The Avolites Discussion Forum

Hello All... I will try to desribe a situation that happen on New Year's Eve with the hopes that some of you veterans might be able to figure out what happened so that I may avoid this again.

I had a rig with 48 dimmers, 6 Mac 250+ in mode 4, 6 Mania SCX 500's, and 7 Apollo scrollers. All was working beautifully through set up and programming, when at the last minute I decided to save the show before dinner. Upon returning and starting the show, I could not get 5 of the 6 Mac 250's to open the dimmer (everything else worked normally). At first I thought they had lamped off, but after physical inspection I could see the lamps and the fixtures were moving normally as programmed. I looked at the output on the Pearl and found that those 5 fixtures had the dimmer value at 00. The sixth one was functioning normally. After reading the manual for the first 8 songs of the show, I looked to see if they were "parked", but they were not. I tried to grab them manually, punch them up on the keypad, nothing worked. Finally I decided to delete the fixtures from the patch and re-patch, which meant I would have to re-build the cues on the fly. (Keep in mind I was stuck in "program" mode this whole time since I was dealing with the issue. I tried "run" mode, but it didn't work either.) I got to the patch menu and deleted the first of the five fixtures, when suddenly the others all popped on and ran normally. I re-patched the deleted fixture and all seemed well, other than having to re-build this fixture into every cue.

The last thing I did before saving prior to dinner was build a chase using the Mac's, but everything seemed normal and things looked like they always did at that time.

Has anyone seen anything like this, or can you offer any explanations?

Many thanks in advance. HAPPY NEW YEAR! -J

All I can think of at the moment is those five fixtures accidentally ended up with the shutter closed although that doesn't follow regarding seeing zero on the output.
Or that somehow they had been set with reduced fixture intensity to zero.

Did you try a complete reset of the desk? I thought of the red 'reduce intensity' button and maybe someone in the venue was just having a laugh with you. But again, the description of what happened on repatching the fixture doesn't quite add up.

I did not do a reset of any sort due to the fact that I was already in to the show and didn't want to black anything out. My first thought was to re-load the show file during the band break, but naturally this was the one night they chose not to take one.

The reduce intensity button is an interesting thought. I will play with it and see if I can reproduce the problem (and the un-patch fix) and let you know. Lord knows I could have made a keystroke error, or someone may have messed with me. Don't think there were any Avo-knowledgible folks around, though. Keep thinking about it! I appreciate the help.

I'm still confused by the problem, but regarding resets I disconnect the DMX first to hold the current state (dependent on fixtures of course) and then try to reinstate values/fader positions prior to reconnecting.
Obviously not always an option and getting the values back quickly might be a combination of practice and pre-planning (ie. palettes) but avoids the horrible effect of zero values across a rig on reset. This is especially true if a console has become unresponsive and there's nothing to lose. Disconnecting means the state will be safely held indefinitely while you can (relatively!) calmly resolve the situation.
Of course if you're unlucky enough to have a frozen state in blackout then panic.