# Hello from Northern Virginia



## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 11, 2016)

Hi all! I'm working on a middle-school (grades 6-8) production of "Aladdin Jr." My son is playing "Iago," the parrot. I'm helping run the lights and sound, so I'm kind of filling the role of technical director. Going to meet the kids actually running the lighting desk and the mixer today.

A _long_ time ago, I did some very simple sound work for my college theater, but that was in the days of reel-to-reel tape decks. Things are somewhat different now. On the general tech side, I'm pretty schooled up. I'm a computer programmer and a life-long electronics hobbiest (WA4LDA, first licensed in 1974). On the specifics of working in a theater, however, I'm learning as I go, and it's kind of like drinking from a fire hose.

We have a Soundcraft GB2 audio mixer, and a Leviton Innovator 24/48 lighting control console. We're also using about 15 Ars Technica wireless microphones. I've downloaded the manuals for all these things and have been studying them nightly. Next rehearsal is in about four hours, so I'm reading as fast as I can.

For sound cues, I've copies the musical numbers to my computer and am using VLCPortable to play them through a TDIBlox unbalanced-to-balanced impedance transformer. It mixes the stereo to mono, but at least I can bring it in on a channel on the GB2. VLCPortable can be set to play a track once and stop (without going to the next track in the playlist). I was never able to figure out a way to get Windows Media Player to do that. I have a Whirlwind PC/DI box on order, but it's lost somewhere in shipping. I ordered up four Hosa Technology gooseneck worklights so we can see the controls during blackouts (and have already sent two back for exchange, having learned from the GB2 of the existence of the XLR4 connector).

I'll be hoping for any advice anyone can give a noob.


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## DaveySimps (Apr 12, 2016)

Welcome Stevens! Thanks for the great introduction. Looks like you are off to a good start. You appear to have decent equipment to work with, and your instincts about meeting in advance, making sound files easy to cue, and thinking ahead about worklight are all great starts. Good luck with the production! Let us know how we can help.

~Dave


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## Moose Hatrack (Apr 12, 2016)

Early on I wrote a throwaway app in VB that played a wav file for each of the function keys. I think the spacebar stopped playback. Laptop F keys were more precise than the ipod screen they were using.


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 12, 2016)

DaveySimps said:


> Welcome Stevens! Thanks for the great introduction. Looks like you are off to a good start. You appear to have decent equipment to work with, and your instincts about meeting in advance, making sound files easy to cue, and thinking ahead about worklight are all great starts. Good luck with the production! Let us know how we can help.


Thanks, Dave! We had a massive delivery and installation of new gear yesterday. We're up to 15 wireless mikes, three more wired mikes just off the lip (mounted on the now off-limits front row of seats; a fair amount of action takes place on the house floor there). two additional house speakers up on sticks, and a five-station Telex intercom (so we can talk to the tech operators, the follow-spot operator, and the curtain-puller). All this for a middle school! Kind of amazing and a bit intimidating.

I have (finally!) managed to make enough sense of the Innovator user's guide to load and playback a cue. It's pretty cool, actually. A major scene is when "Prince Ali" enters the house. The entire cast will be dancing/marching in the aisles as they all move up onto the stage. During this bit, the director wants the house lights to undulate (we have about 60 recessed incandescents in the ceiling, grouped into sets of five or six on nine independent dimmers). By using timed cues that quickly raise and lower sets of dimmers, then looping back (the Innovator calls this "linking") I can have the lighting desk do the effect she wants just by loading and playing the cue. Unfortunately, the desk is so complex that the students can't learn to use it from its cryptic manual, and no one on school staff has ever been assigned to do so. It's sad, because, even though the desk is pretty old (even loads and stores its shows on 3.5" diskette!), it has some impressive automation capabilities. I wasn't involved in the previous show, but it also had a scene calling for the same undulating house lights. They did by having the lighting operator use both hands and an elbow to run the individual faders up and down. It worked, but it was kind of hard to control. Automating this was a big step forward.

Now, I know this is probably very specific to the Innovator, but I did encounter a problem I can't understand. Maybe someone can help me with it.

One can manually transition from one sequentially numbered lighting cue to the next by first defining the cues, then loading them, then manually fading them up and down. In more detail, it works like this:

1. Set all the lights how you want them for the cue with the individual faders.
2. Record that setting to a numbered cue, say #1.
3. Set all the lights how you wan them for the next cue with the individual faders.
4. Record that setting to a higher numbered cue, say #2.

