I'm coming over very negative here), I think there are a lot of neat things going on (separating the 'undo' button from the main bank of keys for one!), but nothing so game changing (for me) that I'll feel like I'm missing out if I don't spec one for my next programming job! Maybe it's because if I need the console to do something it doesn't, I just throw a function or module together in the live development version of FocalPoint to fix the problem, so I'd only really get excited if something that I have no control over changed in a positive way (like being able to drag out windows rather than being constrained to the layout options available).

 

Edited March 2, 2022 by IRW

[gareth]

The layout options have got a bit better with 3.2 - you can incrementally add/remove columns, rows or splits as well as selecting the predetermined layouts as you do now. But not dragging windows out MA-style. Maybe this is something which will change in the near future, though, with the advent of such large touchscreens across the majority of the console range.

[Bryson]

I too liked the regular Gio @IRW, but I believe the @5 absolutely crushed it sales-wise.  I guess we were in the minority.  I'm just glad that the @5 remains in the lineup, as we have a building opening in April with an @5 and it would pain me to have them open with a discontinued console...

Indeed, the Ion XE is the remaining holdout "grown-up" console with no integrated screens - I wonder if ETC almost see it as a fancy Element+ rather than a stripped-down Apex tier.  The Element 2 is now very interesting, as it's lost many of the differentiators it once had.

The Apex 20 is pretty pricey though.  It used to be that the GrandMA stuff was clearly much more expensive but that line is getting much blurrier now.

[gareth]

5 hours ago, Bryson said:

I too liked the regular Gio @IRW, but ... I guess we were in the minority.

I'm with you both on that one. I'd take an old-skool Gio over an @5 any day of the week. I've had this conversation with quite a few people, and it does seem to be one which splits the room fairly equally.

[IRW]

Here’s an interesting point I’ve just noticed- IonXe and Gio@5 both only support two external displays. That means without going ‘up’ to an Apex (or using a custom 4-screen Nomad setup as I do when there’s no Gio available), you can only have a total of three screens unless you spend the big bucks 😕

[Anothertom]

On 3/1/2022 at 4:48 PM, Bryson said:

The "IO Garage" concept looks nice and flexible, but I am concerned it'll be a pain to specify what you want.

I find this an interesting development for a lighting desk as media servers (or at least disguise) have had the 'selectable output cards' for a while, which is great as you can change your outputs for the specifics of the job.

I think it's definitely driven by the intention of heavily utilizing network protocols for both output and control, which the inclusion of two 10Gbps SFP's and 4 1Gbps ports onboard is geared towards (which is a mental amount of networking capability for a lighting console). I'm surprised there's no permanent physical outputs at all, and also that you need to use a bay each for midi and LTC which should probably be built into the hardware, although OSC is much more of a thing these days, and other network based control is available so at midi at least isn't such a deal breaker.

I'd guess a 'standard' IO config would probably be Midi, LTC and two DMX modules.

[J Pearce]

2 hours ago, Anothertom said:

midi and LTC which should probably be built into the hardware

As a noise boy providing MIDI it's usually easier to colocate a LX show control gateway in the sound rack and have that sit on their network than it is to get a MIDI line to the control position. I believe this also works better for redundancy, enabling 2 show control gateways talking to multiple consoles.

 

OSC is good and far more powerful than MIDI, but addressing between departments can be a pain (albeit EOS's second network is useful for this), and sometimes MIDI is just a whole lot simpler. There's also the MIDI UDP vs TCP debate, a few prod LX I work with have found OSC unreliable, I believe probably due to using "fire and forget" UDP (which is what most software supports) rather than establishing a TCP connection.

[alistermorton]

I've found setting up a reliable TCP/IP connection to carry OSC is a bit of a faff (probably just me) so I tend to use MIDI. Having more options is always good.

[gareth]

11 hours ago, IRW said:

Here’s an interesting point I’ve just noticed- IonXe and Gio@5 both only support two external displays. That means without going ‘up’ to an Apex (or using a custom 4-screen Nomad setup as I do when there’s no Gio available), you can only have a total of three screens unless you spend the big bucks 😕

Luckily, there are going to be lots of Gios in good supply in rental stocks for many years to come 😀.

[Bryson]

7 hours ago, Anothertom said:

I find this an interesting development for a lighting desk as media servers (or at least disguise) have had the 'selectable output cards' for a while, which is great as you can change your outputs for the specifics of the job.

I think it's definitely driven by the intention of heavily utilizing network protocols for both output and control, which the inclusion of two 10Gbps SFP's and 4 1Gbps ports onboard is geared towards (which is a mental amount of networking capability for a lighting console). I'm surprised there's no permanent physical outputs at all, and also that you need to use a bay each for midi and LTC which should probably be built into the hardware, although OSC is much more of a thing these days, and other network based control is available so at midi at least isn't such a deal breaker.

I'd guess a 'standard' IO config would probably be Midi, LTC and two DMX modules.

TBF, most projects I design these days don't use a single DMX output from the console - it's all sACN based.  In many cases, simply to facilitate the console being in a variety of locations without needing a physical repatch of the DMX.  I can easily see myself specifying these with no slots populated.