Getting Started Guide - Building chasers

Ok, so now we know how to do some fancy circle copying, let's try to use this to make a chaser.

Let's add it on a new page. Press Page +  until you are on page 3 and make an "Everything Off" using the + Off key combination to open the Off window.

Building the cue list

Chasers are a cue list that is set to run using a different timing than the one stored in the cues. Often they run as loops, but there are other options.

So the first thing we need to do is to build the cue list.

Select all your X4's using the group.

Turn them on and give them a blue color except number 31 - that should be white.

Store this on executor number 1.

Make sure all fixtures are selected (using the group) and tap the Circular Copy > macro once.

Store this as cue number 2. Continue using the circular copy and storing cues until you have 6 cues.

This is our cue list with the different steps in the chaser.

The only problem is that it now have too much information. When you use circular copy then it takes all values of the fixture and copy this around. That's all very nice, but not what we want in our chaser - only dimmer and color. Let's remove the rest. Select all the X4's and press the Please key twice. This brings you all the possible attributes into your programmer. We want to keep dimmer and color information in our cues, so we don't what that in our programmer right now. Press Off and then Dimmer in the preset bar (right side, right screen) and again Off and then Color in the bar. This should remove the red markers next those. Ok, now press Store Cue Thru and then one of the two keys associated with the executor. In the Store window tap where it says Remove. Now we have removed all the unnecessary values from the cue list.

Changing it to a chaser

Now we need to change the mode of the cue list. We need to tell the console that this is now a chaser.

Press the key and then any of the keys associated with the executor where you stored the cues.

In the upper right corner of the cue window you'll see the Tool icon  - Tap it.

This opens the settings for the executor. We also looked at this for our main executor, when we activated MIB. The top if the settings looks like this:

Right now the check marker on "Is Chaser" isn't filled out so it's not a chaser. Tap it once and then tap in the upper left corner where it says Esc.

Notice that the color has changed for the executor in the Executor Bar. It now looks like this:

Try to move the fader down and then up to 100. Now your chaser starts running.

Changing the Chaser settings

If you can't see the cue list, then press the  key again and then any of the keys associated with executor where the chaser is running.

Now the bottom of screen 1 gives us some new chaser specific settings. They look like this:

The top half of this gives you two different settings regarding how the different cues or chaser steps should run. Pressing the three dots on the left opens a pop-up list with four options.

• Forward - will run the steps from the one with the lowest number to the one with the highest.
• Backward - is run from the one with the highest number to the one with the lowest. 
• Bounce - will begins as a forward, then when reaching the highest number it will begin to run backwards. The result is a constant change of direction.
• Random - is choosing a random cues/step as the next one.

The three dots on the right gives you the following settings:

• Endless - will have the chaser running until you stops it.
• Shoot-Off - will run the chaser once and then turn off. If the running order is random, then it will run the amount of steps/cues, but not necessarily all the different cues/step! 
• Shoot-On - is the same as Shoot-Off but it will pause after the final step/cue.

The bottom half of this gives you controls to play the chaser (for any of the shoot modes) or pause it. There are also three buttons that changes the speed. You can half the speed, double it or reset it to what the encoder below is set to.

Remember that I said that all the cue timings are ignored? This means that as a default the cue fade times is 0 and the result is that the chaser snaps between the different steps. If we would like it to do a more nicely fade from one step to the next, we can do this using the second from the right encoder. This is currently called "Fade" and is a percent number. This can be used to set how much of the available time should be used to fade from one step to the next. The more you turn this up, the more of the time is used to fade.

Next to the Fade encoder is the Speed encoder. Here you can set a more detailed speed. But if you are trying to match the beat of some music, then you can press and hold the Speed key while you tap one the keys associated with the chaser. This will dynamically change the chaser speed to the speed of your presses - it's a function called learn and you can also see it on the Master Speed in the Magic Speed view.

The MA dot2 is handling speed as BPM (Beats Per Minute). This is used for chasers and effects and both are adjusted by the Master Speed fader in the Magic Speed view. 

Running chasers from cues

One of the limits with chasers is that they are not easy integrated with cue playback. 

The only way to do this is to add commands in your cue list. Try to press Cue to open the main cue list view. Now scroll all the way to the right and locate the "CMD" column.

In the command cell for cue 4 we want to add a command that activates the chaser. First make sure the chaser fader is down and then note the executor page and executor number. It should be on page 3, executor number 1.

In the command cell type:  fader 3.1 at 100 fade 2

And to turn it off again in cue 5 I write: fader 3.1 at 0 fade 5

Now you can try the cue list and when you run cue 4 then the chaser begins and with cue 5 it stops. Notice how nice it fade in. The fade out isn't really that nice. That's because the X4's still got dimmer values from the main executor. So after the 5 second fade then the colors snap to green. To fix this you'll need to create a new empty cue 5.5 with a fade time of 2 and then add the X4 dimmers at 0% in cue 5 only. Then give cue 5.5 a follow as the trigger. I suggest you make this :-)

 

 

Now this is almost all you need to know about chasers. The cues can have any kind of content, there can be as many cues as you like. It's just a question of your imagination. Next chapter we are going to look at some effects.