The Avolites Discussion Forum

Hi all,

One of my less experienced operators had a very scary moment on our 2008 last night.

It was a simple orchestral gig with a nice big red state for the 1812 overture. The promoter wanted a snap back to the orchestral wash at the end, so the op was planning to hit the swap key, change the states, then release. The previous fade has completed, there's only 1 playback live, with fixtures on 2 different streams. The op realises the key is in program mode, so turns it to run mode, well before the cue,to get his swap working. After a few seconds of turning the key, with no kets pressed, the stage blacks out. He turned the key back again, and after a few seconds the state returned over about 5 seconds. As you can imagine there was quite a rant from the conductor afterwards.

I've managed to reproduce this, sort of. With the state live I turned the key to system, and the output dropped out, but I only managed this once. I also held the swap on an unused playback, then turned the key to run, which blacked out the stage, still holding the swap button I turned the key back which brought the state back in, but over it's programmed fade time of 20 seconds, though he swears it was over 5.

If it was a stuck key it had sorterd itself out by this morning, which I suppose could be possble.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Cheers

Scott

There are definitely bugs involving holding add or swop and changing key position. If this happens then IIRC the solution is to hold the relevant key and switch back again.

I would imagine this is somehow related to what happened.

Thanks nic,
I guessed it was either somthing to do with that, or a problem with the keyswitch, but I do really need to get to the bottom of this. I've edited my original post, just to clarify that keys were only pressed when turning the key when I was trying to recreate the glich and not during the show.

While I don't doubt the operator is telling the truth can he really be so sure? Since you weren't operating I'm afraid it is unlikely you will ever really know, but in my experience it is surprisingly difficult to be so certain of ones actions, especially during a show.

On the other hand you have a known and repeatable bug, reproducing the effects, albeit perhaps not in precisely the way it was remembered.

Unfortunately, there's not much else I can say. Bugs need to be repeatable and, since there are no log files, we only have second-hand memory of actions. Maybe someone else will have seen this and know why it happens, otherwise, unless you can repeat it differently, it might reluctantly have to be put down to either the op being wrong or a one-off/unknown.

I do, however, doubt it is a stuck key or hardware fault if that's of any reassurance?!

Thanks for your help niclights,

I think I've cracked it. I've spent the past hour going throught the motions again. The swap keys have gone from behaving perfectly yesterday, to completely not working today. Over the hour I got a few proper swaps, then it all went a bit intermittant and random, some not working some working and some swapping half way and then flickering. Now none of them work at all. I've checked all the ribbon cables are correctly seated, but am reluctant to start playing with any of the IC's.
EDIT: The swap buttons work properly in program mode, to copy memories. All very confusing.

Looks like I'll have to wait tech service are back after new year, to get it fixed.

Cheers again mate

a lot of consoles do this, so it may not be something that can be written out of the programming