Automated Lighting Programmers must be aware of many concepts when programming a show. One of the most important concepts with any automated lighting console is known as tracking…In order to fully understand the idea of state, we must first look back at tracking. Tracking on an automated lighting console simply means that the cues you write only store the changes you have made for your fixtures and not ALL parameters of all fixtures. Data that is not changed from one cue to the next will remain the same, since no new values are present. This is where the tracking comes from.
—Brad Schiller, from “Feeding the Machines,” PLSN, June 2011
