I think that this thread needs a little housekeeping, it seems that a lot of terms and techniques are being tossed around and it doesn't seem like everyone is on the same
page.
The goal is to create a light show that is synced to music, there are many ways to accomplish this. The simplest is to write all the cues and just push the GO
button as you listen to the music. The next simplest is to write all your cues as auto-follows. To do this, you would have to time out the piece and figure out where each
cue goes and then add and subtract and do some math to figure out the follow times for each
cue. then you just start the music and push go at the right time and all the cues will go.
The next way requires your lighting
console to be able to accept
MSC (
MIDI Show Control) commands and you need software on a computer that can playback the audio and
send MSC commands. Then you write all your cues and wherever you want them to go, you place an
MSC GO in the sequence on the audio controller which in turn will trigger the cues. Audio Playback from software like
QLab and SFX and Devices like the RSD AudioBox can easily sequence
MSC commands. Most newer consoles like
Ion have
MIDI capabilities built in.
The next way is to use the
SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) timecode. Timecode is just a clock with which you can set events to happen at given times. Most consoles can generate the clock themselves, but they can also sync clocks with other devices. So if you had an audio playback device that could output timecode you could connect it to the
console and sync the timecode, then just tell the
console where each
cue goes in time on the
SMPTE list. The other way to do it if your audio device can't output timecode is to have the
console's clock start when you push the GO
button, then just start the audio and push GO at the same time and off you go.
Those are the basic ways to sync lights and audio. One of the other topics that was brought up was chases. A
chase generally refers to an
effect that changes the
intensity of some set of fixtures and loops. Chases are comprised of a series of steps. A step is like a
cue in that you can assign it a
fade time and what channels are in it at what
level. When you run and
effect it plays back the steps in the order you specify (forwards, reverse, random). Effects can usually be loaded into cues or subs, or called manually. On some consoles when you run an
effect you can control the rate of the
effect with a
fader on the
console.
