Control/Dimming Strand 300 Series Stop/Back confusion

[dreamist]

Hey there!

I got a deal a while back on a Strand 300 Series board, which is a board that I had designed a few times on before but was not nearly as familiar with as I am an Express..

Of the various things I'm not terribly great at with the board, the one that has bitten me a couple times now is the somewhat confusing operation of the stop/back button on the console. By far, the most common miscue on this board (or any board, I think) is the tendency to double-tap the go button and start two cues at once. On an express, that would be no big deal, but on this board there seems to be no graceful fix...

The following is the usual sequence of events:

1) board op double taps the go button
2) board op immediately realizes the issue and hits STOP/BACK, thus freezing both of the running cue fades.
3) Board op hits STOP/BACK again to go back to the original cue
4) Board op hits GO to now catch up to where he is supposed to be, expecting that the next cue to be run will be the one following the cue that the console faded BACK to.
5) Instead, the console SKIPS the immediate next cue and again fades to the second cue forward..

i.e. if we have 3 cues:

L1 - scene 1
L2 - special
L3 - scene 2

and we are in L1 and going into L2, and the board op double-taps GO, thus starting both L2 and L3.. the board op then hits STOP/BACK, and then STOP/BACK again, re-fading back into L1. Board op hits GO again, and instead of fading from L1 to L2, the console fades from L1 to L3.

I realize that a fix for this would be to manually load the next cue onto the playback and then hit GO, but of course that takes time and dexterity.. most times this has bit me, it happens around a tightly organized set of cues.

Is there an elegant fix for this, or is this just one of those things that the Strand is worse at even though it's technically a more powerful board than an Express?

Thanks!

Joe

 

[SteveB]

Console is in Q1

1) board op double taps the go button

Starts crossfade from Q1 to Q3

2) board op immediately realizes the issue and hits STOP/BACK, thus freezing both of the running cue fades.

Thus halting the crossfade from Q 1 thru Q 2 to Q 3

3) Board op hits STOP/BACK again to go back to the original cue

Which takes you back to Q2, not the starting Q

4) Board op hits GO to now catch up to where he is supposed to be, expecting that the next cue to be run will be the one following the cue that the console faded BACK to.

Which re-starts the crossfade to Q3.

You need to hit Stop/Back once to halt all crossfades

Then double tap Stop/Back to get back to the original cue

 

[bharrell]

I'm personally a fan of GOTO 2 TIME ## ENTER at this point.

 

[dreamist]

Console is in Q1

3) Board op hits STOP/BACK again to go back to the original cue

Which takes you back to Q2, not the starting Q

This does not appear to be how the console works, however.. The cue that gets faded back into when you hit Stop/Back (after the fade is stopped, thus making it "back") is L1, not L2.. and yet, hitting GO at that point then takes you straight to L3, even though you're fully IN L1. :-/


I'll keep bharrell's GOTO 2 TIME ## suggestion in mind and make sure board ops are trained on that option.. but in a close set of cues, typing that command line accurately will probably be hard to accomplish in time to make it worthwhile.. wonder why they made the cuelist work that way.

 

[BenTev28]

This does not appear to be how the console works, however.. The cue that gets faded back into when you hit Stop/Back (after the fade is stopped, thus making it "back") is L1, not L2.. and yet, hitting GO at that point then takes you straight to L3, even though you're fully IN L1. :-/


I'll keep bharrell's GOTO 2 TIME ## suggestion in mind and make sure board ops are trained on that option.. but in a close set of cues, typing that command line accurately will probably be hard to accomplish in time to make it worthwhile.. wonder why they made the cuelist work that way.

It's been a while since I used a 300 or 500 series Strand board, but as I recall the logic goes like this:
"GO" triggers the next cue in the stack - since the console can handle multiple simultaneous faders, this means you can have many cues running simultaneously (hence: GO,GO double tap results in cues 2 and 3 running at the same time).
"STOP" stops all fades, no matter how many faders are running (hence: GO,GO,STOP fires cue 2, then cue 3, then pauses both of them)
"BACK" returns you to the _last completed cue_ (hence: GO,GO,STOP,BACK fires cue 2, then cue 3, then pauses both cues 2 and 3, then goes back to the last completed cue: cue 1)
Once you have gone back, the next cue in the stack is _the cue that you went back from_,the most recent cue to have been fired - not necessarily the cue following the cue you are currently in. (hence: GO,GO,STOP,BACK,GO fires cue 2, then cue 3, then pauses both of them, then goes back to the last completed cue which is cue 1, then fires the cue that the BACK command was delivered from, cue 3)

I could be off about the logic: Mr. Harrell would obviously know more than I do about how the board was designed. Regardless, his solution (unsurprisingly) is definitely the cleanest. On just about any board with a GOTO CUE button, that button is the most efficient way to get where you want to go - that's what it's designed to do, after all.