1:1 patch: Do you use it?

What type of patch do you use?


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Slightly off-topic, but I've always wondered how large touring shows handle the patch. Assuming you're using all (or almost all) touring racks, would you hard patch internally inside the rack, or would you keep it 1:1 and soft patch at the console, which also travels with you? It seems like either of these would work just as well (for conventionals anyways), but does anyone know which method is generally used?
 
In response to Rockem:
On the occasions that I have worked with touring shows or do temporary events using portable packs we almost always hard patch by the soco run. In other words dimmers 1-6 go down saco A dimmers 7-11 go down soco B with outputs 5&6 on the soco not being used. Or pathing so that pars on the same bar can be on the same dimmer. The reason for this is that it is easier to trouble shoot and a hard patch coupled with a soft patch tends to be much easier than adding extra dimmers.
 
What we normally do are one offs and short runs with touring racks. We hook the socos in A to A etc on the racks, then patch on top of the dimmers to group colors or ficture type. Then softpatch to subs to set cues or looks. The exact method depends on the show.
 
I have to be with Icewolf on this one.

When I design I send the instrument schedule to the ME with only the channel column filled in. I could care less what he does with his dimmers/circuits as long as when I call channel 1 the DSL warm front comes on.

I have some standard numbers (I like specials in the 100's, cyc stuff at 150, etc) but it can vary. For example if I have 9 front light areas in one theater (common in thrust spaces) I will have 12, 15, or 16 in some large proceniums. So my channel numbers vary slightly from place to place, but not a whole lot.

Mike

This is what we expect from our incoming shows. Our normal house hang is 1:1 since we have as many control channels as dimmers in the rack (LBX board and channels of CD80 dimmers. For simple productions, If I want to 1, 5, and 13 to grouped together, that's what subs are for. It's also easier for focusing, since you can just go down the pipe and go by what numbers on the bar rather than try to run all over focusing all the lights on one channel at once.
For more complicated productions, we take Mike's list, fill in the dimmers that are closest to the physical location of the light, and do a quick soft patch. It's going to be different for the next show anyway....
 
Re: Patching house lights to board

Well, you may actually want to do a 1:1 patch, just to "find" the house lights, and then patch them to whatever channels. Also, I'd look at the server rack to see if the DMX line goes anywhere other than your control board. Good luck!

P.S. If the board has a dimmer check function, use that. It might save a little more time than resetting the patch tables and starting from scratch.
 
Re: Patching house lights to board

Before I went through the trouble of going to the dimmer room, I would look at the patch and find out if the house light dimmers are patched to anything, and if so, what. There is no reason to assume the console is patched 1:1 unless you did it. Nobody in their right mind uses a 1:1 patch these days.

-Tim

are you nuts? all three of our spaces are 1:1 patched, and many shows that come through are 1:1 patch except for non rig items. Now I may not be in my right mind but I have serious doubts of the 12 ME's I've met are all not right...
 
Re: Patching house lights to board

are you nuts? all three of our spaces are 1:1 patched, and many shows that come through are 1:1 patch except for non rig items. Now I may not be in my right mind but I have serious doubts of the 12 ME's I've met are all not right...


Why?

Isn't it much easier to think of your warm front light as channels 1-10, rather than channels 1,4,9,13,15,22,8,12,75,26? Even more so on a touring show, do they rewrite the show every night? Pretty much every lighting console installed in venues at this point has the ability to create soft patches, and it takes a remarkably small amount of time to do so. I just don't understand why you would make things harder on yourself.
 
Re: Patching house lights to board

I tend to start every show 1:1 for hanging/focusing purposes (so that the number on the circuit matches the number on the board), and then hard/soft patch into what makes logical sense for the show once the plot is hung and focused. Some venues it makes more sense to hard patch via the patch panel at the dimmer rack, other venues its all done on the console. It tends to make easiest sense for me, and its easier for me to yell at random borrowed minion sitting at the console to bring up channel X than try and remember at the top of a genie lift where I patched the light. Once the focus is done, I patch to where its easiest for me to program.
 
Re: Patching house lights to board

are you nuts? all three of our spaces are 1:1 patched, and many shows that come through are 1:1 patch except for non rig items. Now I may not be in my right mind but I have serious doubts of the 12 ME's I've met are all not right...

