Q Light Controller+

Hi all

I have the possibility to drive a (for me) large amount of fixtures (15 + smoke machine) and would like to know your workflows on what to do.
Until now I had 6 fixtures, 4 led moving head spots and 2 RGBW par lights. I've only been playing with lights at home. No professional LD experience.
My layout consisted of 3 frames with buttons:

moving heads:
- Color selection for odd and even
- EFX
- Functions / animations
- Gobo's
- Animation speeds

RGBW:
- Color selection for both PAR's
- Functions (strobe, alternation, etc...)
- Animation speeds

Combination:
- ON/OFF for colors, functions, ...
- Global scenes
- Combination of animations and efx

However, this will become completely unpractical to display on a single page with more fixtures. I would like to control way more lights with a lot of freedom without increasing end user complexity (Virtual console). I've seen software like Magicq allowing you to select a fixture group and from there a color / animation. I would like to achieve a similar functionality or if you have better ideas please let me know.

What will be the best workflow (scenes, functions, efx etc)?
What is an easy to use general layout?
It has to be an active environment (music and party related lighting, not just scenes).

Thanks!

Tim

keukenrol wrote: ↑Sat Aug 14, 2021 7:25 pm It has to be an active environment (music and party related lighting, not just scenes).

This is called 'busking' Tim.
So you need some instruments to build a show on.

I divide my screen into
Static:
* base-positions (for all heads)
* color picker per function of lights (front / rear, contrast, highlights, ...)
* gobo picker
* master-level sliders per group of fixtures

dynamics:
* basic movements for the movers,
* main chaser (for color combinations within sub-chasers) with go / reset buttons
* tempo section to change all timing behind all chasers / efx...
* flash buttons below the master-level sliders for manual strobe function
...

EFX:
* movement efx picker in solo-frame
* all kinds of animation widgets to have control of all mambo-jambo
* difficult but feasible (by loopback channels) submaster sliders for all of the above ... experience will tell what works and what doesn't
* ...

If you can control basics + dynamics + adding some (small) EFX on top of all, you can achieve quite some nice tweaks to your setup.
You might use the 'page' function for some frames, for less intensive used features. Depending on the difference of light intensities of your fixtures, you might ommit or hide the master-level section. I always have this section live and even bound to an external controller. Blue and red f.i. has such a difference in output that I boost blue and brake red f.i.

Have fun

I will add some commentary behind your reply to make sure I understood correctly:

GGGss wrote: ↑Mon Aug 16, 2021 7:40 pm I divide my screen into
Static:
* base-positions (for all heads): scenes of moving head positions (for example all up)
* color picker per function of lights (front / rear, contrast, highlights, ...): a color picker per group of lights, I like to use RGBWCMYK as colors.
* gobo picker
* master-level sliders per group of fixtures: brightness sliders configured as submasters

dynamics:
* basic movements for the movers: buttons, same as efx?
* main chaser (for color combinations within sub-chasers) with go / reset buttons: for example R G B chaser or rainbow fade?
* tempo section to change all timing behind all chasers / efx...
* flash buttons below the master-level sliders for manual strobe function

Thanks for the reply! I have a midi slider panel available with some buttons which I already used (for example, blinders functionality on fader for warm white leds).
Would you mind sharing a screenshot or video of your layout / functionality? I like to have the buttons big enough to click on a touchscreen but end up making them 80 to 90px big, using a 1080p screen on a 13 inch laptop reduces space for adding stuff, unles using pages indeed.
Is there a possibility to set some colors for an animation? I suppose all of those have to be set beforehand. Example: I like a running light in red now, but during the next song it would be nicer to have it green. Apparently you can do it with the rgb matrix function widget but it is not super practical live. For a chaser you are certainly stuck with the colors you put in first time. Only method I see is to use a brightness fader for the fixtures and use sliders for R G and B values.

I know. Sometimes you have to be creative with the space available.
Have a look at this screen as an example:
This is my 'base' screen I use throughout all small shows I do. And it reflects the thoughts I explained above. Notice the right part of the screen. With this widget, you can define presets for the RGB matrix. The same functionality goes for the EFX module.
If a touchscreen is impractical for you, I'd suggest you invest in a midi controller like f.i. the touchpad-series... Now you have up to x-pages of 64 buttons at your disposal.

