Console Simulator?

[Charc]

Wow, this is one stupid post, but I thought it was worth a shot.

I'd like to get some more programming experience, especially with boards other than our strand 300 series. Now I know they make offline editors (not sure of pricing or availability.) but you can't really see what you program there. I mean it would be a step up from not programming at all, but I wondered if there was any type of like program that also had a quite simplistic picture of a stage or something, so instead of going "theoretically, when I push this button, that light is going to turn on"; it'd be more like "what happens when I press this button? oh the cue follows 15 seconds later". Wow it's late, and I'm sure that made no sense, so let me try and rephrase what I mean. I'd like to get some more experience programming, but our dept. head is quite paranoid that something will mess up our board. So there is no learning / experimentation / developing of skills and techniques to be applied to future productions. Everything is "on-the-job" so to speak. And to be quite truthful I have so much fear messing somethin' up I won't press most of the buttons. Over the past year I've gotten quite familiar with a bit of the basic features, but I feel (like our brains) I'm only utilizing 10% at most, of the power of our board (and I know it the best!). I mean, I don't know how the learning process is anywhere else, but how do you teach/learn consoles? It's all self-taught here, which I guess is half the problem. And our dept. head won't really let me learn / try things out. (Example, we have a current issue with our faders. I got a bit of syntax from here that looks like it should fix the problem. It's a fade up time issue on all channels. The syntax was something like "1-100 TIME 0 *". Seemed simple enough, and theoretically I can't think of anything that'd mess up or interfere. But I didn't get the go-ahead to plug it in. Instead, it looks like the "Strand guy" is coming out...) I'd love to figure out things like fade profiles, split fade up/down times, effects, macros, I-Cue, and stuff I don't even know about because I haven't learned it, etc. but I don't have the time, or permission, to go ahead and learn. It's a tad bit frustrating.

[Footer]

Do a search on here for some of my previous post about strand consoles, bobby harrell has a great site that I have linked to a million times.

What you are looking for is a visualizer. There are a few out there, some only work with certain consoles, others work with everything. WYSIWYG perform by cast software has a pretty good visualizer that you can run off of the shownet network (the network protocol all strand consoles use) without a hickup. ESP Vision which runs w/ vectorworks also has a great visualizer. Both of these programs are in the 3 to 4 grand range.

[DarSax]

Originally Posted by Footer4321

Both of these programs are in the 3 to 4 grand range.

This bothers me endlessly. I don't understand why a company can't come out with a low-tech, very-basic graphics visualizer. I don't need perfect measurements for my truss, I don't need super-duper 3-d visualizations, I just want to see if this might look good.

ARG

[gafftaper]

Hey Charc,
This thread discussed free console software... there's tons of it but as Footer said none of it has a visualization tool. Sadly, the stuff you are asking about is really expensive.

Stage research sells some interesting lighting software that you might want to check out. Some of it has free trial downloads... in fact I think I'm going to go download their program called "Light Grid" right now.

[Footer]

Originally Posted by DarSax

This bothers me endlessly. I don't understand why a company can't come out with a low-tech, very-basic graphics visualizer. I don't need perfect measurements for my truss, I don't need super-duper 3-d visualizations, I just want to see if this might look good.
ARG

its not cheap to develop this software. Think about it, they have to take nearly every light out there, put it in a white room, run it through its paces, record everything it can do, and then put that in their software. Cast its very exacting about their fixture inventory. If you hang a real plot exacly like you have it drawn, everything will come **** close to what it is on that screen. Its not cheap to do all this development. On top of that, there are only about 5000 to 10000 TOTAL users to draw from, and they only get a handful of those. Microsoft can stretch the development cost of windows across millions, cast has to stretch it across a much smaller user group. If you want a cheap "visualizer", get virtual light lab. You can get a full copy for around 200 bux if I remember correctly. These things arent cheap, however most new consoles anymore come with WYSIWYG console edition (you can't print on it) and it has the visualizer support.