Mover Programming: How do YOU do it?

I ran into an interesting situation this weekend; I got a late night call Friday to run a RoadHog console on Sat morning for a load in. They had no other info for me at that moment (the ME there got a serious case of the 'don't come in with THAT disease!' that night), but I knew enough about the place that I figured it was probably just programming and patching.

I show up, and sure enough, the Hog is only running 4 movers, and the conventionals are going on another board. Cool. I boot it all up, and the movers are already programmed and patched, with a generic FX pallette available, but no cuelist. So now I assume I'm pretty much here to upload a show disk once the road LD arrives.

Long story short; no, they didn't. My job was to program a few fx for certain songs, then leave for the run op to go through the show. At 11:30AM I found out the first show is at 2PM, NOT 8PM (I was stupid, and assumed, instead of freakin asking. We're not perfect).

After doing programming a certain way, the house ME and I talk on the phone for 3 min, and he informs me that he would have set it up in a dif fashion. I think my way was the most mistake-proof, he disagreed. Made me think; how many different ways do Light Techs set their programming for a mover-only board?

If it were you, and you needed to quick-program a series of fx for say 8 out of 27 numbers in a concert, and it was the only responsibility, how would you set it up for someone else to run? My way is in the next post. What would have been yours?
 
My response to this was to build a Main Cuelist, and then put my effects on individual cuelists which I then macroed into the main list. This guaranteed the run guy couldn't make a mistake so long as he just hit 'go'.

So for example, I built cues by 10s, and cue 50 would be macro GL7, while cue 51 is RL7 (GL= 'Go Cuelist', and RL= 'Release Cuelist'), then the next cue would be 60, 61, 70, 71, 80, 81, etc.

How would you build it?
 
It's posts like this that keep me from learning the Hog and stick with Avo.

see, I think the Hog is awesome. It's a brilliant piece. I was an ETC head, but the Hog has even made learning Strands and such easier. Why does this make you not want to learn it?

Hell, why would anyone not want to learn something in this business? I just don't understand that type of statement.
 
I would look at it given two main factors: who's operating and what is on stage?

If the operator doesn't have a lot of experience, I'd make a bunch of cue lists that would work regardless, some more up tempo, some medium, some slower. Then they could busk whatever and it would look ok. This seems to work well most of the time, as long as the operator can trigger things on a beat.

If they have experience, then they don't need as much, maybe just pallettes, a few ballyhoos, etc.
 
For more info: The Road LD wanted 'x' for 'y' number. No more than 1mover cue per song, for say 9 of the roughly 30 numbers (due to issues, I got it into 5 numbers... once again, the whole losing 6 hours that I thought I had came into play). The Road LD would call the cues when they were wanted.

a 2nd operator was running the mover board, basically there to hit 'go' and fix issues if they arose.

There's drama about that, but it's not relevant to the question at hand, though.

So, short build time frame, simple but pleasant concert style movements, ready for most anyone to be able to play with 5 minutes of explanation.
 
My honest answer? I would have slaved the Hog off the main console and not paid a 2nd operator.
 

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