Did you know? #35 - Arrange yourself inside the stage view

As said in many places, your different stage views are supposed to support you in programming cues and cuelists in your respective project, on the one hand by reflecting the rough arrangement of the devices of your current lighting setup. On the other hand, you should be able to recognize roughly with the help of the stage views what DMXControl 3 would like to output currently. Even if this is done in detail, please always keep in mind: the stage view is not a visualizer!

Now it is no rarity that you must rearrange the arrangement of the devices or device groups in the stage view in your projects again and again. The reasons can be quite different:

• You simply notice that the positions of the devices do not yet match the structure or the individual pixels within the device.
• You add more devices during the construction of a project and must create space in general.
• You just generally adjust the arrangement of the devices in the stage view, either because you want to create a new setup variant with your devices after some time.
• You are using an existing project as a template for a completely new show, so to speak, but where essentially different equipment in different quantities will be used. However, you want to continue to use the existing cuelists, softdesks and the connection sets in the input assignment.

If the stage view is already a bit fuller or you don't want to pay attention to the selection order of the devices every time you move them, a small entry in the context menu for an active selection of devices can support you: the entry "Sort selection". With this you can simply drag a selection rectangle over the devices you want to rearrange, as in the example in the first step. Because of the freely drawn selection rectangle, the selection numbers in the right top corner of the icon do not even match the names of the devices. If you were to arrange the devices in a linear or circular order, or create a new device group based on this selection, the chaos would be perfect. After all devices (or device groups) are selected, we now select one of the items under the entry "Sort selection" of the context menu. The goal here should now be that we bring the colorfully mixed devices in the circle back into ascending order and that clockwise. This can now be done, among other things, on the basis of the name. Immediately the selection numbers adjust to this choice. Last but not least, we use the stage view function to arrange devices in a circle. To do this, we press the "C" key and move the first device. The circle will be recreated, but where the devices are now positioned in clockwise ascending order.

Free, manual selection by selection rectangle   Entries in context menu of the point "sort selection"   Sorted indices   Sorted devices

You can also use the same function if you want to create a new device group directly from the stage view and you don't want to pay explicit attention to the correct selection of the devices - or rather the correct order.

By the way: In addition to the circular arrangement, the stage view offers you even more options at this point. We already told you about this some time ago in Did you know? #28 - An overview of the keyboard commands.

Your DMXControl-Team