Did you know? #36 - The hidden Feature in the Go Back Button

If you look at the video tutorials on our Youtube channel, you will notice that the cuelists have their own chapter. This is not without reason, cuelists are one of the core elements of DMXControl 3. However, even in this area are one or the other hidden feature. Thus we take a look in this Did you know? on the release time of a cuelist.

Before we can go into the mentioned hidden feature, let's take a closer look at the release of a cuelist first and what it can be used for. As long as a cuelist is active, the values stored in the individual cues are passed to the so-called DMXC-Mixer, which among other things mixes the values of all active cuelists with each other according to the HTP / LoTP / LTP rules (currently only in german). This also has an influence on starting and stopping cuelists. If a cuelist is started and its values have the highest priority, the DMXC-Mixer fades over to this cuelist based on the fade-in time of the first cue. This leads to a transition from the past light scene without this cuelist into the new light scene with this cuelist. The way to control the transition back (from the light scene with this cuelist to a light scene without), on the other hand, is not so apparent. One could get the idea to simply insert another cue at the end of the cuelist, in which the stored values are reset. However, this is not possible, because (at least when tracking is active) cues remain active until the cuelist is completely stopped. So to be able to set this transition, an additional time becomes relevant instead: The release time of a cuelist. This time is used to control the duration of the transition from a lighting scene with the cuelist to a lighting scene without the cuelist.

Since this was very abstract, let's take another look at the release time using a blind effect example. Usually, the blinder effect should override whichever lighting scene is currently active and then fade back into the lighting scene that is still running in the background, to stop the blinder effect. Fading in the blinder effect is unproblematic, since a cue with full light intensity can simply serve the blinder effect in the blinder cuelist. Fading back to the current cuelist, however, is problematic because you don't know in advance which lighting scene is currently active. So you can't save this state into another cue. The correct way for the blinding effect is to specify a release time of e.g. one second. This way the blinder effect will fade back to the active lighting scene during this time and the cuelist will be completely stopped after it.

But where is the little hidden feature? It is hidden in the Go Back button while a cuelist is released. Contrary to what you might expect, stopping a cuelist can be undone during the release process. To do this, simply click on the Go Back button while the cuelist is being released. Then the last cue of the cuelist will be shown again. The fade-in time of the last cue is determined by the release time that has already elapsed. So if the cuelist has already faded out for three seconds, the last cue will now fade in again in these three seconds. This helps if you accidentally stopped the cuelist and want to undo this mistake.

Your DMXControl Team