Thoughts on Scenes

[Lufferov]

Hi,

I've been looking at scene management and wondering if you plan to make any improvements to this area in the future? It seems quite lacking in flexibility at the moment. We are currently limited to 100 cues, which for live theatre is simply nowhere near enough. I could be looking for double that number in just the first act if I have a lot of mic cues.

It also doesn't seem possible to insert a cue, which is a massive problem if I've plotted my show and then need to add new cues to the stack. Currently there's just no way to do this!

On top of this, the "Scene safe" stuff is a good start but needs more flexibility. The "Param safe" is the same, for example, if I plot a show, 99% of the time I ONLY want my mute buttons recorded. However, the "mute" is lumped together with "Fader", "Pan", and "Mix Ons". This is painful if you have to swap mics during a show, I may need to ride my fader levels but with the current set-up, I can't do that as when I go to my next cue it resets the fader position!

Another issue with the scene stuff is that if I "Scene safe" everything and only record "Fader, Pan, Mute & Mix Ons", then if the worst case scenario occurs and my desk dies, when I get a replacement and load my show, it only has those settings saved. So I'd have to re-create all my other settings from scratch including routing, preamp, EQ etc.. This would be a massive problem!

What I'd love to see is a "per-scene" scene safe. That way I could save all my desk settings to my first cue and include everything in it. Then for all other scenes ONLY record the MUTE buttons. Then I can go to any X32 console and load my show and be up and running again in seconds.

Finally, I discovered what I consider to be a glitch with the way MUTE GROUPS interact with SCENES. I like to set up one of my mute groups to mute all channels. But if I have a scene loaded with channels 1, 2, 3, 17, 18, 19, 20 live if I hit the "mute all" group, when I disengage that mute group, it un-mutes ALL my channels! Disaster, I just made my entire cast live in their dressing rooms backstage! When I am in a scene and I disable my mute group, it MUST return to the saved settings in that cue!

Without these basic features the cue stack is utterly worthless for live shows. I understand they are useful for saving presets for different events, but that's a totally different ball game to running a show using a cue stack... At the moment the X32 is severely lacking in this area and needs a lot of work.

[Tony Dawson]

Hi,

I've been looking at scene management and wondering if you plan to make any improvements to this area in the future? It seems quite lacking in flexibility at the moment. We are currently limited to 100 cues, which for live theatre is simply nowhere near enough. I could be looking for double that number in just the first act if I have a lot of mic cues.

It also doesn't seem possible to insert a cue, which is a massive problem if I've plotted my show and then need to add new cues to the stack. Currently there's just no way to do this!

On top of this, the "Scene safe" stuff is a good start but needs more flexibility. The "Param safe" is the same, for example, if I plot a show, 99% of the time I ONLY want my mute buttons recorded. However, the "mute" is lumped together with "Fader", "Pan", and "Mix Ons". This is painful if you have to swap mics during a show, I may need to ride my fader levels but with the current set-up, I can't do that as when I go to my next cue it resets the fader position!

Another issue with the scene stuff is that if I "Scene safe" everything and only record "Fader, Pan, Mute & Mix Ons", then if the worst case scenario occurs and my desk dies, when I get a replacement and load my show, it only has those settings saved. So I'd have to re-create all my other settings from scratch including routing, preamp, EQ etc.. This would be a massive problem!

What I'd love to see is a "per-scene" scene safe. That way I could save all my desk settings to my first cue and include everything in it. Then for all other scenes ONLY record the MUTE buttons. Then I can go to any X32 console and load my show and be up and running again in seconds.

Finally, I discovered what I consider to be a glitch with the way MUTE GROUPS interact with SCENES. I like to set up one of my mute groups to mute all channels. But if I have a scene loaded with channels 1, 2, 3, 17, 18, 19, 20 live if I hit the "mute all" group, when I disengage that mute group, it un-mutes ALL my channels! Disaster, I just made my entire cast live in their dressing rooms backstage! When I am in a scene and I disable my mute group, it MUST return to the saved settings in that cue!

Without these basic features the cue stack is utterly worthless for live shows. I understand they are useful for saving presets for different events, but that's a totally different ball game to running a show using a cue stack... At the moment the X32 is severely lacking in this area and needs a lot of work.

I'm also going to be using this board for live theatre and a bigger cue stack and the ability to just control mutes in scenes would be amazing

[Eric Eskam]

the ability to just control mutes in scenes would be amazing

Yup! Between the way mute groups currently work and the inability to record just mute state as a scene I wonder when the last time the designers mixed live sound was

[humhead]

Agreed this desk would be a very bad choice for live theatre, lack of recall safe choices, insufficient scene count, inability to play back files via scene link, or to recall scenes from xControl.

[Paul Vannatto]

Is there a chance to get more details of the scene safe categories? I'm particularly trying to find the category that covers the scribble strips (color, text, icon).

Due to the fact that the X32 assigns the channels in blocks of 8, I need to be able to switch the Aux 1-4 between the Aux In and the Card In. I've already figured out that if I safe most everything except the Aux 1-4 (on Chan safe screen), and the Routing I/O and Configuration (on the home screen), I can create 2 scenes (PC In and DVD In) and switch between the 2 scenes and it switches the blocks accordingly. But I can't find the category to store the scribble strip config.

What would be nice is to have more details of these categories listed in the manual. That would alleviate the tedious task of trial and error trying to find what works.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Paul

[Resthill]

Scene recall fade time?

[Per Sovik]

I'm also going to be using this board for live theatre and a bigger cue stack and the ability to just control mutes in scenes would be amazing

Mute is a separate item in the <param safe> tab, so doing mutes only is right there for you to use if you want to.

EDIT: Oooops, didn't realize these were old posts!

[Per Sovik]

Agreed this desk would be a very bad choice for live theatre, lack of recall safe choices, insufficient scene count, inability to play back files via scene link, or to recall scenes from xControl.

Recalling scenes from xControl? Surely that is right there, or are you referring to using the board controls to pull scenes from the PC?
For file playback from scenes I use CombiWave and Boume's Midi translator, and there are lots of other software that will do the task directly from midi. Requires a computer of course, but it's nice to have the stick free for recording anyway

EDIT: Oooops, didn't realize these were old posts!