ME thinks he isn't nuts. The theater I currently work at produces 5 shows during their season with 5 different designers. Each show my patch is 70% different from the previous. Each show needs different things, and each designer channels and works in a different way. This is including the three of 6 that work together quite often. I've worked in spaces with over 600 dimmers and in spaces with only 6. 1:1 drives most designers nuts.
 
Re: Patching house lights to board

A 1:1 patch would be a nightmare for me. I need area lighting that never moves. The first 20 channels are 4 rows of 5 areas, starting with DSL. Front warm, front cool, etc. are in groups. If someone comes in and wants a 1:1 patch, it's easy enough to start a new show and reset the patch.
 
Because that's what our subs our for. Granted your idea is good, most of our shows are one color down wash and one color front wash...

And I think that's the big difference is the scale of the shows. On the rare occasion I do theatre of course I'll use a proper patch, but if I am doing a wedding reception with 24 dimmers, I'll just flash through them and then make groups based on use. Taking the time to repatch everything in some sort of order would just end up being a waste of my time.
 
I honestly can't even believe this is a thread.... I have never met any professional LD who didn't patch their show. 1:1 only seems appropriate if you have absolutely no idea how to do paperwork
 
I honestly can't even believe this is a thread.... I have never met any professional LD who didn't patch their show. 1:1 only seems appropriate if you have absolutely no idea how to do paperwork

Depends on what you're doing. Not everyone here designs for theatre with weeks to plot and program their shows.

I use 1:1, but that's because we only have a couple shows a year that come through and spend more than one night in the room. Otherwise everyone is out just as swiftly as they arrived, and I'm usually the house lighting designer on-the-fly. A group loads in, we ask them what they would like to see, and if I'm lucky I get 90 minutes scattered throughout the day to make the changes I want to make to the lighting rig and then I get maybe 15 minutes at the console to record some groups and be ready to go.

For what I do, absolutely no part of what I'm doing would be made easier by having an elaborate patch in place. Even for our annual dance events like The Nutcracker, I've done the math and no time would be saved for me. It also helps that I'm the programmer though. Anyone who is the lighting designer but is not the programmer has to bridge the communications gap between the two of them by being able to reference fixtures quickly off the top of their head. As the programmer, it would take me longer to sift through paperwork and try to remember what I numbered those few fixtures when I can have a handle on the console for them as simple as "US FOH Warm" and "DS FOH Cool" and "MAC250's".

Like a former TD of mine used to say, "Anyone can design a show with three hundred fixtures and an endless supply of labor and time to get the show ready. It takes a real designer to operate under constraints on the number and types of fixtures they can use, the time they have to load-in and focus, and the time they have to program the show."
 
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Like a former TD of mine used to say, "Anyone can design a show with three hundred fixtures and an endless supply of labor and time to get the show ready. It takes a real designer to operate under constraints on the number and types of fixtures they can use, the time they have to load-in and focus, and the time they have to program the show."

The only people who say things like that are the people who have never had to manage 300 fixtures and a massive crew. :wall:
 
Depends on what you're doing. Not everyone here designs for theatre with weeks to plot and program their shows.

I use 1:1, but that's because we only have a couple shows a year that come through and spend more than one night in the room. Otherwise everyone is out just as swiftly as they arrived, and I'm usually the house lighting designer on-the-fly. A group loads in, we ask them what they would like to see, and if I'm lucky I get 90 minutes scattered throughout the day to make the changes I want to make to the lighting rig and then I get maybe 15 minutes at the console to record some groups and be ready to go

See, the only world I see this as even remotely useful is one where you use every dimmer and your lighting goes sequentially.... I'm not talking about patching for every show persay but at least a house patch. Leading number is focus point trailing number is fixture number, evens come from stage left odds come from stage right, something like that at least.... So downstage left would be 11 and 12 if you just had a basic cross shot. Those two lights without a patch could easily be 6 and 23 otherwise...

Well, to each their own I guess
 
We use 1:1 patch with elaborated rep plot numbering. Circuits (being numbered 1:1 to dimmers´ addresses, thus actually the dimmer number) are spread out more with a phase load in mind than any logic, so while FOH positions have continuous numbering (FOH3 unit 1-8 being circ. 57-64, FOH2 65-72 and so on), booms are simply a mess with no logical order (17, 19, 33, 21, 35, 23...). That is why I suggested channel numbering we eventually stick with, being based on unit position rather than zone or special purpose that changes from show to show, obviously. So, FOH1 units 1-8 became channel 11-18, FOH2 channel 21-28..., boom positions became 111-119 for SR and 211-219 for SL and so on.

