Q Light Controller+

Dear Massimo,
Thanks so much for QLC+. I am learning a whole new world of lighting and am just starting on my journey. QLC+ is making this possible. The venue I am volunteering for is a local community church building and their current setup is a nice set of LED lights and a box with 8 pre-set functions. I'd like to make the lighting better if possible.

I would like to list a few things I have done and not understood... I hope you can answer my questions.

I have posted my QXW file into a public dropbox account. I hope you can use this to better understand my questions. it can be found attached.

my work list.
In FIXTURES tab
1) Add all the fixtures at the correct DMX address.
2) Group the fixtures into handy fixtures groups to make selecting them easier later (i hope). The graphical positioning grid is pure genius! I love it. you will see from the qxw that i had labeled things according to the truss they are on.
FT = front truss, MT = middle truss and RT = Rear Truss. L = left side, R = right side.

3) I have not (in this project) created many Channels Groups.

4) Change to FUNCTIONS tab

5) add new scene

6) Here is my question.... I would like to use a 'Fixtures Group' to select the fixtures used in the scene. Is that possible?
You will notice that, for the "Purple Back Wash" scene, I have used the 'Channels Group' I created to control the Wash lamps on the rear truss.

I love the ability to group fixtures and view them visually on the 10x8 square in the FIXTURES tab, but i cant find anything useful to do with that once I'm creating a scene.

Many thanks and I look forward to a reply.

God bless
Rick

Hello Rick, thanks for your post.
I'll try to explain briefly what are fixture groups and channel groups.
Keep in mind QLC+ is very flexible, so there are a wide variety of things you can do, depending of what is your final goal.

Fixture groups have basically two usages:
- logical grouping: you can group fixtures by universe or venue displacement. This has a visual usefulness, but not more than that.
- matrix displacement: If your fixtures are LED RGB lights, then you can achieve awesome results with the combination of fixture groups and RGB matrices. For example you can easily create automatic animations of your LEDs following the displacement of your fixtures in a fixture group.
For example, if you have 8 RGB lights on a truss, you can create a fixture group 8x1 and then you can set up a RGB matrix to animate those lights with the desired effect (ping pong, color fading, random, odd/even, etc..)

Channel groups:
Their usage is mostly for editing convenience. For example, if you have 20 lights of the same type and you want to create a 100% red scene, you might want to move just one fader to control all your 20 fixtures' red channel.
That's where channel groups come handy. Just define them in the Fixture manager panel and use them in the Scene Editor.
Channel groups are not for live performances, just editing of scenes. For live control you might want to create some Virtual Console sliders and use either the Click & go functionality or single channels control up to your needs.

I hope I've explained it well.
If you need more details please let me know.

Many thanks Massimo,
I am beginning to think i am running along the right lines then with my experiments and disasters!

Great stuff.