Support Forum

I have taken some time to learn Freestyler and its nice functions. Also fixture creator is easy for me to use.
I'm coming from a hardware based dmx controller, with quite limited shows, and my goal is to upgrade my light shows with help of Freestyler.
I will use it in DJ events that I do myself, from 50-500 people.
I have a quite large number of fixtures, ranging from simple RGB lights to more advanced moving heads.
My goal is to control them all through Freestyler in one universe.

I haven't done so much scenes or cue's yet, more than trying them out and learn the program.
I am in front of the work to actually program scenes and cue's to use in real events.

That brings me to these questions, what is the best way to set the stuff up in terms of scenes and cue's.

Questions:
When making a scene, I guess it's easiest to do that for a small number of fixtures at the same time?
Or is it even better to limit the scenes to only one fixture?
Of course I need to run them all together in the lightshow, but that could be made through submasters, running several cue's at the same time.

Let's put it like this. I will create a few scenes / cue's to control colours.
A few scenes to control moving heads movements.
Then I can combine those with a big number of different combinations.
I guess I also need to have overrides, when I for example want the show to be static in one colour, during people speech and so on.

I hope my question makes sense, I need to grasp the best way to produce results. Thanks!

I find it best to make scenes for every fixture group and then stack the cues and use Cuelists to fire them. If you make scenes this way you can then build your shows using whatever fixture you want and build cuelists to suit

Thanks Partyman. When you say fixturegroup, how do you mean ?

Front pars
Rear pars
Movers
Lasers
...

OK, I see. Thanks!

If you are luxury of a returning setup in your gigs then you can get yourself a nice bunch of divers scenes and cues. If not and there is a lot of change (example venue size, type or location) you still can get your self some good basic shutter/effect scenes.
But as said above, working with groups and then create scenes for it, is the quickest way to go.

I'm going to do a sketch for you on a regular venue for us which is in a aluminium frame tent of 25 meters long, 10 meters wide and 4 meters height.

In this location we get to work with a stage with on it a few bands and dance/hardcore DJ's which both require different lightning styles (party and "pictures/scenes"). And a roof which we hang a 20m truss in.

The lights:

Stage:
6x RGBWA LED Wash Head
1x 1500w Hazer
2x 1500w fogger (for a cheap co2 style effect)
6x RGBWA LED Par as front

Roof:
12x RGBWA LED Wash Head
8x RGBWA UV LED Par (per 2 between the heads)


For programming I break these up in groups (selecting a group is a lot faster then per fixture).
For even faster programming I assigned the groups to the numbers on my keyboard.

Heads Stage
Heads Stage even numbers
Heads Stage uneven numbers
Front

Heads Roof
Heads Roof even numbers
Heads Roof uneven numbers
Par Roof
Par Roof even
Par Roof uneven

Side Note: You can make as many groups as you want, but you need to be able to keep them "in hand".

Now I program some shutters and effects to the different or combined groups and throw them in a quelist called Band or DJ.

If you wan't really fast programming, create your self some scenes that only trigger a function or colour on all your fixtures (al red or strobe, shutter open/closed) Ad them to override buttons, and assign hotkeys/buttons to the override buttons.
Now if you programmed your scenes without the use of colour/function you can push let's say numpad 1 and trigger all your fixtures in that group to be red or whatever.
With the use of multiselect you can even combine colours on as example all your even or uneven fixtures.


And so on there are a lot of tricks to get more "flexible" with freestyler.
Especially if you let your fixtures keep the same channels on every location, and you can keep them in a standard sort of lay out/format.

Thank you very much Schuim for this advice. It is exactly this kind of 'fundamental' strategies I would like to get at this point.
Actually, I have the luxury with returning setup and what I am doing now at the moment is to assign all my fixtures to the dmx channel list. It's a little of each, a few moving heads, and some other typical disco effects.
It will be possible for me to use the same layout for each gig, OK in some I may not need all of the fixtures but it doesn't matter. But basically I am doing a complete light setup to cover this season.
By freestyler's transparent mode I understand you can combine scences and cues in an unlimited fashion to generate lots of fx. If I have scenes controlling colour and other scenes controlling MH movements they can be combined, without the need to program 'all channels' in one scene.