Basic ETC Ion Question About Cues

Stevens R. Miller

Well-Known Member
Amazingly, I have not been able to find the answer to this question in the oh-so-clear, 440-page pamphlet that comes with the ETC Ion.

I have learned how to program basic cues and play them from a cue list. When I play a cue, channels set to specific intensities fade to those intensities, including channels for which the intensity is zero. If a channel does not have an intensity set for it (that is, its "tombstone" is empty), the most recent intensity set for that channel is left unchanged when that cue plays.

Once I have set an intensity for a channel in a given cue, I can't seem to set it back to the "nothing" value it had before I set it.

How can I set a channel in a cue so it remains unchanged by that cue when it is played?
 
It sounds likes you want to revert the channel to it's prior value; that is, remove the move instruction. If so, then the trick is to set it to an empty (null) value.

In Live: <channel X> [At] [Enter] [Update] [Enter]
In Blind: <channel x> [At] [Enter]
 
It sounds likes you want to revert the channel to it's prior value; that is, remove the move instruction. If so, then the trick is to set it to an empty (null) value.

In Live: <channel X> [At] [Enter] [Update] [Enter]
In Blind: <channel x> [At] [Enter]

Much appreciated, sk8rsdad, those work great! Thanks to your help, I was able to find a few places in the manual that do explain this, but they're in rather obscure sections (that is, [At][Enter] does not appear to be in the section on basic settings, nor in the section on playing a cue list).

For context: I am, once again, scrambling like a maniac with a local community theater company to help with lights. This time, we're in an actual theater (The Franklin Park Performing Arts Center, in Purcellville, Virginia). They have an ETC Ion and were kind enough to let me play with it on my own for a few hours, but these creatures are all alike in some ways, and all different in some ways. So, even though I got it to play cues, there's still a lot I need to learn. Taking a "move" (new term for me right there) out of a cue was one of them. We had load-in yesterday, with first curtain on Friday, hence the maniacal scrambling.

ETC's free Eos family offline program is a great learning tool, though. I was able to try your guidance right here at home on my computer.

Thanks for the assist!
 
The Eos family consoles use the move-fade paradigm. Every change in a cue is a move instruction.
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Well, things went pretty well at tonight's rehearsal and I did use the technique you described. However, the Arts Center likes to have their Ion operating in Cue Only, rather than Tracking, mode so that confused me for a while.

One thing, at the end of the evening, really knocked me over: I had set a number of lights to illuminate just stage right and saved that setting into a submaster fader. Pushing it forward brought all those lights up, and pulling it back brought them down, just as I wanted it to. But, somewhere along the line, by the end of the evening, something had changed: pushing that fader forward brought up my lights, but pulling backwards cross-faded from my lights to a number of instruments I hadn't used all night. Pushing it back and forth continued to cross-fade between my lights and some other set, even though all lights were off before the first time I pushed the submaster fader forward.

This turned out to be repeatable behavior: If I pulled the submaster fader all the way back, then punched in [1] [Thru] [999] [Out], all the lights went out. After that, if I moved ths submaster fader forward, my intended set of lights came up. Then, if I pulled the submaster fader backwards, my intended lights call came down but, again, a set of lights I hadn't use all night cross-faded up. And, again, shoving the fader forwards and backwards just continued the same cross-fade, over and over.

I couldn't make a submaster fader do a cross-fade if I wanted it to! Any idea at all about how that could happen?
 
That video was helpful, btw.

It appears the bizarre cross-fade behavior I saw on one submaster may be the result of that submaster being set to LTP, rathern HTP, mode. I'll check it tonight and see if that's it.
"rathern" Northern, southern, RATHERN! I understand.
Good to see you here Stevens.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
Heh. I have a keyboard-related form of dyslexia, which often causes me to leave out what I call "small words" (like "is," "the," "it," and such-like). It also causes me to collapse words that have letters in common into one pseudo-word. The latter applies in this case.

I meant to type, "rather than." But I collapsed the "th" of both words together and dropped "Than's" letter "a" for "rather's" letter "e," and it all just typed on from there.

I hate that I do this, but I do it all the time. Even after proof-reading (since I know I do it), I still do it.

Wish I could stop. But I can't.
 

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