As it happens I used a
Colortran Prestiege
Magic Sheet extensively and use an Expression 3 Designer's Worksheet currently. I'm told that I'm an oddball in this.
The Designer's Worksheet is GREAT. There's some work you have to do setting it up, but it pays off in time saved during tech.
The big downer is that the folks at
ETC chose to use a Kurta graphics tablet as the hardware, and because the Kurta was out of production before I even got mine, there's the problem of the pens. When
ETC gave me the tablet it came with a corded
mouse. They offered me a wireless
mouse too. Thing is, using a tablet, you gotta have a pen to be fast, a
mouse is too slow. My first pen failed after about four years; I bought 3 on ebay and am down to only one spare. It's the Achilles heel of the whole
system. I found a corded Kurta pen on eBay, but it won't work with my tablet....
Okay, anyway, the way it works is this. You create "regions" on the tablet that are associated with macros. Touch the region with the pen, the
macro executes. So you do up your
magic sheet in
CAD, print it out,
lay it on the tablet, then go into the Designer's Worksheet Editing display and do your regions. You define a region, then enter the
macro.
This can be tedious, but you save a lot of time by having macros predefined. I always know that I'm going to have
macro 101 for "Chan. 1",
macro 102 for "Chan. 2",
etc... so I already have those entered as part of my new show default memory. This allows me to select "Region 101", use the pen on the tablet to
mark it out, then just hit "Enter
Macro" instead of keying in the
channel stuff, which allows me to knock through all the single
channel points really fast.
What works great, though, is that you can create macros that select groups of channels. So, once I'm done doing single channels I'll define regions that do that. So, for example, on my
magic sheet I'll have an area for side lights; all the single channels will be aranged in a
grid, warms on top, cools below; then there will be a title, "Warm Sides" above the warms and I'll make a region on those words that will run a
macro that selects all of the warm side channels, and above all the sides, the word "Sides", and on that a region that will select all the warm and cool side channels.
Laying out acting areas on the
magic sheet, I'll put an X where the area is, and then put the
channel numbers hitting the area around the X, then make the X a region that selects all of the lights for the area. I create regions that select all of the areas lights for the whole
stage from each direction, all of the area lights for a given
platform, all of the area lights period,
etc....
I also have small squares that are always across the bottom of the sheet that are set as "@10", "@20", up to "@FL". So, for example, with two pen taps I can grab all of my cool sidelights and put them at 60%. With two pen taps I can bring all the lights on the DSR
platform to 80%. Two more pen taps, the one light that spills over onto the housefloor is at 50%.
Etc....
Using the tablet makes moving my iCues around lightning fast. I have marks that grab each iCue's lamp
channel, and marks that grab each iCue as a "
Fixture"; and then also marks that grab only the ones from the front, or all of them. I have another
mark that runs a
macro that says "Only Postion @
Focus Point". I have another that says "Only Postion Enter Record
Focus Point", and another that says "
Return Solo" so that I can record a
focus point in three or four pen taps. If I'm using focus points extensively I'll make a map on the tablet for focus points, and make regions for the focus points where the
macro runs "Only Position @ FocusPoint # Enter". So, in two pen taps I can grab any or all iCues and move them to any
focus point.
So, anything you can do with macros you can do with a pen tap. Way cool.
This sounds tedious to set up, but it's actually not. Creating the
magic sheet in
CAD is time consuming, yes, but I'd be doing that anyway, I just have learned to do it a certain way to make it tablet friendly. Defining the regions and macros generally takes me about 15 minutes.
Actually, I don't know why anybody wouldn't use a tablet interface. It's incredibly intuitive and fast.