Getting closer! Current setup: 4 x moving led head spot, 4 x LED RGBW par, 1 x LED RGB par, 1 x laser, 1 x smoke machine, 1 x 10RGB led bar.
Some fixtures have the dimming and strobe on the same channel, I would like to use 2 sliders but this makes it difficult since every fixture is using a different value. I have set up the "monitor the selected channels and update their slider level" option under the level tab for these. It allows me to use the strobe and press the X when I want back to dimmer mode on my other slider.
Using knobs for strobe and slider for brightness/dimmer on my midi panel.

Let me know what you think, thanks for the help!

Tim

Combined channels are a bitch... even with the big light table brands... with QLC+ you can tweak this by limiting the slider range. You can have a slider from 0-192 and another one from 193-255, which works fine. BUT! Due to HTP the higher values will win the battle, so now you have to rely on LTP for both sliders to work. Be warned that the least twitch on one of the sliders, the new values will be sent.
I like your setup: clarity is present, I could run your desk.
The use of a midi controller, helps you to deal with a lot of controls. Top.
The "monitor selected" surely helps you resetting a temp value. Top.

TiP: You can create virtual controls by using loopback values. One slider controls a virtual dimmer inside a loopback universe. This channel can be used as input to control other sliders f.i. One 'master' submaster in loopback can control many submasters inside frames on VC.
TiP: You can make use of the collections function, to create default looks. Inside collections, you can add many scenes/functions. Calling this collection set or calls all these scenes/functions at once.
TiP: You even can create a chaser calling those collections in sequence. This helps you to call different stage looks instantly. Just be careful adding fade-in times here. Gobo swaps, color wheels, dim channels react with different physical change timing. With the big fellas, you can opt to do this MiB (Move in Black): Dimming channel (or shutter) is closed, changes are fulfilled, the shutter is opened again, without having to program this behavior.
TiP: With movement EFX: always use relative mode. Create base positions. By doing so, you can have an EFX running on top of a base position. Nice part about this is that you can have movement EFX run while you slowly go from one position to another... This sometimes produces unwanted twitchy movements, because EFX has to recalculate every time. So nice to have but to be used carefully.
TopTip: don't forget to have fun and rest assured that only <5% of your audience will notice errors inside your light show. A hard gobo switch out of beat will be noticed faster than a slow dimmer fade.
TopTip: flyouts ... a nice to have feature is the flyout. Create a slow flyout, having it quite long, help you control the last climatic 16 bars of a song f.i. If the timing of your flyout is off, you manually can control the dimmer channels.

Been playing around with those collections, nice feature! I've also been using the efx and animation window presets, but the disadvantage of them is that they make a button to activate the function/efx inside the animation window. The button itself cannot be customised. Is it possible to call the preset in the animation window from another button? At the moment I make a new RGBmatrix function for every effect I like and link a button in a solo frame to it.

For the releative EFX movement, I suppose I should set the relative checkbox in the EFX effect and then activate a home position button?
Extra question: Is it possible to trigger for example a cue list which is only shown on the second page (thus out of focus). It does not seem to work. Would love to have to availability to manually change between cues without having the window visible as it takes a ton of space.

Current layout in attachment.

Extra question: what would be a good method to be able to dynamically change the color/colors of a function/chaser? I was thinking to only set the brightness slider as scenes and then use the color scene on top of it.
RGB function colors can be set in the animation window but are also rather fixed. For example: red as primary color and cyan as secondary. 2 possibilities: slowly fade between the colors within each fixture or (how it currently is) change color for all fixtures per frame.

In my setups, the dim channels are always separated from other fixture functions...
Color picker per fixture group works best. (Front != contrast != spots / beams) [edit != not equal]

Aight thanks! Is it possible ot have the flash functionality available for chasers or functions? I would love to keep pressing the button as long as the function/chaser needs to run.

Flash: not directly, but if you do the loopback channel magic, then you could momentarily flash a chaser. (Hint: create an input profile with the option to generate 2nd click)