Selectable Blackout Question/Help

[gmint]

I'm looking for a little programming assistance with a challenge that I haven't yet been able to overcome. To hopefully give a good explanation of my problem, let's say a simplified version of my setup is this:

4 Moving Head Spot Fixtures

and

4 Moving Head Beam Fixtures

Also, I generally like to program things so that everything is pretty much controlled by one button or two buttons. For example, I select one button for movements and all of the fixtures do a movement pattern. I select another and all of the fixtures do a different movement pattern. Same goes for visual looks. For example, one button might give me a hard edged white spot from all the lights and another button might give me a green wash from all of the lights. I do this with the extensive use of collections. In short, there isn't a lot of manual control going on when playing a show (primarily because I've got other things to focus on), it's basically pushing a button or two every now and then. The problem I'm facing is this:

Early in the show I really want to save my beam fixtures for later, so I essentially want to be able to kill the beams until such time as I think it's appropriate. I can, of course, make some collections that don't have the beam lights enabled, but what I'd really like to do is program both the spots and the beams into the same collection and then have a way to essentially kill the beams until I want them. I've thought of some ways to do this but most of them would rule out using things like RGB matrices on the beams (which I don't want to do) so I'm really looking for a sort of selectable blackout. I suppose I could always just turn the master dimmer down for those fixtures in the Simple Desk, but I was hoping for something that I could integrate into the virtual console.

I'm betting that there's a way to do this, but that I just can't figure it out. If anyone would be willing to throw some suggestions my way, I'd be very appreciative!

[TEL0000]

You could create a scene that turns the beams on. Then put the scene in the collection and additionally as button on the virtual console.
That way the beams would be included in the collection, but you can turn them off with the button on the virtual console.

[gmint]

You could create a scene that turns the beams on. Then put the scene in the collection and additionally as button on the virtual console.
That way the beams would be included in the collection, but you can turn them off with the button on the virtual console.

I considered that approach and although it does partially work, the problem is that every time I trigger a new collection, the beams will default to on and I would have to turn them off every time (or vice versa). What you suggest is close to what I'm looking for, but I'd essentially like the on/off scene to be persistent across activation of other collections.

[TEL0000]

If you don't include the scene into the collections it should be persistent.

[gmint]

If you don't include the scene into the collections it should be persistent.

That would work except that I can't use any RGB matrix effects in the collections to control these fixtures.

[TEL0000]

I don't know your fixtures, but if you have a separate dimmer or shutter channel, you can make a scene only with that channel on, so it will not affect the matrix effect. (I think you need to uncheck the dimmer option in the matrix editor)

But i don't know what you can do, if you don't have those channels on your fixtures. It would be nice if qlc+ would have virtual dimmer channels for rgb fixtures.