I was able to get through the whole show this past weekend, no issues. 246 scenes of all types including the new superscene.
First off, I tried the 5.0.3 beta, it worked for a couple of days, and then gave the same unregistered business another poster has reported.
Nice to see the animations on load and save. That was a nice touch. File sizes and save times are a HUGE improvent over D4. 9M for this past weekend's show versus 108M for a similar show in July using D4. And it's so quick I can save often. Bravo. So many other cool things. Hiding banks is great.
---Would be nice to be able to reassign the function that the space bar currently has to another key. Was much more convienient to map the space bar to "Next Scene". Especially for when I have someone else doing the George Jetson thing (pushing the button, lol). ---Please bring back showing the key binding on the scene button. Ideally top-right of the scene button, both expanded and reduced. ---Please also bring back right click access to map a single key/whatever binding. ---I really miss the fader animation too. I know it's probably resource heavy, but it was useful at times. ---One thing that got me, and took me a while to figure out was that keyboard mappings ARE case sensative. Don't remember it mattering in D4, but this is actually a good thing as it increases the number of possible mappings. Just one of several "surprises" so far. ---Super big thing... The groups bar needs to either have a horizontal scroll bar, two vertical rows, or preferably both. I have 31 groups currently, and that is just fixture types. I spent a good part of the programming time clicking those little arrows on the right. I thought about maybe mapping the arrow keys to them, but they are not selectable while the mapping window is up (right clock kb mapping would have been handy!). Also tried undocking the window to see if that helps, but noted that nothing in the undocked window can be mapped. ---I can't seem to reproduce it at the moment, and can't recall exactly how it occured, but several times when I would add or change an effects engine while programming, it would reset the scene duration back to 5 secs. Shouldn't do that... ---Speaking of engines, it would be ideal for each engine to have it's own speed when stacked. I likely don't want my scanners moving as fast as my pars are chasing. ---Another thing with engines. Seems each engine is tied to a group of fixtures. Is it possible to tie multiple other beams to it as well? For example, say I'd like my pars and bars to follow the same rainbow effect, or whatever. The only way I can think of to make that happen currently is to make yet another group (and do the left right arrow button dance even more) and then add that group's beams to the fx. (this does work just fine, I just don't need any more groups until if and when the group scroll thingy gets some love!)SUPERSCENE
---I absolutely love the superscene. One of the cool things I was able to do was create a location scene, and call it in several superscenes. Get to the venue, edit the scene, point the lasers where you want them, boom, location is set for whatever scene you call it in. I also plan to use this for player locations for the Xmas shows.Honestly though, i think this functionality could be better implemented as a scene setting, probably on a fixture by fixture status. "Use P/T values or stored location"
---I can find no way of manually stepping through a superscene. That would be -super- useful. ---In the setup screen, right click on a fixture, and you get a menu. Please explain what "update profile file" does and what we can do with it. I tried to edit a fixture (came with a couple of channels swapped, didn't notice it at the time) and update it. Just came back with an error. I have several fixture files that I would like to edit (gobos, colors, etc, etc) and replace them without changing any of the programming. This looks like it has the potential to be just that. ---Remember that I said there were 146 scenes for the show this past weekend, (plus quite a few more, loops for the hazers, geysers, etc). When you grab a scene to put it somewhere else, and you want to move it somewhere off screen, the screen will not scroll to allow that. Had to move it as far as I could, scroll the screen, move it some more, repeat...
A FEATURE REQUEST:My one major request. If I could have one button/widget, whatever you want to call it, for the touch screen, it would be an item that would display the name of the currently active scene(s). I'm guessing since you are able to display the name of the scene that's being loaded or saved, that this might be within the realm of possible?!?
There are many nights that I run the lights myself while we are playing. It's easy to get excited, hit the footswitch too many times, or miss hitting it, and eventually get to the "where the hell am I at?" state. At that point, I have to go over wherever I have the computer set up, squint my eyes all up, and see what scene I'm on, then (since I'm likely still playing at the moment) walk back over and hit the forwards or backwards footswitch X amount of times... Not the most professional looking excercise, lol. If I had such a widget, I could just have the active scene displayed on a phone/tablet/whatever mounted on the mic stand or something, likely big enough to read it at a distance, and know where I'm at all the time. Game changing huge, I tell ya.
Well that's what I got for the moment. I'm sure I'll be back with more after I get deep into the Christmas shows.
Thanks!
Mark