MHL homes on blank, and lamp before move

[Tekuryuu]

Hey all, I have 2 questions about moving heads homing on blank (blackout or individual “off”). If this has been discussed before, please drop a link to the thread, much appreciated!

First, my system is completely set up, I have home-made fixture profiles for all of my lights, and I have been using this setup for about 3 years now. Everything is great, I’ve been building up my rig as I go along and everything is stable and operational. At this point, I am trying to figure out 2 annoying issues to “clean up”.

My setup is a windows 10 box with 2 22” touch screens, and 3 enttec wings. I am using an ArtNet bridge to send the 2 FS universes plus 2 manual universes up to the stage and have it broken out into optical isolators and on to the chains. Right now I’m running 2 lines of truss, and am looking at adding a 3rd. Ps - would be awesome if FS could support 3 or 4 universes !

The first issue is that any time I “turn off” a moving light, it returns to the OEM “home” position. Off could be using the global blackout command, disabling a macro button, such as during a set where I want to do a quick, temporary change. Think like music playing, want to go all black with strobes for 1-2 seconds, and then back to the same scene again, in that moment I cut the scene, all the MHLs home instead of remaining in their current positions.

The second problem, and more the “annoying” part as a result of that homing issue... is that when I enable a pre-set scene or macro, the lights turn on first, then swing into position, blasting light all over the place on the way to the position. How do I get these things to move to position THEN turn the light on? This happens to all of my MHLs, regardless of brand, type, etc.

A bit of additional info:
If I disconnect the DMX cable to the light, or otherwise lose the signal to the light, it freezes in place, which suggests that FS is sending some kind of specific command to home and blank, since that does not happen on signal loss.

Using a manual board, the lights all work as expected, it is possible to control move and lamp independently as you’d expect. So it’s not like bad design in the fixture.


A friend of mine who has never used FS, but has experience with Ma, Hog, and LightJockey told me that this problem with the light turning on first before moving is very common with the software controllers, but easily handled by the hardware boxes. I would be surprised if a great program like FS could not handle such a simple thing.

Any help would be much appreciated!
-Tek

[Partyman]

I also dislike the homing issue and do not have a solution but await anxiously to see how/if others have solved the problem

[Jan_K]

I think that will be an idea if you enter this in "The Bug Tracker".
Not sure if is a bug or a feature request.

And please with a detailed description so Raphael understand the issue.

/Jan

[Tekuryuu]

I also dislike the homing issue and do not have a solution but await anxiously to see how/if others have solved the problem

Well I’m really glad it’s not just me! Thanks.