Our space is a black-box theatre with 96 dimmers, one (!) S4 Revolution (channel 301), two Selador Paletta LEDs (401 & 402), a strobe and some foggers and hazers.

There are usually 14-25 shows on the repertory with at least 10 new each season. Profession of a LD is not established here in Slovakia, so we stick with the rep numbering because after three years of using we know it by heart and noone ever wanted to use their own custom patch. Groups and subs are used heavily, anyway.

So, one could say we use 1:1 patch that is... not quite 1:1.
 
See, the only world I see this as even remotely useful is one where you use every dimmer and your lighting goes sequentially.... I'm not talking about patching for every show persay but at least a house patch. Leading number is focus point trailing number is fixture number, evens come from stage left odds come from stage right, something like that at least.... So downstage left would be 11 and 12 if you just had a basic cross shot. Those two lights without a patch could easily be 6 and 23 otherwise...

Well, to each their own I guess

Nope. There's no one who benefits in our theatre from that. Then we get people coming in who need a piece of paper to cross-reference circuit numbers with channel numbers. I've found it a real PITA with a patched plot when someone calls out "Circuit 149" for that light they just added or were just troubleshooting. If the light isn't patched, I have to take the time to patch it. If I'm working on an RFU, that means running up to the console in the both. If it is, that probably still means running up into the booth because there's not a snowball's chance I'm going to remember what I patched that as. Either way, there's lost time waiting to get the light turned on, and if I'm the only one in the theatre at the time and I'm in the scissor lift, it now means as much as an extra 10-15 minutes getting the thing patched before I can turn it on and focus it.

Our rep file in the console does include a graphical light plot in it. If someone asks for the "third red fresnel on the end", I can either grab my group for Down Red and then quickly Next through it to get to my light, or I can just use the trackball on my console to arrow to that fresnel, click on it, and bring it up.

Elaborate patching systems are great for touring acts that have to worry about doing the same show on different dimmers each night. They're also great when you're console is as dumb as bricks and you need to compensate for that by having an encyclopedia's worth of useless numbering schemes logged in your head. For us, our console, and our shows, we stand only to waste time with those numbering schemes though. I know this from experience because for a few months I tried and only found it to make my life a rotating cycle of listening to people come to me and say "Why doesn't this work?" and "That's...uhhhhh...channel.....51?...61?...maybe?" and "Bollocks! I need to run up to the booth to patch that new circuit in before you can bring it up on the RFU."
 
Like most of the high school students who've replied, I'm a 1:1 user... when I've got other students around. For the sake of keeping it simple, we keep our 24/48 MaXim on 1:1 patching, but extensively hardpatch. In my school auditorium, I'll usually hardpatch before I softpatch. My main reason isn't technical - I just find it easier to teach a 14-15 year old to light working on 1:1 rather than going "Ok, fixture 23 is patched into dimmer 18 which is red 6 on the desk because it's open white focused DSOP." It's just simpler, especially with only 24 dimmers. Kids like being able to see the path from fader > dimmer > patch > light, and with this setup that physically exists, which makes it much easier for them to get to grips with where power/data are going.

Personally, I'm an avid softpatch user, even when working with almost exactly the same rig in the same venue for most shows. When I know they're going to want the same locations lit but with other things going on ("Oh, they'll play in the same spot as the string quartet, but I'd like a red cyc, not blue") I usually end up making a few extra patches that are essentially multiple-fixture specials to save time. Best effort-saving trick I ever learnt was to softpatch every LED fixture in the house into three faders; master red, master green, master blue. Makes life so much easier when they just want a wash.
 
I use 1:1 most of the time because I usually don't have the time to become intimate with a custom patch. I always set up groups anyways, and I learned to just rely on them instead of a custom patch for most things. A 1:1 patch also makes focus easier, so the rare times I have used a custom patch it hasn't been implanted until after focus.

The two cases I will usually use a custom patch are on older boards with lots of dumb faders (if they are there I probably will use them eventually and it just looks messy to have them out of order as I have a desire to label everything), and when I work on a smaller design (physical size of venue - black boxes and smaller found spaces usually) for a while at which point it's almost easier to use channels for me.
 

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