The Fixture Library Concept - Philips Strand Lighting Operation Manual

Operation Guide
Tracking can be very useful when you want to make the same change to a series of cues: for example, you might have
a series of cues that include a fixture that lights a part of the set in the same way throughout. If you later want to
change the intensity of that light, you may change it in the first cue the light appears, and the change will track trough
to all the cues until the next change for this attribute of this particular fixture.
While tracking can help speed up the modification of cues, you may not always want changes to track through. For
example, in a theatre show, you probably wouldn't want changes to track through from one scene to the next, and in a
music concert, you wouldn't want changes to track through from one song to the next. To prevent changes tracking
through, you may record a so-called "blocking cue". A blocking cue contains values for all attributes that have values
in the cuelist, regardless of whether the values have tracked through from previous cues. In the example given above,
a new cue, cue 4, would act as a blocking cue:
The new cue 4 acts as an end-stop, preventing any future changes to cues 1-3 from tracking through to subsequent
cues.
Maintaining Tracking
Sometimes you may need to playback cues out of order - For example in a rehearsal situation where it might be
necessary to jump between different scenes or even acts. The ML Console is taking care of maintaining the tracking
state and will always calculate all values as if the cuelist was played back in order.
Track Thru End
Sometimes it is desirable to track values from the last cue in the cuelist to the first cue. A real live example for this is
a looping cuelist that creates a color chase, that when you run it first should set the fixtures intensity to 100% cue by
cue. After the loop they should stay on and just alternate colors between red and blue.
Fixture
End of Cuelist
The idea is that the intensity of the next fixture is brought to 100% in each cue, and that these values then track
through for the duration of the loop. However, as soon as the cuelists loops to cue 1, the console calculates tracking as
if you just started this cuelist - hence only the first fixture would have its intensity set to 100%.
To stop this happening, you need to enable "Track Thru End" - this will tell the console to track everything from the
last cue into the first as if it would be one large cuelist with a never-ending number of cues.

3. The Fixture Library Concept

The consoles Fixture Library is divided into three parts: A System Library, a User Library and the Show Library.
Fixture Types may easily transferred between Libraries. If a fixture type is modified within the Show Library and
1 4
BASIC CONCEPTS
Fixture
Cue 1 80%
Cue 2 50%
Cue 3
Fixture
Cue 4
50%
(Blocking Cue)
1
Cue 1 Red
100%
Cue 2 Blue
Cue 3 Red
Cue 4 Blue
1 2
10%
100%
1 2
100%
2
Blue
Red
100%
Blue
Red
Since the cuelist loops at the end, it will jump to Cue 1.
500ML Lighting Control Console
3 4
50% 50%
100%
3 4
100% 50%
3
Red
Blue
100% Red
Blue 100%
4
Blue
Red
Blue
Red