Q Light Controller+

Hello,

I'm theater writer/director/producer with some technical knowledge. I own a children's theater company in Madrid and would like to run a number of shows from QLC+. We're basically testing it right now to see if we can make the move and start designing our projects there. Thank you for all the support throughout the years to this incredible software.

We are running on a Mac environment with an Enttec USB DMX MKII PRO. Ideally we'd like to run all of our shows exclusively from one laptop. We own a bunch of LED lights and a couple of Astera AX1s. We'd like to program some basic effects on those LED lights and bars. No problem there. Problem comes when I want to add conventional lighting to the equation, since I don't know what lights am I going to use until I get there besides some basics (a spotlight, back and front lighting... I don't know the technical terms in english, so excuse me if I make any mistakes). We'd basically want to have "preset" scenes and fader movements in QLC+ that could adapt to those different situations. We have a half an hour to an hour to setup, in most cases.

I'd like to setup a Virtual Console to control all the different shows, so I would copy the basic layout of the "master" project and then adapt it to each show.

We don't have that many functions to cover, but we'd like to make a cue list and trigger Shows within them to sync lighting changes to a music track while having some live functionality available in case there is any mistake.

I've tried to make an example project but I can't find the way to make what I want to work, which is to program some preset scenes with dummy fixtures, assign them to faders and buttons, then remap those fixtures. But in the resulting project I must add the fixtures to the scenes again and program the scene effects again. I don't know what I missing but from what the reference manual says it should be working. Am I doing something wrong? Is there any way to set this up?

Thank you in advance!

I'm trying to give more details of my case in case it's helpful to someone.

I want to have a template of my shows on the Virtual Console:
- With a subset of submasters to control conventional lighting.
- With a cuelist that controls my LED and Astera Lights (using the chasers for that, I've tried that succesfully)
- A couple of collections linked to synced light and sound fx so I can play them live during the shows.

I've been browsing the forum for a couple of days unsuccesfully, but from what I gather this would be the workflow I'd need to set up a show this quickly:

1. Making a master project with dummy conventional lighting and my LED/Astera lights.
2. For the variable lighting situations, when I get to the venue I should either repatch directly or using loopback (I don't know which would be more helpful but I'm pretty clueless about how to use loopback). When trying to repatch Scene values and Fixtures just dissapear, having to start over and being unable to design anything pre-show. Is this how QLC+ is supposed to work for now or am I missing some step? Can I get some guidance here?
3. When creating submasters to group lighting on the venue, I've just discovered I can use the general dimmers, use the simple console to "group" fixtures and Dump DMX values to a new scene. But I don't know how to keep my programming intact. I don't mind a huge work around the issue, but I'd like to set up the show as "patch and go" so I can train people on setting up the show without having to learn that much about QLC+.

Not trying to be persistent, but since it's such a common use case from what I've read thus far maybe sorting it out will help the newbies. I plan on posting the resulting project here so people new to QLC+ can take advantage of its possibilities for theater. They are there, and having such a flexible program working for you can be a huge advantage.