Effects cause flickering when using a tracking backup to make a quick remote console

Vista software How do I ...?
1

My church’s current setup=a Desktop PC/Tower with Vista (the “Main” control) and a laptop as an auxiliary “Mobile” console. The intention of the mobile console is to ease setup when working on stage setup (instead of running 100’ back to the stationary desktop console to toggle on/off a light, the mobile laptop can be used)

When effects are applied to a set of light fixtures, the fixtures will flicker. When the laptop is shut off and the same effect is applied to the light fixtures, there’s no flickering.

Anybody know a way to end the flickering besides disconnecting the laptop? In the meantime we can go to only using the laptop for working sessions and never during an actual event (It means the lighting operator is tied down to the desktop PC’s location. It’s not the end of the world to do that.)

2

I can’t really help with the specific issue but my main question is if the laptop hardwired to the pc or are you using a wifi connection?

In my experience vista needs a very stable network connection for having tracking backup to work properly

3

Good question! The laptop is a WiFi connection.

4

If you are simply using a remote then I suggest running a VNC server on the main console and a client on the remote device. This way the wifi connection dropping will not interfere nor will Vista try to use the remote device as a processing device.

5

altough its maybe “safer” with a VNC but its less intuitive and you need 3th party software on each device you want to use.

I would recommend to just run a cat6 between the machines and use the tracking backup as it should be used