Lighting Control - Smart Fixtures

[David B]

Hello!

Absolutely love love QLab. I've used it for video and sound cues for roughly 3-years now.

I'm approaching an event where I need a simple yet semi-robust lighting controller and I would love to consider QLab. One main hesitation, and hence my question:

Can I control intelligent fixtures/movers? Is it possible to programs sweep and pans?

Are strobes programmable?

Unfortunately I do not have an intelligent fixture handy nor the DMX adaptor to do some testing myself. And my research so far on the internet has resulted in very little information for lighting in QLab.

More context: I come from some experience in lighting and programming on both Hog and GrandMA lighting consoles.

[David B]

I've messed around with lighting on QLab, patching a fixture that I am familiar with. I see I can modify the lights pan and tilt values, however, I am so accustomed to just choosing a fixture and applying a pan-tilt effect (on a Hog system for example) that I feel out of place in QLab.

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi David,

Thanks for your questions! 

QLab’s current level of lighting control stops short of tools for quickly building effects, so while they can be built it’s currently a much more manual process than other programs.

Adding tools specifically to create lighting effects is a high priority for us, when it comes to our lighting plans. Lighting is the youngest feature set in QLab and we are excited to develop it more.

Best,

Chris

[David B]

Thanks for the timely response Chris!

Excited to see the progression of QLab with those features and I'll be watching it very closely. In the meantime however, I'm not scared of manual.

Is there any detailed information, tutorials, or example show files for how to program simple pans and strobes? I would naively assume that it would be creating two cues that fade between positions? 

I would also assume I could perhaps have one cue control the position/movement while I could have another cue control the color?

Thanks in advance!

[sveneri...@gmail.com]

To set up "Virtual parameters" in the light definition section before adding a fixture to the lighting patch is a very helpful thing. There is a virtual parameter that works like a pan-tilt grid and another that acts like a color picker. 

I also dabbled in setting up custom made remote controls for light fixtures via MIDI och OSC. So far I've tried Lemur, Touch OSC, Open Stage Control on iPad or an Elgato Stream Deck witch is very useful if you want less tech savvy people using your setup (but of course you have to do the programming of the device in advance).  There is lots of guides in the QLab cookbook https://qlab.app/cookbook/ if you want to learn about this and also doing a search in this group.

I - sort of like you wrote - set up a que-list with ques that only contain pan-tilt positions in addition to my custom made remote that shows all the different gobos and colors. And if i want to set up an effect/sweep/chase or whatever you want to call it you can just make another que-list with a couple of auto-follow ques in a loop and trigger it with a start-que from your main que list.

 

I almost no experience with using big expensive lighting consoles like Hog and GrandMA but I can certainly reccomend diving into the manual world of QLab because it is so intuitive.

Maybe I'm not making much sense but feel free to ask me if you want to know more about anything i wrote.

// Sven

[David B]

Thanks for the input Sven! Glad to know it's possible.

That CookBook link I think might actually have been golden. For those who may be seeing this in the future, check this out:

https://qlab.app/cookbook/lighting-playground

I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but it looks highly promising.

Sven, in terms of questions for you. Having the operator use a Stream Deck is my current plan (and one of the reasons I like QLab as my lighting controller). I feel perfectly fine with setting that up. However, in this line:

          "custom made remote that shows all the different gobos and colors"

Does this controller trigger a QLab cue that sets the light to a certain color?

[sveneri...@gmail.com]

I'll answer with a video ;) https://youtu.be/6nPWKGlw1oI

Here is my latest "remote" and this one is mainly made to make it easier for myself to program but it also worked really well with my theatre-light students to get up and running with programming in QLab :)

Most of it is possible with OSC (which to be fair is the more powerful option) but there is no option for OSC-faders on the stream deck. The biggest downside is that that MIDI-channels only have a value of 0-127 and that can be a little too blunt especially if you have 16-bit pan-tilt values so you still have to go through the dashboard and that is why I set up the position ques.  

// Sven

[David B]

Fantastic remote! Well well done 👏  Reminds me of something I would do hahaha. Thanks for the video! Certainly helped!

Ended up installing Capture yesterday and messing around with it and QLab. I feel very capable of setting up what I need to at this point, and a lot of that is credit to y'all here.

Post-June event, I intend to post what we were able to do with the lighting along with a video so that others see what QLab is capable of! I'll be sending messages in here as I run into issues :)