Brother, can you paradigm?

Dracula drained me.

First rehearsal at the actual space and I only went because we were going to use that time to figure out the basics of lighting and sound.

Lighting was software on a Mac. ETC "Eon Family." Which is a Mac port of a stand-alone application of the offline programming software for the Eon board. Which is at least one generation, perhaps two, past the last ETC board I was comfortable with.

So a lot of changed paradigms to deal with. First challenge; this is so much the now-accepted way of doing things, there's no introductory text to the software. There's no overview in the manual, no quick-start guide, no introductory tutorial (at least, none that aren't a three-hour training video). All the resources I was able to quickly Google up on my phone jumped right in. And as this was the latest version of a popular software offshoot of a popular board, pretty much everything I turned up was detailed lists of what had changed since the last version.

I had to figure out the underlying concepts sideways. With a fair amount of trial and error. Mac port of an offline version of a hardware board, remember? So OS GUI standards are absolutely no guide (so much so; when you invoke the "save file as..." command, it pops up a virtual keyboard you navigate with the arrow keys. No, this was not written for the computer. It was ported from hardware.

Thing is, lighting controllers -- all the lighting controllers I grew up with and used through the years -- were at the bottom of it all riffs on the paradigm of the two-scene preset. Think of it this way; for each light/control channel you had a knob. Set each knob to a different value to achieve a particular blend of lights.

Now make an exact copy of that row of knobs and add an A/B switch to switch from one set of knobs to the other. Actually, a pair of knobs, one reversed from the other; turn them one way to turn all the settings from one set of knobs all the way down and all the settings from the other set of knobs all the way up. Reverse for the opposite effect.

This was effective enough and fast enough. On the old manual boards (such as at my high school) one "scene" (one set of knob settings) would be on stage while someone quickly twisted the offline set of knobs into the next desired look. Cross-fade (as the process was called) from A to B and now A is offline and can be programmed for the upcoming look.

Boards evolved from direct physical control via rheostats to electronically controlled dimmers with the knobs -- that is, faders -- now operating on a 0-10 volt control voltage, to digital controls; at which point, all the settings could now be stored in RAM and read out with software.

But through all of this, the A/B paradigm, the so-called "Two Scene Preset," was maintained as a useful way to organize the data.

ETC began to change this back at least with the Express and Expression consoles. Since the desired position of the actual dimmers -- the big triac choppers delivering power to the actual lights -- had long since been decoupled from any direct physical control, the first big shift in paradigm is to think of a "scene" not as a collection of absolute values, but as a set of changes to whatever was the current status.

This was already a de-facto way of viewing the data, as even back in ProStar the console went out of its way to indicate which values had changed, with the values being continued from a previous cue being left in the original color.

ETC implicitly (as I read when I eventually found a more useful manual) converted to looking at all commands to the dimmer packs as being changes. Like an engine room telegraph, the dimmers (as indeed so all the new arsenal of digital fixtures, from LED pars to moving-head lights) will in the absence of new commands maintain the last directive.

Well, that's enough on that particular change. Suffice to say there are other old models which have also gone the way of the dial tone (cell phones have no need and no place for that). The only vestige still there is that the Eon series still has the default characteristic of bringing the previous commands OUT simultaneous to bringing the new commands IN.

(Another major uncoupling from the old two-scene preset paradigm is that "analog dimmers" -- aka devices that put out a varying and significant wattage that is generally poured into a variety of incandescent bulbs -- is a smaller and smaller part of what is connected to the console. Most of the light is coming from various digital fixtures, which require only digital information and which almost without exception use multiple channels of information. The analog dimmers still have a one-to-one correspondence -- or, rather, can -- but as a single LED par uses at least three control channels they are organized instead into "fixtures." The latest crop of ETC boards no longer pretend that a channel can be mapped directly to a circuit, with the rare exception of the analog dimmers, which are treated as a special case. Basically, analog dimmers are fixtures that only have one channel each.)




In any case, it wasn't the stress or the mental exercise, both of which I found invigorating. The mystery illness is back again, pretty much on schedule, and I've been barely dragging to work this week. (Work hours are still not helped by having to put in long unpaid lunches to work on my friend's project).