To play them back manually, do this:

5. Press [LOAD] 1 [ENTER] over the A/B fader pair. (The [GO] button below that pair lights up.)
6. Making sure the A/B fader pair is all the way down (A at 0, B at 10), press [GO].
7. Slide the A/B fader pair up so A ends at 10, and B ends at 0. (At this point, the Innovator automatically unloads the cue, allowing the next step.)
8. Slide the A/B fader pair all the way back down again. (This has no effect on the lights, which remain as set in Cue 1).
9. Press [GO]. (This loads the next cue, #2, into the pair.)
10. Slide the A/B fader pair up again, so A ends at 10, and B ends at 0. (A fades _up _cue #2 while B fades _down _cue #1.)

This may all seem pretty much Theater Lighting 101 to most of you, but I was ready to do a major happy dance when I got it to work. This will allow us to pre-load all the cues for the show, and just sequentially "GO" from one to the next, merely by fading the next one in as we fade the last one out. Woo-hoo!

But...

The way to work through a whole show of cues appears to be to repeat steps 6, 7, 8, and 9, with each press of "GO" loading the next sequentially numbered cue. I defined 5 cues and tested it. It works fine, except that _some_ of the time, when I press "GO," the lights very briefly flicker to what their settings will be _after _the next pending cue has been fully faded up. For example, if cue #1 has faders 1, 2, and 3 at full, and 4, 5, and 6 at 0, and cue #2 has faders 1, 5, and 6 at full and 2, 3, and 4 at 0, at step 9 in my above sequence, just before I press "GO," cue #1 is active, with dimmers 1, 2, and 3 at full, and 4, 5, and 6 at 0 (we are patched 1-to-1, all the way). That's fine, but to load cue #2, my next move is to press "GO." When I do, I very briefly see the lights on dimmers 2 and 3 wink off, and the lights on dimmers 5 and 6 wink on. Immediately after this "wink," they all go back to the cue #1 settings. Sliding faders A and B all the way up smoothly fades out cue #1 while smoothly fading in cue #2, exactly as it should.

But I can't figure out what's causing that wink. It only lasts a fraction of a second, and doesn't always happen when I press "GO." To make matters more complicated, I tried the same operations on the second pair of faders (C and D), which have their own "LOAD" and "GO" buttons. So far, pressing "GO" on those faders hasn't shown the wink (a big problem I have is that we can only get the theater for about two hours every day after school lets out, and the director wants to get right into rehearsal, so I don't get more than a few minutes to experiment with this amazing but perplexing device that I've never used before).

Now, I can add timed fade-ups and fade-downs to the cues as well. Using that option, I leave the A/B (or C/D) faders all the way up (A at 10, B at 0) all the time. Simply pressing "GO" automatically fades out the previous cue and automatically fades in the next cue, with never a wink to see. I can do the whole show this way, but it rules out any manual operations that might allow for more closely tracking certain actions where we want to time the fade to match what the actors are doing. (Also, my seventh-grade tech crew likes running the faders more than pushing the buttons, I can tell already).

So, can anyone think of a reason why that "wink" might be happening? I did all my tests with the house incandescent lights. I note that our Colortran stage lights take a _lot_ longer to start glowing (and also to stop glowing) than the house lights do, so it's possible this wink would barely be visible for cues using those lights. Regardless, I'm sure this isn't how it's supposed to work.

Am I doing something wrong? Might the Innovator have a bug or hardware problem? Any work-arounds?


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 12, 2016)

Moose Hatrack said:


> Early on I wrote a throwaway app in VB that played a wav file for each of the function keys. I think the spacebar stopped playback. Laptop F keys were more precise than the ipod screen they were using.


In the next incarnation, I may do something similar, Moose. We have 37 pre-recorded sound cues for this show (74, if you count the voice-guide tracks, though we only use them in rehearsal). What I'd like to do is write something that makes it impossible to play a track without pressing a particular key. VLCPortable is pretty close, but it will play a track if you double-click it with the mouse, as well as by pressing "Enter." Selecting a track can be done by using the cursor keys, but a faster way is to single-click with the mouse. An accidental double-click selects and plays immediately. I'd like to protect against that.

Either way, both your program and the one I'm using are a step up from past practice here. The person who did the sound last time (and is also a terrific music director for the the overall production) cued and played the sound-tracks out or her iPhone. It worked, but I think the method you cooked up is safer.


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## TheaterEd (Apr 12, 2016)

For sound cues, you can give Show Cue Systems a shot. Its pretty intuitive and you get a free 30 day trial. We bought it for my school, but make sure you don't activate your trial more than 30 days before your show. I believe the trial limits your max number of cues, so just split it into two separate show files and change at intermission or during a long scene.

