As a good programmer should, I keep a "Blank" show that has all my paletes laid out how I like them with as many different types of fixtures as I have come across written into them. With my understanding of the WH III platform, if I "Remove" these fixtures from the show when I make an archive of this show to use as my "start" show, I will lose all data assocaited with those fixtures from my palettes. Is there any way to avoid this? My current workaround is to keep one of every fixture type in the show, not necessarily patched. Thanks!
How's things? Did I see in another thread that you were over in China? All of my Minnesota gossip sources have been pretty weak lately, so feel free to pass on any interesting news you may have.
Jason is correct that Global or Per-Type palettes will apply to fixtures that are added to a show after the palette has been created. This assumes (of course) that the per-type palette has the fixture type in question and that the fixture supports at least some of the parameters in the palette.
If you record per-fixture palettes, they will only be valid for the fixtures that they were created with or that have been added to the palette. Also remember that position palettes are created as per-fixture by default.
It might be worth thinking about why you feel that you need a start show. This was a habit of mine with the Wholehog 2, but the only start show I travel with these days is for my media server palettes. I generally find with a Wholehog 3 that configuring my start show for a moving light rig takes as much time as starting from a fresh show and working as I go. I'm much less dependent on palettes because fixture control on the Wholehog 3 is much faster and more intuitive than it was with the 2.
I agree with Tom completely. I only have two "starter" shows on H3 now....one for DL.2s/AXON and another for Catalyst.
Something I used to do on the H2 though was keep a separate show disk for different fixtures and/or manufacturers and then merge them together in whatever configuration I needed. This of course has gotten much easier now on H3.
Yep... I've was in China for about 10 days. I didn't think I would turn out liking it so much actually. We got a really great deal on a tour trip and since my dad works for the Airlines, we flew for practically free (but we did get stuck there for 4 days since we fly standby and there was bad weather in Hong Kong that routed over 50 people to the flights we were trying to get on). Did all the tourist stuff, Great Wall, Forbidden City, The Summer Palace and Tiananmen Square, but also met some Chinese mobsters that control a large part of the counterfitting ring (so if you ever need a high quality fake watch, you know who to go to. Maybe Christams gifts from High End to their employees and customers? Everyone gets a Rolex! Just Kidding). How I ran into this mobster? I'll have to tell you later. It was really cool to see all the Olympic buldings in progress. I hope they finish it all in time.
Anyway, about having a start show.... I really like having all the palettes I use labelled and ready for updating. As the 'Auto Palettes' are pretty good, they don't have everything I would like to have. For instance, I have a set of palettes that puts into focus each gobo/fx wheel at a small, medium and wide zoom. Another thing of how I do things is in the labelling of each palette. At the beginning of the name, I put the starting letter of which pallete it is in and the number (for instance 'B12 Wheel 1 Clk Rotate Slow' is palette 12 in the beam parameters), this way, when I'm trying to figure out which palette a value is comming from looking in the output window, i don't have to try and find the 'B12 Wheel 1 Clk Rotate Slow' by it's name, I know it's Beam 12.
I also have all my palettes set up for digital fixtures as well, just the way I like them. Since a 'View' can record where in the palette list you are, I have views already set up to jump to my 'Catalyst' and 'DL.2/Axon' palettes.
I know that for new shows, when you are programming with someone else, it may be best to build your palettes from scratch, but for those one-off shows, it's best to have your start show that you know where everything is.
So yeah... that's my reasoning for 'start shows'
Hope all is well with you Tom, I hope to get around to testing all those issues I've come across in the past couple of weeks. I'll let you know what's up.
