Light Jockey?

[Met]

Howdy all,

I hope you can help me. I am the new LD/Media Guy at a local church here. They have 8 Lekos, 8 Mini-Macs, and their general house lights all run thru Light Jockey. Bottom line.... I don't get how you program timing etc and all of its capabilities. Anyone have any knowledge of this program?

PLEASE HELP!!!!

Met

[len]

Tons. Conventionals aren't quite as easy to work as movers in LJ unless you have a Fingers fader panel. But it can be done. Read the help and teach yourself. It's not that difficult. Just go one step at a time. Read, try, read, try. But a full tutorial here would be too difficult.

Also, if you want, I could program some basic stuff for you and send you the files on a cd so you could install it. However, I'll need to know the addresses of the fixtures and how the conventionals are controlled (dimmers, etc.). However, my workload will right now would mean it'd be a couple weeks before I could even think about it.

The third option would be for me to zip my existing library to you by email, and you could look at it to see how I do things. That would only take a few minutes.

[Met]

I have some basic stuff programmed, and I am good with how the lights move and all I just cant figure out how to get more than 12 sequences per cue and how to set up timings and how to get lights to move like down an aisle w/o having multiple cues.

[len]

Since I don't know how much you know, some basics.

A scene is the most basic programming element. One or more scenes makes a sequences.
One or more sequences makes a cue.
One or more cues can be saved in a cuelist.

You can't get more than 12 sequences per cue. It's been requested but Martin can't/won't do it.

Setting fade times is easy. On the Sequence Control bar, you'll see the active sequence name. If a sequence is active, it will be yellow. Immediately to the right of that is the sequence box you want. Open it. You'll see double arrows to right and left. Clicking those makes the sequence run continuously in foward and backwards. To the right of that is single arrows. Clicking those moves the sequence forward and back one scene. Next to that is a window indicating how many total scenes i the sequence, and the number of the current scene. Next is the plus sign, which is used to add scenes to the end of the sequence. Next is a button allowing insertion of scenes in the middle of a sequence, and finally a button to trash unwanted scenes.
The next line allows for the scene time. That can be set from .05 seconds and up. Below that is fade time. This is the time you're looking for.

To do a followspot down an aisle, there's 2 ways.

1. Point the lights to the starting point.
2. Add another scene in and point the lights to the end point.
3. Adjust the scene time and fade time (they should be equal, and there's a checkbox in the window which will keep fade and scene times the same) as needed.

The difficulty with this is that the beam may not appear to track in a straight line. You may have to create several scenes.

Once you get comfortable with this, you might want to make a sequence with a number of scenes that follow along the path. Then, as the object hits each pre-set point you can adjust the flow a little better. Also, you can make the scene advance manual, and set a hotkey (like a "go" button on a lot of other desks) to advance from scene to scene.

The other way is to get a gaming joystick (I find that to be the best when using lights as a followspot) and control them that way.

Either way you won't get as good a result as if you were using a manual followspot, but it's not bad.

[Met]

cool, ty I will try this. I wish there was someone in my area that knew how this darned thing worked. I am a visual learner but i will try and see what happens. Thanks again