As for lighting. I haven't used your particular board, but generally for running a musical where everything happens approximately the same way every time it is standard to use timed cues and just the go button. As much fun as the kids are having with the sliders, you will get much more consistent results with the timed cue method.


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 12, 2016)

TheaterEd said:


> As much fun as the kids are having with the sliders, you will get much more consistent results with the timed cue method.


Thanks, Ed. I hope I can sell the kids on this idea, as I can see already it's the best way to go. I gather that the bulk of the work in lighting nowadays is done _before_ the show. As the director makes her choices about light cues, we just record them into the desk. We can tweak fade-ins and fade-outs, and alter other settings, until she's happy. Then, on show night, I really do like the idea that "all" we have to do is load the first cue, and press "GO" until the show is over.

Regarding fades (and, again, this is probably specific to the Innovator): When I set time, I have the option to use a split time. The syntax is [TIME] 3 [AND] 6 (or whatever numbers of seconds I want). I can see that the "3" in that example means it will take three seconds from when I press "GO" for the cude to fade in. The book suggests that the "6" means that _previous_ cue will take six seconds to fade out, but it also seems to suggest it means that the same cue I am setting to take three seconds to fade in will take six seconds to fade out.

Is either interpretation standard? I can run experiments to see which applies, but, like I said, time allowed for experimenting is pretty brief.

Your input is much appreciated.


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## Moose Hatrack (Apr 12, 2016)

Stevens R. Miller said:


> An accidental double-click selects and plays immediately. I'd like to protect against that.


Agreed! I started with a simple stack of well labelled command buttons in a dialog box... that worked great until an errant thumb accidentally hit the mousepad on the laptop causing a miscue that will still make me chuckle as the doc is pulling the sheet over my head. I quickly changed to the F keys. Just last weekend we saw a teen group do Get Smart. When Max fired his lighter it took a full 10 seconds for the bullet to reach the fish tank. I hate to be a buttinski but later I butted in just enough to find out that the SFX were on a phone.


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 12, 2016)

Moose Hatrack said:


> I butted in just enough to find out that the SFX were on a phone.



The modern cellular telephone is an amazing instrument, but a theatrical production tool I think it is not.

Could be worse. This musical I'm doing is the first theater work I've done since 1978, when I did the sound FX for three plays in college. One (the world debut of a work by Ed Bullins, even) involved a scene where an actor mimed the honking of a car horn, followed by miming the starting of its engine. I was supposed to deliver the sounds of the honk and the ignition. This being 1978, those sounds were on short bits of quarter-inch magnetic tape, separated by white splicing tape with "honk" and "ignition" written on them. Well, the scene just before that involved one actor holding another at gun-point as he slowly crossed the whole stage, trying to make up his mind whether or not to shoot. The sound FX for that was a slowly building rumbling noise, that faded away fairly quickly as the gunman left the stage. We never knew how long that scene would go, and the actor tended to be very inconsistent. So, to be sure we had enough FX for all contingencies, the tape segment was lengthy. Okay, so show night comes along and the actor doing the gun scene must have been excited and nervous, with the result being that he crossed the stage in about one-tenth of the quickest time he'd ever done it in rehearsal. I kept up with him, ramped up the sound, then down again as he left. Next, I put the reel-to-reel tape deck into fast-forward, sweating bullets because the car scene was next and I wasn't sure I'd get to the honking cue in time. The tape deck revved up as fast as it would go, until I saw the white splicing tape shoot by. The actor was seconds away from the honking action, so I rewound the tape, cued the reels by hand so the white splicing tape was just past the playback head, looked up, so him reach up with his hand and mime a double-press of the car horn, so I was just able to hit "play" in time... to run the ignition cue. The tape deck had revved up so fast and the honking cue was so short that its splicing tape marker, the cue, and the splicing tape marker for the _next _cue (the ignition) blurred together in my vision (in the dim light of the control booth), and I had no time to bend down with my flashlight and actually read the splicing tape. I really thought I had caught the first one, the honking cue, but I had shot past it to the ignition cue.

The actor was not happy with me.

The director was not happy with me.

I was not happy with the actor who abbreviated the gun scene.

Care to guess which two out of those three made any difference to who got yelled at?

Anyway, I told that story to my crew of middle schoolers today. None of them knew what a "tape deck" was, so the point kind of got lost on them. Fair enough. I am sure we will, as a team, discover whole new ways to screw up with modern technology!


