Lights were frozen in up position with Element console.

[JLNorthGA]

I wasn't there - so I have no more data that what is in the title.
As I understand it here is the basic scenario. Mark was running the lights on Saturday Evening. He warmed up the lights and then ran through the cues in the program. Before opening the house, he noticed that the lights were frozen in the up position - so a number of them were at 100%. He couldn't go to the levels for the curtain warmer and preshow lighting. When he tried to press the GO button or the Stop/Back button - it didn't vary the lights. He rebooted the board and reloaded the program - to no avail. I was on my way back from Atlanta - so I got a panicked phone call.

The TD of the local college happened to be in the audience. He evidently took the sliders down, moved them up and took them down again. The console then worked and the program could be followed.

I'm not sure what happened - though I would really like to find out. I suspect that Mark somehow got to the submaster mode and inadvertently was using submasters as opposed to the program. I don't know - when I arrived at the theatre - things were working fine.

Any thoughts? I'm going to try and download a keystroke log later.

 

[sk8rsdad]

My guess is they were being controlled by something other than the playback faders, most likely a sub. It would help to know the colour of the intensity that was being displayed. Yellow would mean it was coming from a sub. Power cycling the console is seldom a solution since the Eos line is designed to restore the last look. That the look persisted through the power cycle supports the notion that it was being controlled deliberately, albeit inadvertently, by something else.

 

[kesowul]

If it was a sub controlling those fixtures, you can hit _{[X <where x is your first Sub number] [Thru] [At] [Home] [Enter] this will put all of your subs to their home position.}

 

[Patchwork1]

What version of software are you running? An early release of v2.x Eos software had a submaster bug for element consoles. I had a problem on 2 different consoles where the subs would get "locked" at some intensity. by running the sub up to full and pulling it down again I was able to regain control, but it was a continuing problem. The latest stable release of the software has fixed this.

Pat

 

[JLNorthGA]

I'm not exactly sure what version I'm running. Probably an older one. I updated over a year ago - but not since then. I check and see.

Thanks.

I did send a download of the event log to ETC - maybe they can tell me something.

 

[Patchwork1]

v.2 came out in March so probably not. But the new software has some pretty cool feature such as magic sheets, which makes programing much easier as you can lay out your groups and pallets graphically. Even better if you have dual touch screens.

Pat

 

[KyleAnderson]

I have an Element in a theater that will have up to a dozen operators in any given week. When we were having a similar problem for a few weeks. Values seemed to be "locked" into place incorrectly. Clearing cues and running submasters wasn't helping. (and wasn't intuitive for a lot of our stage managers)

I called ETC's tech support and learned about [goto cue][out][enter]. Going to cue "out" clears out ANY levels and sends all fixture data to its home state. It's now the first troubleshooting step I take when my stage managers call and tell me our lights are acting funny.

 

[RickR]

Just a reminder: the color of a level is a very important clue as to what is controlling that channel.

Yellow is for submasters, Red is manual, Green, Blue and Purple are cues. Its my first question when something is funny.

[About] can also tell you who is in charge but that's more advanced.