Magicq help

[withoutfear]

I am beginning programming for our Christmas play and am running into a few problems. 1. My dimmer pack keeps kicking off and I'm no sure why. I have noticed that if I have them all on and used the "grand" fader to turn everything off, somehow having them "on" in the simple menu page but having the grand down kicks the dimmer pack off. There have been other instances that have caused the lights to kick off and it's just a pain to deal with. I've resolved to just turning them on at the "simple page and not programing them to a playback because of the issues. This makes for crappy scene transitions! I also noticed this problem with all of my led's and movers. From time to time I would like to strobe my lights but I've found that once I click strobe all the playback cue's strobe, it's either always strobe or always not. Why is that? I set up five different moving light scenes(on their on moving light playback). One cue was to strobe the others just move quickly. Once saved however, all moving lights strobed until I went in to the "beam" option and selected "open" then all lights were solid. Any help would be appreciated on these issues.

[withoutfear]

And yet another problem.
I started over with my movers.(chauvet int spot 250's) I did one scene that was just white colour and pansine. I recorded it to play back 3. I then made an entire scene for a wedding we have this Saturday. It included all my LEDs plus two movers in a static shot with a gobo and blue colour! I recorded it to playback 10 on page two. I slid the fader down and back up a few times and it was right. With all playbacks down, I fired the playback 3 mover with the pansine and white and it worked, I then turned that off and fired my wedding scene ( pb 10) and the mover came on in white and pointing at the last place playback 3 was at. It won't do anything else. What is happening to my mover programming? The LEDs are correct. The same thing happens when I try and program my movers into the same scene as all my LEDs that's why I run LEDs and movers on separate playbacks! I hope this makes sense and you all can offer me some help.

[waynehoskins]

That second one sounds like a tracking issue. When you record a cue, things that don't change don't get recorded in. So if the movers didn't move from where they were before to get to where you recorded them in your wedding cue, the cue doesn't have position information. Not usually an issue if you cue an entire show in order on a single playback, but if you're not expecting it (such as cueing out of order), it can be a nasty surprise.

[Esoteric]

Wayne is correct. Tracking can totally come back to bite you if you are not CAREFUL.

[withoutfear]

Any idea on the strobbing issue?

[Esoteric]

Nope. My initial reaction is to try a different dimmer pack and see if the problem persists. What dimmer pack is it?

[waynehoskins]

I think I understand the strobe issue. Sounds like a tracking problem as well.

What I think you would do is, when cueing, write a cue with the fixtures you want strobing. Then write one where you turn that off.

With tracking, things keep doing what they're doing until you explicitly tell them to stop or change. Quite a difference from cue-only/preset thinking where things always are off unless you explicitly tell them to do something in a cue.

[Esoteric]

Oh yeah. Sorry I misread the question. I was talking about the dimmers turning off.

MagicQ does have a theater mode that doesn't track.

[mstone133]

Page 96 of the manual...using the ACTIVE command ensures that all attributes of a light are loaded into the programmer and then will be recorded when you program the cue.

[withoutfear]

Thanks guys, it was indeed a tracking issue. I read up on it and thats what it was doing. i will be using theater non tracking from now on.