Q Light Controller+

As I was programming the other day, I had a little idea for a feature which may or may not be worthwhile. I don't know if it will make sense to others, but I thought I would mention it in any case...

I program extensively using collections. Generally speaking, I setup a pretty granular scenes for most of my fixtures (e.g. a set of scenes that controls only the color on my main movers, one set of scenes for the shutter, one set of scenes for the gobo on my secondary movers, and so on and so forth) and then I go back and use the collections to create my overall look. This might not be the way that everyone does it, but for me, it makes everything very reusable and pretty quick to program. Scenes are one of my very favorite features of QLC+

The only problem (and it's not really a problem, but maybe more of a minor challenge) I have is that the collections get very extensive even for a small/medium size installations (e.g. 6 moving heads, a couple of beam lights, some LED washes, and LED strips, and a few other things) and it gets easy to forget an attribute of a fixture here and there. So, for example, maybe I forget to add the shutter attribute and then I get a bit confused when I switch between collections and sometimes my lights strobe and sometimes they don't (as a result of carrying over the attribute from a previous collection).

So, that got me thinking, what if I could set up a sort of a template where I could determine at a glance whether or not all of the channels I wanted to control are being controlled by the scenes, matrices, chases, etc., that make up a collection. Better yet, what if that template could also give an indication of whether more than one attribute was being affected by an entity in the collection. Personally, this would be huge for me.

I understand that not everyone probably uses the same paradigm as I do when programming, so maybe what I'm saying here doesn't make sense. But hopefully that's not the case...

To build a modular light show I would definetely say that scenes into collections is the way to go.

However if you end up having a collection with 50 scenes, maybe you need to add a further layer of modularity, cause it can get easily messy.

Once you designed all the scenes you need, I would suggest to first group them by meaning. For example create a few collections for positions, colors, shutter, gobos, etc
Then create some more collections where you will just add the "grouped" collections.
You will end up having group collection with say 10-15 scenes and "final" collections with 3-4 collections into them.

Collections into collections are contemplated and in complex projects they might be the logical solution to go.

That was my thought as well and I'm definitely going to go that way in the future. Just to extend on the case for my suggestion, the only place that this starts to get tricky is as follows:

On certain more complex fixtures (like my Chauvet Rogue R2 Spots) I've actually found that it's easier to program certain aspects of the light by having at least some scenes with multiple attributes. Focus is a good example of this. Let's say I want the first gobo on the first (of two) gobo wheels. On a low-end light, that's simple, but on a more complex light, it's more like three (or more) attributes, for example, gobo wheel 1 in position one, gobo wheel 2 open (to make sure I'm not obstructing the first gobo), and then I have to make sure that I'm properly focused for a sharp edge gobo. When I first started working with these types of fixtures, I tried making individual scenes for each channel (like I described before) but I found that it's either too easy to forget to add a specific channel and/or (especially in the case of focus) it might take very fine adjustments for every gobo setting (which could be a LOT of different settings that are really difficult to remember). I quickly discovered that the combined approach I mentioned works much better. And if that were always the case, that wouldn't really be a problem.

The thing is, sometimes I do want the gobos to be separate from the focus so I can apply a chase to the focus channel thereby creating a gobo morphing effect. And this is where it gets difficult to track what all is in play with a given collection (even in the case of maybe only 7-8 attributes).

Now, I'm pretty disciplined in naming and organizing my stuff. For example, I might have:

Rogue - Gobo 1 - 1
Rogue - Color - 2
Rogue - Gobo + Focus - 1
and so on...

But I still find myself missing things on occasion which is why I made the initial suggestion. I think the real goal (in my mind) would be to have some mechanism by which to quickly ascertain attributes are in play in a certain collection.

To a similar end the one thing that I think that takes more time than it really should in QLC+ (and that's not to say that it's any better in other systems) is the manual work of organizing and naming scenes. I think that the wizard is a step in the direction of making this easier, but nine times out of 10, I end up just going through and manually creating all of my scenes because I don't find the naming to be flexible enough for my liking and it often tends to create too much cruft in the way of things that I just end up deleting.

Again, that's just my $0.02.