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Adapt a show to a new venue

Take a show you've played before into a room with a different hang: fixtures at other addresses, hung upside down, pointing elsewhere, and colours that look different in the new room. Why a show built on presets makes this cheap: Changing the show.

Requirements: the show uses groups and presets (cues link to presets rather than storing raw values), and you have the new venue's patch plan.

Steps

  1. Load the show and save it under a new name for this venue (Backup → Save Show As). The old version stays as it was, and each show file keeps 10 backups of its earlier saves.
  2. Re-patch. Press Setup, tap Patch Only (Live), and change the DMX addresses; this doesn't stop the output. From the command line: Assign Fixture 101 At DMX 2.1. Set invert and offsets for fixtures that aren't hung the way the show expects.
  3. Focus the position presets. Call each position preset, correct it on stage, and Update it. Every cue that links to the preset moves with it.
  4. Colour and balance pass. Call your colour presets in the new room, at show distance and in haze, and retune the types that look off (see Make one colour preset work across fixture types). Rebalance the intensity base presets the same way.
  5. Safety limits, if needed. A group master on an executor scales a group relative to its programmed level, so at 70% even a cue at full only reaches 70%. Use it for fixtures that must stay down in this room (a wash pointing into the bar, a beam near a low ceiling).
  6. Play through and take notes. Run the show once without stopping, write down what bothers you, and fix the list afterwards.
  7. Save.

If the rig is very different

When half the fixtures are new or gone, start from a template show with the new patch and bring in what still applies with Partial Show Read:

  1. Save the show first, so you can go back.
  2. Press Backup, load the destination show, then tap Partial Show Read Initialize and choose the source show.
  3. In Partial Show Read Prepare, match source fixtures to destination fixtures (Use Mine, Use Other, or the Wizard), then tap Prepare!.
  4. Tap Partial Show Read, pick the presets, effects, sequences and executors to import, and move them across.

Leave the session first if the console is in one.

Sources