Universal lighting cue keyboard shortcuts please

[Jake Perrine]

Hey Figure53 team,

I’ve been working with the lighting tools in qlab for a while now and have some reflections on the workflow.

1). Why is the “new cue from All” (CMF-shift-n) and “new cue from changes” (cmd-n) keyboard shortcut in the lighting dashboard the same as other commands in the workspace window (make new workspace)? Shouldn’t there just be one keyboard shortcut (to rule them all) for each function that works from anywhere in the program? I am constantly making new workspaces when trying to add a new lighting cue. I will make a lighting look in the dashboard and then decide where I want to place it in the workspace cue list by clicking on the cue I want to place it after, then press the shortcut, but now I’m in the wrong window so I get a new workspace instead. Doh. It should work the same in any window.

2). A shortcut for Arm / disarm cue would be nice.

3). Tabbing between fields in the workspace list would help: cue number, cue name, prewait, duration, postwait, etc. Likewise shift-tab to go backwards through fields, shift-return to go down the next same field (cue numbers), etc. The longer one can avoid the mouse the better / faster it all goes.

4). Same goes for the lighting dashboard. Up down Arrows to move through the faders, left right to add/subtract level. Less pecking with the mouse.

5). In the video surface editor and the video cue geometry tab can we just see the values for Constraints and X/Y/Z rotation instead of clicking to bring up a sub-menu to see / edit values? Also arrow keys to change these values would be great.

6). Arrow keys to change audio sliders / crosspoints values. Basically, anywhere there is a numeric value box.

Thanks. More to come.

[Chris Ashworth]

Good morning Jake,

Thanks so much for your email!  It’s great to get all this feedback

A few quick thoughts on some of the items below:

For 1) I think the basic reason is that we’re just running out of key commands. :-)  But perhaps an alternate way to think about this would be if we could map MIDI messages to those commands, allowing for a dedicated button to do that job from anywhere.

For 4) the up and down arrows do move from field to field in the dashboard. I like the idea of using arrows to adjust the value.

For 5) the X / Y / Z values are not shown because they do not exist. The orientation of the videos is stored and manipulated in something called a quaternion, which is a representation that provides some helpful properties. Some reasons to use quaternions include:

• There is a smooth, direct, and easily computable rotation between any two orientations represented as quaternions. In contrast, animating between two X, Y, Z orientations will typically go through an odd an unexpected path that looks wrong.

• Unlike X, Y, Z representations, quaternions do not suffer from a limitation called "gimbal lock" in which two of the planes of rotation become aligned and thus reduce the whole system to 2 degrees of freedom instead of 3. The end result of this is that you can enter X, Y, Z values which prevent your video from rotating any further in a direction you'd really like to rotate it.

So, when you're entering a rotation around the X, Y, or Z axes in a Video cue, QLab is converting that into a quaternion representation, and then applying it. Looking at the result visually is intuitive, but looking at the numbers that actually produce the result more or less feels like looking at gobbledygook.

For 6) hm, currently arrow keys navigate through the crosspoints rather than adjusting them.  But something to think about in terms of the impulse behind that idea, for sure.

Cheers,

C