Learning Tracking

[J Pearce]

To expand on the points well explained above:Update Cue 'X' thru Cue 'Y' can be a useful command.

 

 

Select Active Out (Shift + Select Last, then Select Active below the screen, then Out) is the best way to get to blackout without introducing extra undesired data to your plot. Using Goto Cue 0 to do blackouts will cause all sorts of issues if you are using intelligent kit. Tracking is incredibly useful with intelligent kit as it makes marking much easier. However, as with intensity, if you edit a cue with others plotted after you need to think about how you update that. My usual is Update CueX thru Cue Y+1, where cue Y is the fade cue so that it doesn't move while fading out.

 

 

Channel 'N' About is another useful command which tells you when channels are used, and what cues they have move data in.

 

Get into the habit of blocking blackouts and cues where the stage transforms, rather than small incremental changes.

 

Judge - every modern tracking desk I have come across will calculate the tracking as you go, so that you can jump around at will and get the same result as starting from 0.5 and stepping through.

[alistermorton]

I'd also second doing the ETC 2 day introduction to Ion course if you can. It cleared up a lot of minor frustrations I'd had trying to make the transition from Strand 300 to Ion. Yes, there are things I still find a bit frustrating (GoToCue nn Enter instead of Cue nn Go, for example) but I can sort of see why they've done it now, and there are some things I still can't quite work out how to do (how to put fixture attributes directly on a fader rather than use the encoders, for example) but I'm getting there.

[timsabre]

Interesting that Judge mentions Avo Titan, and sorry if I'm digressing slightly, but editing a tracked cue stack is the one thing that I struggle with on Titan. I think it's probably me rather than the software but it always happens at a frantic moment where there is no time to analyse what happened.

 

It's true that if you jump to cue 55, Titan will reconstruct the cue for you as it would have looked if you'd come to it sequentially. It also does "move in dark" very well and in nearly all respects works beautifully.

However I find that if you edit say the colour of a fixture, whereas Titan should go back and just modify the colour in the cue where it was previously set, it actually changes other things about that cue as well. I suspect that it is something to do with the record mode (on Titan you can choose to save the entire state of every channel, or just modified fixtures, or just changed attributes of fixtures).

 

If anyone has a foolproof method of editing cues in tracked cue stacks on Titan I'd be interested to hear it.

[Judge]

Tim, if you are in "record by channel" mode then it should only change what you wanted.

Jon, I only mentioned that because my experience in operating tracking desk is pretty much limited to ETC, Avo and ChamSys but its good to know that they all do it. Now if only the method was the same.

[timsabre]

Tim, if you are in "record by channel" mode then it should only change what you wanted.

 

I know, and mostly it does, but sometimes it does not and I don't know why.

I clear the programmer, fire up the cue list and jump to the cue I want to edit, change the colour of the fixture, press Rec Step, then [Merge].

When I play through the cues again, sometimes the fixtures will be off, or will have changed position or gobo in that cue or in a previous cue.

Wish I could get to the bottom of what's going wrong because editing a cue stack always makes me nervous...

[tommulliner]

I was taught tracking, as if you were talking about chairs on a stage. (with chairs being lights and the stage being cues) When the crew bring the chair on, it will stay in the same place until it is moved again. If the director doesn't like where the chair is, in notes they'll tell the crew to move it further stage right, and then it will be further stage right for all cues in that scene.

 

I found this way particularly useful when I first learned tracking on the 2 day course with ETC.

[Ryster]

I was taught tracking, as if you were talking about chairs on a stage. (with chairs being lights and the stage being cues) When the crew bring the chair on, it will stay in the same place until it is moved again. If the director doesn't like where the chair is, in notes they'll tell the crew to move it further stage right, and then it will be further stage right for all cues in that scene.

 

I found this way particularly useful when I first learned tracking on the 2 day course with ETC.

 

Thanks to all for the helpful advise, to be clear, it's not the concept of tracking I'm struggling with. I understand that part perfectly fine. It's more to do with the execution of it on the desk and how to work without breaking everything, which is what my previous attempts at programming in tracking have resulted in.

 

It's always difficult for me to justify working in tracking when my brain is so used to cue only, especially when the only times I get to use the desk is in a show setting. So I have to be confident and on top of everything, I don't have the time or luxury of spending 10 minutes figuring out how I screwed up the plot.

 

It would be nice to have time to use the desk with a visualiser. But we have neither the time, nor the visualiser! We only have generics in house, so when we do have "intelligent" kit, it's on hire and only for the production that is taking place.

[alistermorton]

How close to London are you? If you can find two days, it really is well worth popping along to ETC's Acton centre and doing the introduction. I found the instructor (Nick) was very amenable to questions and what if and how do I scenarios. Good use of two days in my mind.

 

There are some quick key shortcuts that aren't at all easy to find in the manual - trace is one of them (which is the answer to your original question of making a change track backwards), select active is another which , yes, it's there, but I hadn't come across it. Also, Nick's explanation of blocking, marking and asserting removed some of the fog that self teaching had put in place.I'm now a lot more confident about editing cues and not worrying that I'll make a horrible change that tracks right through an entire show.

[mac500]

In blind mode on ion just use the next and last keys to move through blind quickly.

[gareth]

Haven't waded through all the posts in this thread, so the answer might already exist - but the function you're looking for to track a change backwards through the cue list to its last hard instruction is 'Trace'.

 

And another recommendation here for ETC's training sessions and 'tea break tutorials'. They really are very helpful.

[daemon]

 

Thanks to all for the helpful advise, to be clear, it's not the concept of tracking I'm struggling with. I understand that part perfectly fine. It's more to do with the execution of it on the desk and how to work without breaking everything, which is what my previous attempts at programming in tracking have resulted in.

 

It's always difficult for me to justify working in tracking when my brain is so used to cue only, especially when the only times I get to use the desk is in a show setting. So I have to be confident and on top of everything, I don't have the time or luxury of spending 10 minutes figuring out how I screwed up the plot.

 

 

All you need to do to no screw up your plot is add an extra step of thought every time you hit update. You need to decide whether to update to track (adding a move instruction in the cue you are updating and levels staying the same until the next move instruction), update cue only (add a move instruction to the cue you are updating and also insert another move instruction in the next cue to return the channel to what it was), or update to trace (update the last move instruction for that channel). With the Ion it is easy to make a whole lot of changes to a state on stage and then selectively update different channels in a different way. Before long this extra step of thought will become second nature. If you don't know then update cue-only. It's far easier to go through spreadsheet view and get rid of unnecessary individual hard values (they show up white on screen) than it is to fix channels that have tracked through where you didn't want them.

 

The other vital thing as previously mentioned is properly blocking cues when you are originally recording them. I always think about the cues that I have "started from a blackout" as those that should be blocked ie. you build a state from black, record it, block it, make a few changes and record the next cue and so on, then get to a point where it makes sense to start from black again as the looks are totally different. These are the cues that logically should be blocking cues.