Copy To and Recall From

In this lesson we’ll teach you about a couple of tricks that will help you become an even more efficient designer. If these are too much to remember, that’s fine, they’re really unnecessary; but as you continue growing in your programming skills, hopefully you’ll remember that these two commands exist and come back to learn them again. And to help you out, if you are returning to this lesson and have gotten rid of your worksheet, here’s a copy of Worksheet 1 with all the previous lessons completed.

One of the most important lessons a lighting designer can learn is recycling. Once you’ve spent time making good artistic decisions for one cue, it’s okay to re-use them in another cue. So let us say that the look of Cue 1 is great, and we want to copy that look to Cue 3.

That’s easy.

Start by going to Cue 1, or [Go To Cue] [1] [Enter]. You can copy this by recording the current look as Cue 3, or [Record] [3] [Enter].

It’s that simple. But sometimes we don’t want to copy the entire look, instead, we only want to use a certain group of lights or reuse a portion of stage. This is where the Copy To and Recall From commands come in.

To showcase these two commands, let’s start by creating blank cue and recording it as Cue 4. The easiest way to do this is to start by clearing out the light board by going to Cue 0, or [Go To Cue] [0] [Enter]. You can record this blackout as Cue 4, or [Record] [4] [Enter].

Let us say that we liked some of the front and side lights from Cue 2 and want to copy those channels (1-6) to our current cue. This is where the Recall From command comes in handy. We are in a current look, and we want to Recall the values from another cue. Start by pressing typing [1] [Thru] [6], the channels we want to grab from our other cue. Now, rather than providing an intensity, we’ll press the [Recall From] button, or the letter E on your computer keyboard. EOS now needs to know the location from which you want to recall these channels, for our example that’s Cue 2, so follow and complete this command with [Cue] [2] [Enter].

Now that we’ve done the recall command, our channels are put in manual mode. They haven’t actually been recorded.

So if you were to press [Sneak] [Enter] we would lose these settings. And that’s fine. Go ahead and do that. Let’s start over from scratch to show how to use our other command, Copy To. Sometimes we want to go the opposite direction, we like the look on stage and want to re-use a portion of that look in a different cue. Using the same example as before, let’s start by going to Cue 2, or [Go To Cue] [2] [Enter]. This time, we’ll grab channels 1 through 6 and Copy the values to another cue.

Start by pressing typing [1] [Thru] [6], the channels we want to send to our other cue. Now, rather than providing an intensity, we’ll press the [Copy To] button, or the letter C on your computer keyboard. EOS now needs to know the location from to you want to copy these channels, for our example that’s Cue 4, so follow and complete this command with [Cue] [4] [Enter].

The MAJOR difference here is that this change automatically recorded itself into Cue 4.

If we were to now step through our cues to Cue 4, we would see that channels 1 through 6 have been copied over, but channel 7 has been left alone.

Finally, both these commands can be used internally inside of a cue. For example, perhaps we liked the structure of channels 1 through 3 and wanted that same structure copied to channels 7 through 9. That seems silly here, but it would allow us to grab lights used to focus the audience to a small spot down-stage-left and copy that look to another spot up-stage-right.

To do this, we would use the following command [1] [Thru] [3] [Copy To] [7] [Enter].

This will copy the 3 selected channels to the same footprint of 3 channels – 7, 8, 9. You’ll see that channel 8 is now in manual mode (same value as Channel 2), it’s not recorded since we just copied values over from the same cue. Let’s get rid of that by pressing [8] [Sneak] [Enter].

The same technique also works with Recall From. But let’s showcase another nice part of this. This time let us transfer the values from 4 and 6 to 7 and 9. To do that with the Recall From command, press [7] [+] [9] [Recall From] [4] [Enter].

EOS will assume the same gap from 7 – 9 to 4- 6; skipping 5, just like we skipped 8.

Finally, we could use the Copy To and Recall From commands to transfer the values of an entire cue. So let us say that we actually just like the whole look for Cue 2. Start by Sneaking all of our captured channels. Now press [Recall From] [Cue] [2] [Enter].

This will copy any channel that had a value from Cue 2 into our current Cue; which is why only some of the channels have a yellow outline.

This looks great. Record and confirm this look.

And we’re done!