Focus, Beam, and Color Timing
Here’s a quick one.
Cues transition from one value, to another, over time. Focus, Beam, and Color values can have their own timings; separate from the Intensity time and separate from one another.
These timings work in much the same way; however, they cannot have Split Times. Intensity values are fairly clear whether the value is going up or down, getting brighter or getting darker. Focus, Beam, and Color timings however … well … it’s just one value to another. If I go from Red to Blue – there’s no clear up or down. If I go from a gobo rotation of clockwise to counter-clockwise – there’s no clear up or down.
I’ve created a couple of illustrations for you. Go to Cue 21. Here you’ll see three lights on the back wall. Go to the next cue, Cue 22. You’ll see these three lights change their focus, color, and gobo over 5 seconds. You’ll also see another set of three lights going to the same settings; but because they were off in the previous cue, they auto mark (meaning they don’t move while live).
We can change the timings of each of these by either tapping the [Time] button to toggle through the options or clicking on the timings themselves in the PSD. Why don’t you change Cue 22’s timings to …
- Focus – 0 seconds
- Color – 8 seconds
- Beam – 16 seconds
Try it again. See how all the timings have changed?
Alright. Now go to Cue 23. We’ve set ourselves back up for the same scenario. Now go to Cue 24. In this case we see the lights moving while fading out. In the previous case, we wanted to see those transitions (well, at least to show you what happens). This however is a pretty common scenario; that you are fading out a moving light and don’t want to see the focus, gobo, or beam change while it does it.
What can we do?
Delay the focus. Delay the beam. And delay the color.
So provide a delay value for each one. How much? Well we just care that it doesn’t transition while the light is on; so let’s provide a value of 7, which is the cue’s Intensity Down time.
Once you’ve done all three, it should look like this …
Oh, and technically, you could click on all three together …
Now go back to Cue 24 – and you won’t see those ugly live movements!