I used to
love paperwork, but now I don't. I want to know as little as I need to for me to get my job done as a
programmer. I don't need to know what the
fixture is lamped at, what the exact
gel is, or what the name of the
gobo is, just where the
fixture points, the
circuit #, the
channel #, and so on.
Too often someone will give me the groups
they want to use, but when it comes time to program they don't reference the fixtures by their group numbers, so I kill a lot of time looking on my list of 25 groups for a
one-off every time they want "those two lights with the gobos in them."
With my Congo Jr. I love being able to toss groups onto the master playback
wing because it labels the faders automatically and with the push of single
button, I can select all of the channels in a group. It makes programming go pretty smoothly. However, I'm just as quick at programming without faders, though sometimes someone will be indecisive about where they want certain lights to be, so they ask to have me put a few on faders for them that can be operated independent of the
cue stack.
Flash 'n trash is a whole different beast, though. I wouldn't be able to do that without my playback
wing.
I always seem to encounter a recurring problem with students, which is that they grow up on individual
channel faders, and teaching them to use groups, subs, masters, and presets is painfully difficult because they don't like to type things in; they just want to push each individual
channel fader up. That's not terrible when you only have 20 channels of
conventional lighting, but when you have 150, good luck. Whenever a student wants to work in our roadhouse, I judge their competence not on simply being capable of programming a show, but on being able to organize their show files in meaningful and deliberate ways that allow them to quickly reference any groups and channels that they need to. Anyone can program a 170-cue show one
channel at a time, but to be competent to work in the roadhouse, you need to be able to work lot faster than that.
While two-scene presets used to be good for teaching, now they're more dangerous than they are helpful. For people who plan to move on and program for larger events, they are awful at teaching good programming techniques. Every time I hear someone tell me they are irritated at not being able to use individual
channel faders on our shows with 250+ channels of conventionals, I die a little
bit more inside.
The best advice I can give to people moving on from two-scene presets to larger boards is to not be afraid of groups and programming in
broad strokes, but to embrace this new feature and use it to your benefit. Organizing show files and structuring them in a sensible format is an incredibly valuable and completely necessary skill that two-scene presets just can't prepare you for.
An interesting tidbit of wisdom on this note, is that most of the two-scene presets out there on the market (here's looking at you,
Express!'), while capable of being used as two-scene presets, and can be called two-scene presets, are rarely used as such. A lot of people were extremely angry at
ETC for dropping the
Express line because it marked the end of two-scene presets in the educational lighting markets, but when asked how many of them actually used their consoles as two-scene presets, almost nobody said they did. Programming channel-by-channel is just too inefficient. Groups and submasters on faders are nice, but once you've built your entire
cue stack, the lack of motorized faders on most consoles means to ever edit your levels below what they're initially programmed at, you need to type them in.
Typing is the way of the future until motorized faders are standard. Even if/when they are standard, a lot of people will be so used to inputting by keypad that even motorized faders will slow them down. The next worst thing to programming channel-by-channel is using the
mouse to program on desks like Congo,
Ion,
Element, and so on. Anyone who has taken a demo or training session from Spencer Lyons knows that he'll just about slap your
hand if you grab the
mouse, because it serves purely as a crutch for people who don't want to navigate using the keypad. If you're desperate, it'll get the job done, but there's a dozen better ways to navigate that will speed up your programming ten-fold. (this is what the entire debate on faders is about -- which methods are the most
practical and efficient)
