In content effects, the main piece of information you need is
"what are the lights supposed to do?"
and that’s called a series.
A series contains steps, and those steps contain content,
and whatever group or channel set you assign to that content effect
in combination with that series creates the look on stage.
So a series can be opened from the {Series} editor in the effects soft keys.
This show file has a number already written, so we can take a look at a bunch of different examples,
and then I’ll show you how to insert a new one and build your own.
One of the things you need to consider when building a series is
how you want the lights to actually interact with that series data.
So a very simple series is a continuous color chase,
and that just means that the lights are going to continuously change from one color to the next.
If I look at the steps of this series by hitting [MODIFY] on the 'Steps' cell of that table,
I can see that this is a three-color chase.
It has three steps. We’re going to ignore step zero for the moment.
It includes information about intensity, so it ensures that as I run this color chase
that the lights actually turn on at the same time.
I don’t have to include this information.
I could get my intensity information from another sequence or a master or manual control,
but for this example, we’ll leave the intensity value in.
And then over here, I have the first type of content, which is color palettes on each step,
and it’s Color Palette 2, Color Palette 5, and then Color Palette 3.
With this series built this way, it means any light in my rig that has data stored in
these three color palettes can run this effect.
In this example, I don’t have additional content loaded in the
number two position here or the number three position here.
It’s just intensity and color.
If I wanted to add information in, like change a gobo,
change your iris size, whatever, I can add those secondary and third types of content if I wish,
but we’re going to keep it simple for right now.
Each piece of content has an attack time.
In this case, the attack time is set to 100 percent,
and that means 100 percent in the series of the step time that’s set on the playback itself.
This lets me play with timing on the effect live.
It doesn’t fix the timing to specific step times or fade times.
I could do that as well by simply entering a real time value and hitting [MODIFY].
In this case, [1] [MODIFY] gets me one second.
If I want to turn that back to 100 percent,
[100] [ALT] [Modify]
gives me the alternate kind of data - a percentage time rather than a real time.
This is a default setting in the console.
You can choose whether you want to use percentage times most of the time
or real times most of the time and change that default.
You can always get to the other type of data by using the [ALT] and [MODIFY] shortcut instead.
So what do we get when we play this particular series live on stage?
What I expect to get is when I choose this series, I’m going to get a continuous mode effect,
which means that the lights are going to run from one color to the next continuously.
My step time is going to be one second, and my default attack time is going to be one second.
So here I have Effect 31 selected. It’s my content effect,
and you can see in the device controls dock,
I’m going to run it on my wash lights in one part
so all the lights are going to do the same thing at the same time.
Distribution in this case doesn’t matter
because I only have one part,
and my series is called 'Color'.
So I bring this up, and you can see that my lights, every second,
fade in one second to a new color.
If I want them to snap, I can now change my attack time to zero,
and every second, all the lights in this group will snap to a new color.
The 'Continuous' mode means that these lights are going to go red, green, blue, red, green,
blue, red, green, blue continuously until I turn the effect off.
This same series can be used in a different mode of operation.
So I happen to know that this group has 14 lights,
so I’m going to pick 14 parts.
If I leave it in continuous, you can see I get a mishmash of colors on the stage.
Every grouping of three is running red, green, and blue.
Each individual light or individual part is running red, green, blue, red, green, blue continuously.
So it’s continuing to run in a continuous mode.
If I come to my 'Mode' parameter, though, I can choose a new mode called 'Build'.
And what’s going to happen now, as you can see on the visualization,
is each part of the group is going to enter the effect in red.
Red is step one.
When we finally get through the 14th light,
you’re going to start seeing green pass through one part at a time.
So it’s building each step onto the stage
by the number of parts we’ve determined here for my group,
and I can make this go faster just for our own sanity.
So red, then green, then blue.
This is where the loop time gets interesting.
The loop time is how long does it take to get through one color.
Now I’ve adjusted the rate so that this goes a little faster so it’s easier for us to see,
but in normal timing, it would take 14 seconds to get through each of those 14 lights
with a one second step time.
So if I say I really want these colors to establish themselves on the stage and stay there for a little while,
I can extend the loop time.
So now we’ll see red and a bigger pause before green starts up again,
and this is because I’ve changed my loop time from 14 to 24.
It’s like adding ten mythical lights into the group
that have to go green before blue starts up again.
If I make this time shorter – so if we try a loop time of four,
what you’ll see is you get groupings of four lights in a single color band
that moves across the whole distribution of the grouping.
So this is another way to get a different type of look
out of the same group and the same series
with a few small adjustments to the effect playback.
So let’s look at another series in my series list.
We’re going to take a look at the 'BlueWhite' effect,
and in the 'BlueWhite' effect, we only have two steps.
Well technically, we only have one step, and we have a background state.
In a Break Mode effect,
what we’re doing is we’re setting up an effect
that’s going to move through a grouping of lights in some distribution that you’ve set,
and as each light hits the active or the real step in this case,
it’s going to follow the timing of that step
to in this case, turn onto full and turn to Color Palette 1, which is white.
In additional timing values called 'Sustain' and 'Release', which are parameters on the effect playback,
that white color is going to stay on stage for a certain amount of time,
and then that part will go back into what’s called the 'Background' state.
In this case, our background state is to be on at full, but be in Color Palette 3.
So in this effect, Color Palette 1 gets me my open white, and Color Palette 3 gets me a dark blue color,
and I’ll play that for you now live
on the same lights we were using before.
So all I’m really going to change here is the series, and I’ll put it back to the recorded time.
So what we’re going to see when I turn these lights on is the wash lights, 14 parts
moving sequentially, so in that same order, fading to white and then going to blue every second.
So you can see they come in together, which is the entry method that’s on this playback.
They all turn to blue, and one at a time, they’re fading to white.
I can change this behavior again by playing with the times.
So now they’ll snap, stay on, and move along.
I could create a reverse ramp, so they snap on and fade out.
I can make the fade out even longer, and now we’ll see more lights on at a time
because the lights are staying on for one second and fading out in three seconds,
but every single second, a new light is being told to start fading up
or to snap on in this case.
So now, you see a longer trail of lights as the effect moves on.
And I can speed that up again to make it a little more obvious,
or I can lengthen that tail even longer
by extending the release time, the time it takes to go from white back into blue.
The equivalent for this in real life is if you’re in a football stadium.
Doing the wave at a football stadium is the exact same thing as a break mode effect.
The active state – in this case, it’s be white. In the football stadium, it’s stand up.
The background state is sit down or be blue, in this case.
You stand up, you stay standing, and you sit back down.
The chair doesn’t come back up to get you.
So that’s how this 'Attack', 'Sustain', and 'Release' time is used
to make the white fade in, the white stay on, and the white release back to blue.
And that’s a break mode effect.
Most old school moving light effects, like flyaways or this pop to white
are break mode effects,
so it’s a very powerful tool for making
very interesting looks on stage with very small changes.