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 12, 2016)

Back to my problems with the Innovator for a moment: Is there a forum here that is best for asking more about that? It's an old piece of gear, but it still seems to work pretty well and has a lot of potential. The manual is just a bit cryptic, so I could really benefit from knowing someone who may have used it, or another Leviton lighting console.


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## Colin Bishop (Apr 12, 2016)

Stevens R. Miller said:


> Back to my problems with the Innovator for a moment: Is there a forum here that is best for asking more about that? It's an old piece of gear, but it still seems to work pretty well and has a lot of potential. The manual is just a bit cryptic, so I could really benefit from knowing someone who may have used it, or another Leviton lighting console.


I use an Innovator 48/96 (pretty much same board but with more faders) at my school and have become pretty proficient at it.

When you do "[TIME] 3 [AND] 6" that is indeed telling the board that you want the cue (the one you entering the command on) to take 3 seconds to fade up and to have the previous cue to take 6 seconds to fade out. Usually when setting times I will also do "[CUE] #" them the time command to be sure I am adjusting the time of the correct cue.

If you need more help with the Innovator you should probably post in the "Lighting and Electrics" forum here or feel free to message me and I'll see if I can help.

And as @TheaterEd said you should probably only use the timed cue functions. I never used the manual faders for my shows.


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 13, 2016)

Colin Bishop said:


> I use an Innovator 48/96 (pretty much same board but with more faders) at my school and have become pretty proficient at it.



Glad to meet you, Colin! You may just be my new best friend  !


> When you do "[TIME] 3 [AND] 6" that is indeed telling the board that you want the cue (the one you entering the command on) to take 3 seconds to fade up and to have the previous cue to take 6 seconds to fade out.



Thanks. That _is_ what the book says, but the book is pretty vague a lot of the time. (Well, it seems vague to me, anyway.)


> If you need more help with the Innovator you should probably post in the "Lighting and Electrics" forum here or feel free to message me and I'll see if I can help.



Will do, and thanks again!


> And as @TheaterEd said you should probably only use the timed cue functions. I never used the manual faders for my shows.



Yes, I can see already why that's preferable.

Regarding that: the director has asked for a couple of scenes to have dynamic light effects. Specifically, in one scene, she wants the house lights to oscillate up and down, repeatedly. Our house lights are on nine dimmers, in clusters of five or six lights each. I created a short cue that fades the even-numbered dimmers up to full in one second, folloiwing that with another cue that fades the odd-numbered dimmers up to full in one second, and have that one linked to the first cue. To play the cue, I load the first cue into faders A/B and press "GO." It works great and the director loves it. But the cue ("cues," really) runs indefinitely, with the even-numbered dimmers fading up to full, then the odd-numbered dimmers fading up to full as the even-numbered one fade to black, then back and forth, forever. Is the proper way to stop them and move on to the next cue to load the next cue while the two oscillating cues are running, then press "GO" to move on?

To be tediously explicit, here's how my FX cue is defined (just for four dimmers, for simplicity):

```
1. [ENTER] [AT] [ENTER]     ; set all to 0
 2. [CLEAR]                  ; release any captured
 3. 41 [AND] 44 [AT] [FULL]  ; half the front house up
 4. [RECORD CUE] 1           ; make this cue 1
 5. [TIME] 1                 ; fade in
 6. [FOLLOW] 1               ; wait a second
 7. [ENTER]                  ; record cue 1
 8. [ENTER] [AT] [ENTER]     ; set all to 0
 9. [CLEAR]                  ; release any captured
10. 40 [AND] 45 [AT] [FULL]  ; other half of front house up
11. [RECORD CUE] 2           ; make this cue 2
12. [TIME] 1                 ; fade in
13. [FOLLOW] 1               ; wait a second
14. [LINK] 1                 ; jump to cue 1
15. [ENTER]                  ; record cue 2
```

To play the cue:

```
[LOAD] 1 [GO]
```

While the cue is playing, will it work to just use this to move on to the next cue?

```
[LOAD] 3 [GO]
```

Sorry if this is painfully beginnerish. I just feel like we've got a wonderful piece of equipment here for our kids to use, but no one has the time and/or interest to make good use of it, except me, and I only get the briefest of intervals during rehearsals to figure out what it does and how to do it.

Very glad to have met you. Hoping to learn all I can!


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## Colin Bishop (Apr 13, 2016)

With the way you have created the effect that correct way to move on would to be to load the next cue and press go.

