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The programmer

The problem

You're building a look. You select some fixtures, set a colour, move them, try a different gobo, change your mind about the colour. All the while the stage has to show what you're doing, but nothing should end up in the show until you're happy with it.

You also need to know what you've touched. If you store now, does the cue contain only the colour you just changed, or every attribute of every fixture on stage?

The programmer is grandMA2's answer to both questions.

The idea

The programmer is a scratchpad that sits on top of everything else. The manual describes it as the place "where all the active and nonactive values, which are not in the playbacks, are located."

Three things in it matter:

Selection
Which fixtures your next command or encoder turn will affect. Selected fixtures are what At 50 or a colour change applies to.
Values
Every attribute you've changed. These go straight to the stage and take over from what the playbacks are doing, so you see your changes even while cues are running. The details (what happens when a cue is triggered after you set a value, and what Freeze changes) are in Playback priority.
Active or inactive
Each value is either active (red marker in the sheets) or inactive (white marker). Active values are the ones Store will store. Inactive values are still in the programmer but are no longer marked for storing.

The active/inactive split is what answers "what did I touch?". By default a store takes the active values only, so a cue contains exactly what you changed, which is also what tracking expects (see Cues, sequences and tracking).

Clear peels the programmer in layers

Because the programmer holds three different things, Clear removes them one layer at a time:

  1. first press: deselect the fixtures
  2. second press: deactivate the values (they stay, but won't be stored)
  3. third press: remove the values from the programmer
Start building a look Clear ×1 deselect Clear ×2 deactivate Clear ×3 remove Selection what you control Values red = active On stage Store takes Fixtures 1–4 selected none none none Dim, Color active Dim, Color active Dim, Color inactive (white) empty your look your look your look playbacks only Dim, Color Dim, Color nothing nothing hold Clear 2 s (ClearAll): all at once
After the second press the stage still shows your look, but Store would take nothing: the values are there, just no longer active.

To verify in onPC: check 2

Holding Clear for two seconds (ClearAll) empties everything at once. To make every attribute of the selection active, for example to store a complete state rather than just your changes, press Please Please. Three presses deactivate them again.

Interpretation

Most "the console does something weird" moments for beginners come from leftovers in the programmer:

  • A fader seems to do nothing: the programmer still holds a value for those fixtures and is overriding the executor.
  • A cue contains unexpected attributes: they were still active from earlier.
  • A stored cue looks different when played back than it did while programming: some of what you saw came from inactive programmer values that weren't stored.

Make a habit of clearing fully between looks, and look at the active markers before you store.

Where a value comes from

When a light doesn't do what you expect, the fixture and channel sheets can show more than just the value. Their layers answer the question "who is controlling this?":

  • Output shows the final value including masters.
  • Value Exec ID / Value Cue ID show which executor and which cue a value comes from (1:11 means page 1, executor 11; 8:1 means sequence 8, cue 1).
  • DMX shows the raw DMX value leaving the console.

Working without the audience seeing it

The programmer normally outputs live. When you need to prepare something during a show, or just don't want to see every intermediate step, there are alternatives to programming live:

  • Blind keeps programmer values off the stage while you work on them.
  • Preview shows what an executor would do without running it.
  • Highlight is a toggle that applies the fixtures' defined highlight values to the current selection, so you can see which unit is which while you step through them.

And when something goes wrong, Oops undoes the latest action, and holding it lets you undo several steps back.

When it matters, and when not

You can't avoid the programmer, since every stored object starts there. What you can choose is how much of the selection and active-value mechanics you think about:

  • Busking a small rig: you mostly need Clear discipline and the knowledge that the programmer overrides your faders.
  • Programming a routine (an intro, a build-up into the drop): the active-value rule becomes central, because it decides what each cue contains and therefore how tracking behaves.

Sources