Coverage Tab; Defining Venue Planes - Martin Audio MLA MINI Advanced User's Manual

MLA MINI
DISPLAY 2.2

COVERAGE TAB

The next step is to precisely define the coverage but as with any application it is very good
practice to save your project as you go along. Click on File on the Dashboard if it is not visible
and click on the Save icon. Choose a suitable file location, you might with to create a dedicated
folder for a given show to hold all files in one place, then name the file and click save.
Having completed the venue slice, the Coverage ("Cover") tab will now be active. A single mouse
click will open the Coverage Editor window.

DEFINING VENUE PLANES

As with the Slice Editor, the Coverage Editor will open as a floating window, this is definitely
worth maximising as you may need to work on quite small sections and there is no zoom function
in the current version (it is on the wish list for a future version)
You will see the venue that you have previously drawn looking as shown:
Each node entered in your Venue slice is shown as a white circle with each plane now allocated
a colour between the nodes. There are three types of plane, Audience which is shown green, non
audience which is red and hard avoid which is blue. The system by default makes the stage hard
avoid, the coverage planes from where specified in the venue slice start to finish will be audience
and all other planes non-audience. The first step is to edit these to reflect exactly how you need
the system to react to the venue.
In the example above, the audience area includes the stalls, the wall at the back of the stalls,
under the balcony, the front of the balcony and the balcony itself. Clearly this is not correct and
we need to change some of these planes.
At this stage we have to make a decision on where our priorities lie. There is a temptation to
make all areas other than the genuine audience planes hard avoid to try and make the system
reduce spill onto anywhere other than the audience, however we have to be realistic about
what can be achieved. Whilst we have a tremendous amount of processing power available, we
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