Know Your Fixture Before You Arrive
Before arriving on show site, the programmer can and should familiarize themselves with the unit. This means getting your hands on a unit and a console. The reason this is important has to do with interacting with the fixture on the console. Recently I programmed a show using Shapeshifter C1 fixtures and then a second show using B-Eyes, both on a grandMA2 console. Because of its relative newness on the market, I didn’t have the opportunity to touch a Shapeshifter prior to its arrival on the show site. And I was immediately regretting that when I tried to enable the macros to make the fixture come to life. Choosing Enhanced mode for the DMX protocol, each unit takes up 79 channels. And the effects macros channels have multiple parameter control channels that affect attributes like speed, fade, and intensity. And it wasn’t as easy as just picking a macro and speeding it up at first. In fact, I set aside a good chunk of time after the end of the day to stay and program some palettes for the units so that I would be in better shape for the next day. With hundreds of effects and thousands of variations on each one, there can be an overwhelming amount of work involved to make something purposeful play on the unit.
Choose Your Mode
I found this to be even more of an issue with the Clay Paky B-Eye K20. First of all, there are more options for control modes. Instead of using one of the two modes in the Pixel Engine (RGB: 111 channels and RGBW: 148 channels), I decided to stick with Basic engine and use the Shapes mode (35 channels; see Fig. 1). And that’s where the head scratching began. Clay Paky not only has documentation in the User Manual on the options for the effects, it also has a secondary document that goes further into explanations on the variations that are possible with each effect (Fig. 2). In fact, there is so much documentation that it is daunting, and not exactly fast to read and absorb. (Given that most programmers I know never bother to read the manual anyway, I wonder exactly if they know one exists?)
Luckily, I was able to set the console up with a fixture a few days before programming for the show, and this gave me the chance to follow along with the manual and fiddle around with each channel until I could make something happen — which didn’t actually work well using the default profile in the console. In fact, it seems that the default profile in the console was missing a few channels that were critical to the effects, as well as being poorly labeled. But a quick search on the MA Forums resulted in a very well written profile that I easily merged into my show. Once added, I was quickly on my way to getting much more desirable results from the fixture.
Know Your Encoders and their Strange Labels
This brings me to my final point. Console profiles are the most important tool that a programmer uses to interact with a fixture. If they are confusing or obscurely labeled, the only way to tell what channel on the console controls what channel in the fixture is to open the DMX View window and start touching wheels. Prior to downloading the much improved profile from the MA Forum website, I made a cheat sheet that matched up the labeling on the console with the labeling from the DMX protocol in the User Manual for the B-Eye. Yes, using a cross-reference for each channel was a little tedious, so that’s why I abandoned using the default profile. But if I had been somewhere on a show site with no Internet connectivity, that may have been my only option. Remembering that a lighting fixture is simply a set of DMX channels means that in a worse case scenario I can patch “x” number of single channel DMX fixtures and make it work means that I can always find a way to operate a fixture using a bad profile too. I just may not enjoy it very much along the way. Want my advice? Check out the console profile and compare it to the fixture and the DMX protocol layout ahead of time. You’ll be a much happier camper programmer if you do.
