First let me say how amazing this software is, I ran my first show with it back in April and it was great. The show was an Ice show (think Stars on Ice, but at a local club level). I had 20 GLP Impression LED Moving head lights, 4 Vari-lite VL2500 (profiles to be uploaded soon) and a 12 channel DMX controlled relay controlling various non-dim circuits around the arena. By the first show I had everything programmed and all I had to do was hit 'Go' ... In the past I tried using Freestyler and a few other freeware solutions but was never satisfied due to their focus on 'busking' and not a sequence of cues.
Now on to my suggestion... This week I'm working on the show Urinetown in a traditional Theatre. Unfortunately the theatre where we are working has an antiquated (at least in the world of technology) lighting board and because we are using Movers and LED wash lights I was eagerly looking forward to using QLC+ for the flexibility. After setting up my workspace and creating a copy of the theatre's house patch I was ready to go, or so I thought. I then thought one major thing that prevented me from using QLC+ and forced me to go back to the house lighting board (yuck!) Here is the issue that came to light (pardon the pun)...
The inability to save current live cue back to itself while running a show. Example... During the show I am constantly tweaking values, a little darker here, a little lighter over there etc... On a conventional lighting board after making my change I hit record and save it to the cue I'm in. This is critical as out rehearsal timelines are short and many changes are made on the fly. The only way I could see doing anything close to this on QLC+ is to save live DMX values to a new scene. That would then involve replacing the old scenes with the new scenes after the show. If you are making several changes / saves this could get very messy...
While setting everything up I came up with a few other time saving features that would be nice to have...
2) It would be nice to have an import feature to 'create a patch'. for example, I'm using a 120 channel dimmer and I want to create scenes for what would be representative of a channel on a lighting board (Area washes for example) so Dimmer 1, 3 are Channel 1 (Area 1) ... Dimmers 2, 7 are Channel 2 (Area 2) etc... In a CSV is could be represented as scene;instrument (in this case Dimer);Instrument channels so Area 1;Dimmer;1,3
3) It's not easy to program a blackout as a queue. I just want to grab the intensity channels that have a value greater than 0 to in a scene to drop them to 0.
Anyway, Thanks for all your hard work, it really shows. I look forward to using the software on other shows down the road!
Alan.
Q Light Controller+
Official forums of the QLC+ project