The Sneak Command
Sometimes while adjusting a look on stage, you might decide that you don’t want to keep your changes, that you might want to release your manual control of a light or series of lights. However, if you were to snap those lights off, that might be distracting – wouldn’t it be nice if the lights would just sneak back to what they were at previously? Well, that’s the purpose of the Sneak command.
To illustrate this, why don’t you start by going into Cue 2, which would be [Go To Cue] [2] [Enter]. Next, make the following adjustments to the cue.
- Channel 2 at 50
- Channel 6 at Full
- Channel 9 at 60
Your Live Table should now look like this; noting that Channels 2 and 6 are red, meaning they are in manual mode or have unrecorded adjustments.
Next, clear the command line by pressing [Shift+Clear] or Shift + Delete / Backspace on your computer keyboard. Now that your command line is empty, press [Sneak] or the letter N on your computer keyboard. Now finish the command by pressing [Enter]. You’ll watch Channels 2 and 6 turn Pink, meaning they’re in motion over 5 seconds (which is the EOS default sneak time).
Now that the sneak command is finished; you’ll see that each channel went back to what it was before you had captured anything. Meaning …
- Channel 2 went back up to 100%
- Channel 6 went back down to 50%
- Channel 9 went back down to nothing, then returned to a blank value
Next, let’s try a more surgical approach to the Sneak command. Let’s start by just putting everything at 30 percent, or [1] [Thru] [9] [@] [3] [Enter]. Yuck. This is boring and murky.
Let us restore the front lights, Channels 1 through 3. To do this, we can type [1] [Thru] [3] [Sneak] [Enter].
Looking at your Live Table, you’ll notice that Channels 1 through 3 have been restored, but Channels 4 through 9 are still in manual mode.
Well. This still looks horrible. So let’s just quickly go back, without waiting for the sneak command to finish at all, by first clearing out the command line with [Shift+Clear] then providing a sneak time, or [Sneak] [Time] [0] [Enter]. This will immediately restore all the channels back to what they were previously.
So far we’ve only used this technique to “sneak out” channels, but we can also “sneak in” channels. This is great when you are in the middle of rehearsal, want to add a light, but not be a distraction to the rest of your artistic team. This can be done by adding the Sneak command at the end of any command. For example, perhaps we want to bring in all the back lights to full without drawing attention to ourselves. We could do this over 30 seconds by typing [Chan] [7] [Thru] [9] [@] [Full] [Sneak] [Time] [30] [Enter].
The lights will then slowly creep up to their new value.