The better way to create this effect would.be to use the effects sub-display and create a proper effect. When on the stage display pres I believe S5 (the soft key to select an effect. You will see the available softkeys at the bottom of the display.) Then enter a effect number. So "(S5) #" would be the command to create/open an effect with the given number. In the effects display you can enter a name for the effect(optional) and choose a pattern. I'd recommend just leaving it on forward (steps will play one after another). Each row in the effects display is a step in the effect. You can choose a fade up time for each step and a time for the step to stay up. In each of the boxes of the steps you can choose a channel number and a level for that step and choose more channels in the other boxes in that row for that effect. And the same applies for the next step. You can use the softkeys (S1) through (S8) to add steps and delete steps and the arrow keys the navigate the display.

In your case you'd choose which house lights to have on in step one, choose a level, dwell time, fade time and then do the same with the other house lights for cue 2. The exit the effects sub-display by pressing [STAGE]. Then record the effect into a cue with "[CUE] # [EFFECT] #". Now when you load that cue the effect will play and you will be able to goto the next cue with [GO]. You will want to make sure the channels in the effect do not have levels set in the cue itself though. You probably want to give the effects chapter of the Manuel a quick read over if you want to try to create this effect.


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 13, 2016)

Colin Bishop said:


> With the way you have created the effect that correct way to move on would to be to load the next cue and press go.
> 
> The better way to create this effect would.be to use the effects sub-display and create a proper effect.


Thanks, Colin. That does sound like a superior alternative. When I volunteered to be the tech director, I had never heard of the Innovator (or of DMX 512, or pretty much anything more recent than the 1978 stuff I used in school). I'm a "computer guy," so I downloaded the Innovator manual and started reading. it's not, in my humble opinion, the most clearly written manual in the history of documentation. Since the board is not my property, and there is no one else affiliated with the school who has any idea how it works, I'm approaching it with great caution. First thing I did was buy some 3.5" diskettes and save out all of its current settings. That way, at least, if I screw it all up somehow, I can reload it. I also bought some CR2354 batteries so I can be sure it won't suddenly forget everything between shows (no idea how old the one it now might be). Next, I started working through each chapter of the manual, trying to be sure I understood everything before moving on to the next one. Since I only get about ten or fifteen minutes at each rehearsal before the director starts calling for specific lights, this has been a pretty slow process. I finally felt ready to define and play a cue for the first time two days ago. It does work, but I can see by peeking ahead to the "Effects" chapter that you recommendation is the right one. I'm sure I'll be on your back about it with more questions soon.

We took inventory of all the lights in the theater a week ago. We have two electrics with a total of 34 instruments, as well as four banks of gels. A disturbingly large number of them are burned out, or are not working for some other reason. The director (a woman named Beverley, who seems to know exactly what she is doing) has managed to get the school to bring a crew this Friday to work on all that stuff. I'm hoping that will help justify giving me a couple of hours with the Innovator and the lights, so I can really get this under my control.

The device reports it has version 1.20 of the firmware. I have downloaded version 1.30 and (if I can find a computer that can write it to diskette) would like to upload it. Any risks in doing that, that you are aware of? The manual I am using is for version 1.30, and mentions a couple of soft keys that don't seem to be available on my display. I am guessing that's because the missing functions didn't exist in version 1.20. I'd like to get it as up-to-date as possible, but first curtain is April 21, and I'd feel pretty foolish if, in the name of trying to do an upgrade, I somehow disabled anything.

Your advice is very much appreciated. What kind of shows do you do with your Innovator?


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## Colin Bishop (Apr 13, 2016)

I do not know of anything that could go wrong with updating the board. If you follow the instructions in the Manuel for updating it should be fine. I however have never updated mine, but I am running version 1.33. So I think you should be fine to update but I am not sure because I have not done it.

As for missing soft keys you probably want to make sure that you are on the right display for that specific soft key and you may have to click soft key 8 sometimes because it will be labeled as "MORE" and show other softkeys for that display. Or it could be that your version it out of date. Only having had used one version of the software I would not know.

Usually with my innovator I run two shows a year for my high school, a drama and a musical. This year we also got rented out for a dance schools performance of the nutcracker and I tab lights for that on the innovator.


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## Stevens R. Miller (Apr 14, 2016)

Colin Bishop said:


> The better way to create this effect would.be to use the effects sub-display and create a proper effect...


I'm convinced! I've tried to define a simple Effect ahead of the next rehearsal. I posted it in the Lighting and Electrics forum. I'd be extremely grateful if you'd have a look and tell me if you can see any problems ahead of time.


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