[In 11.6.1] Chase light cue

[Buyaicia]

Add "chase light cue" type.
To play a loop of lights.
And an option to stop the chase light cue in the SFR cue.

[Peter.Hawkins]

I agree with the need for a chase cue- currently doing a show that needs chases and this is taking me forever to set up!!! In other lighting programmes this comes as standard and is easy to use.

[Boswell]

agreed!

[Buyaicia]

agreed too!

[Mike Daniell]

Excuse my ignorance regarding details, but could you provide an example of how you might set up a chase cue? For example, would the cue contain a list of DMX channels and a time period between changes (to be applied to all changes in the chase)? What about DMX values? 0% and 100%? Or low and high percentages? What about modes? I've read about forward, backward, bounce and random.

Any advice appreciated. The core functionality, of course, is already available - it's primarily a matter of how to define a chase in a cue.

[Buyaicia]

The lighting desk I have (old one, 48 dmx channels), has a very simple chase mode. I create steps with channels and levels in a sequence (no fade in and out time), I asociate the chase to a lighting cue, and if I fade in the cue that contains the chase, it runs in sequence continuously. Its speed is adjusted with a knob or uses the sound received by an internal microphone.

From the point of view of SCS I imagine something like a slideshow cue where each slide is a lighting cue.

This is an idea.
Regards,
Lluís

[Boswell]

Could this be done for simple chases using a subcue for each state and putting a time delay on each subsequent subcue?
Just a suggestion, not near the theatre at the moment to try it!

[Buyaicia]

Boswell,
I did this long time ago, when light cues were added to SCS.
I added a set of ligthing delayed subcues and a goto cue to loop it. It worked fine with delays bigger than 0.3s, but I was not able to find the way to finish the "looped" ligthing subcues. A SFR cue stopping both cues (lighting and goto cue) did not work.

Regards,
Lluís

[Mike Daniell]

Some thoughts on implementing a chase light cue, based on suggestions above and also other info I've picked up:

• Each step in a chase would be set up as a Lighting Cue with an Activation Method of 'Call Cue'. Some lighting boards refer to these steps as 'scenes'. No change is required to SCS for setting up these steps or scenes as all of this is implemented now.
• A new cue type of 'Chase' will be created which will be similar to the existing 'Call Cue' cue type. A Chase cue may contain calls to several callable cues and will also specify the time interval required between steps. This time interval may be controlled by a slider for ease of adjusting the chase speed during a test.
• A mode property could also be added to the Chase cue to indicate if the chase is to be forward, backward, bounced or random, and a separate property to indicate if a dark chase is required.
• For implementation I expect the chase to be controlled by a separate thread to good timing.

Any comments?

[Buyaicia]

Looks very good. It is much more I can do now.

Regards,
Lluís

[BCGTech]

Some thoughts on implementing a chase light cue, based on suggestions above and also other info I've picked up:

• Each step in a chase would be set up as a Lighting Cue with an Activation Method of 'Call Cue'. Some lighting boards refer to these steps as 'scenes'. No change is required to SCS for setting up these steps or scenes as all of this is implemented now.
• A new cue type of 'Chase' will be created which will be similar to the existing 'Call Cue' cue type. A Chase cue may contain calls to several callable cues and will also specify the time interval required between steps. This time interval may be controlled by a slider for ease of adjusting the chase speed during a test.
• A mode property could also be added to the Chase cue to indicate if the chase is to be forward, backward, bounced or random, and a separate property to indicate if a dark chase is required.
• For implementation I expect the chase to be controlled by a separate thread to good timing.

Any comments?

The above looks good, although I'm not sure what you mean by a 'dark chase'. The only other thing I can think of is what happens when the chase is terminated. Perhaps there should be two possible actions: 1) Exit immediately leaving the channels at whatever levels they are at for the current step or 2) Exit at the completion of the current loop leaving the channels at the levels they were at before the chase was started.

Bruce

[Mike Daniell]

A 'dark chase' is where the dark (off) light does the chase, eg channel 1: off, all other channels in the chase: on.

When a chase cue is stopped, eg by an SFR cue, then the DMX channel values would stay exactly as they are. A regular lighting cue or sub-cue could be combined with the SFR cue, or - even better - a checkbox property could be added to a lighting cue to 'stop any currently-running chase'. So to stop a chase you would just create and run a new lighting cue that has this new checkbox selected, and that contains the required post-chase lighting plot, or possibly just that zeros or resets the channels that were in the chase.

But all of this is theoretical from my point of view as I've had little hands-on experience of designing and running lights. I welcome your suggestions, and also from anyone else who can advise further on what is actually required in practice.

[Mike Daniell]

It's just occurred to me that with the above model using 'steps' or 'scenes' then SCS itself doesn't need to have separate support for 'dark' chases. Each step will contain the required lighting plot for that step, so a 'dark' chase can be defined by setting high DMX values for all fixtures apart from the 'dark' fixture, for each step.

[Peter.Hawkins]

What you have described sounds pretty much perfect to me. At the moment I use subcues to setup the lighting (which auto start after the audio track begins), this is followed by a goto cue which autruns once the subcues have finished and then an SFR cue to stop the chase which has to run based on a timer associated with the start of the audio cue at the moment. The issue wth this method is that it can result in funny lighting artifacts/ frozen screen if the lighting cues are running too quickly. The ideal situation would be to have all of the cue settings as a single cue which uses subcues/ scenes as the lighting scenes so that they can be easily edited if needed.

All in all I'm looking forwards to it.

[Mike Daniell]

I can't give you a lot of detail at the moment but I'm now working on implementing chase, and on further investigation I've settled on a design that is far better than what I was previously planning. I am simply enhancing the existing Lighting Cue design to support chase cues. A 'Chase' checkbox will be added to the Lighting Cue properties in the Editor, and the setting of this checkbox will determine what other properties are displayed and editable. If the 'Chase' checkbox is selected then fields will be displayed to indicate and control the currently-displayed step, ie the existing fields for DMX Items and DMX Values will be for that step.

So the DMX channels and values for every step of the chase will be held within a single Lighting Cue (or Sub-Cue). The speed of the chase will be specified using a BPM (beats per minute) control and slider.