LIGHTWRIGHT 5 problem

[katieeelauren]

Hi everyone!
I'm a first time designer, and am struggling to assemble my paperwork.

First off...
Do I need to enter all of the information in order of position? Meaning if I enter a color wash that has 4 instruments located on separate pipes, should lightwright be able to order them correctly when completed? (because it won't for me)

Also... Most of the rows I enter in lightwright have little locks on them, that won't allow me to move them.

ANY AND ALL ADVICE WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED!

thanks!

 

[rochem]

Hi Katie.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Lightwright! In my opinion, it's one of the best pieces of software written for this industry, because there are literally no limits to what you can do apart from your own creativity.

To start out, I'd highly recommend going through the LW tutorials, which are available from the Help menu or can be downloaded from the website. This will show you all these things you're wondering about, and a lot more. I'll answer your questions, but take an hour or two and work through the tutorials, and you'll understand it much better.

There's no restriction on what order you need to enter things, or how much information you need to enter. At the top of the window are two dropdown boxes, labeled "Show:" and "Sorted by:". When you go to the sorted by dropdown menu, you can select how you want LW to sort your lights - for positions, youi'd select Position, for sorting by channel, you'd select Channel, and so on. By default, this will put positions in the order you entered them, but you can change the order by going to Maintenance -> Position. As for the locks, those are displayed when you've dragged your rows around and taken them out of the default order (usually taking them out of numerical order by unit number). To get rid of them, you need to hover your cursor over the right side of one of the Position labels and click - this will display only the lights that are in that position. At the bottom right is a lock icon - click it and confirm, and your lights will be resorted to their normal order. Make sense?

Check out the tutorial, as that will help a bunch. Good luck!

 

[katieeelauren]

Wow.. thank you so much! Getting the locks off is a HUGE help... only problem now is that when i select show ALL and sort by POSITION some of the pipes are not in the correct order, hence where I got myself into trouble with the locks. I will absolutely be going through all of the tutorials but for the sake of getting some sleep tonight (i know it's a foreign concept for a tech theatre student) any ideas on why this may be occurring?

 

[SteveB]

Go to Maintenance - Position and press Alphabetize. This will do the initial sort.

Then and while still in the maintenance section, click in the extreme left column of ea. position and drag the positions into the order you want. LW saves this sort order with the show file so you only do it once.

When working in the worksheet and selecting All by Position, you will have the positions sorted in the desired order.

FWIW, I find it helps to do a purpose sort in maintenance as well, which is where I set the purposes in what I think is going to be a correct channel order (If I have not yet assigned channels), then when I sort by purpose, it's essentially sorted by channel as well and makes channel number entry very easy.

As an add'l tip, if you haven't done so, go to Worksheet - Columns and select only those columns to view that you need. You can un-clutter the worksheet screen this way with just pertinent info. LW lets you see a lot of data but sometimes there's stuff you may not need, like Gobo Size, etc...

I also find it pays in the long run to get correct info into the data base as to instrument types, wattages, color frame sizes and counts, etc.... as well as the correct information for the dimming system, range per rack, capacity, circuit amp ratings, etc.... get all this stuff in the first time, even if it's generic stuff like a Sensor 96x2.4kw rack or 2. Greatly helps later when counting color, sheets, error checking for overloads, dimmers in multiple channels, etc... This is an area where LW has always shined, error checking and finding typo's.