I believe in the past you have said you have an
ION. They way the
ION, and other consoles work, is that each
cue is essentially its own packet of information about levels that it sends out to dimmers and fixtures upon hitting GO. There are essentially two modes of thought for consoles-
Preset and
Tracking.
Preset, or
Cue-Only programming comes from two-scene
preset boards where each
cue required the setting of levels for each
fader, regardless of whether or not they were changing
level from the previous
cue. Failure to set the
level on each
fader would mean that it would be retaining the
level from 2 cues prior. Maybe correct, likely not. In a modern electronic
console, this means that each
cue in the list will
send out information about levels for each
channel.
Tacking works quite differently.
Tracking essentially works as if the
console is only sending out new information, or changes. Say your
base look has
channel 1 at 50, 2 at 75 and 3 at Full, and you record this as
cue 1.
Cue 2 has 1 at 50, 2 at 75 and 3 is now at 50.
Cue 3 has 1 at Full, 2 at 75 and 3 at 50. You now go back to
cue 1 and change some levels. 1 is now at 60, 2 at 50 and 3 at OUT. Updating while in
tracking mode will cause 1's changes to be made to Cues 1 and 2, 2 will change in all three cues, and 3 will only change in
cue 1. The
tracking stops when it encounters new information for a
channel, more properly known as a move. It only goes forward in the
cue list.
The
ION is cool compared to older
tracking consoles like the
Express, in that it has a
softkey called
TRACE. When you type the command [UPDATE][CUE X][TRACE], your updates will apply both forwards and backwards as the
console will
TRACE backwards to when the move to the original
level occurred. With this and plain old
tracking, you must be careful about inserting
block cues and using
cue only when it is necessary to prevent changes from being tracked into cues where you do not wish them to. Another neat trick about the
ION is you can tell it which cues to update and/or where to update from and to where.
Hope this helps,
ETC also has some great educational videos on their site about this and
LTP HTP etc.