I’ve tried reading the manual a little bit, but it’s too long for me to actually read all of the things prior to Cues and Presets. We understand everything necessary to run a Sunday morning service, but I also do lighting for a theater group that uses our building, and church events–where there is minimal involvment–are not uncommon. We’ve used presets solely for five movers (Chauvet DJ Intimidator spot 260x) we have in the ceiling, but there have been problems with linking effects to presets. As far as cues go, I’m having trouble with understanding what to include in each cue, and how to organize them in the cuelists. If anyone can help with anything, it would be MUCH appriciated! This is all for the Vista EX and MV consoles.
This is a loaded topic, youtube is probably your fastest resource. Reading the manual is the most complete resource but that takes time (I personally am interested in this topic because I volunteer at church to run lighting and often need to explain to other volunteers how to use the board).
For everything there’s the training videos published by Vista (and they’re probably the best): https://www.youtube.com/@VistabyChromaQ
But also good are the following:
For cues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B12_ff4wGNw this video is made (supposedly) by a church as well. It’s pretty straight to the point on creating cues (you may not need to use all they have as they’re going for a cue for a part of a song)
For presets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cojHmABQGp0 This guy is a GREAT resource for all things lighting. The video is for how presets work in another lighting software. But the introduction gives a good summary of presets in general. If you’re looking for presets information just watch the summary.
Your programming depends on what you’re going for. But assuming you want to activate a cue and leave it (or tell someone to click here):
My own opinion, Make a preset for each parameter you want to control (location, color, intensity). Then set your cue look. Finally have the first cue of your cuelist have a release all command so that Vista releases prior cues before any other cuelists are fired. By having the release all part, you can tell someone to click the play button and not worry about what other cues are doing.
Just my 2 cents.
No, thank you so much! Yeah, as you mentioned, making it possible for anyone to just hit a button and forget about it would be incredible. I’ll look through the videos for sure.
Here’s a great resource for presets including how to work with effects over presets for busking.
In my church we have a very flexible program (often switch up songs during practice, add on or remove elements as needed during a given event or Sunday service), so we take a lot of what this video talks about for presets and apply them to cuelists so that we can tie them to faders. Here’s the categories and settings we find useful:
- Cues for basic looks w/ a base intensity, colors, focus, position, &c (e.g. Speaker, Praise, Prayer, Video Dark, Video Bright) — set these to low priority so all of the other cues will override them
- Intensity cues to modify the base cues when needed (e.g. brighter stage lights for builds during praise, baptism lights, top light/house light controls for on-the-fly changes that a basic look can’t capture)
- Color cues — for these we use a chase rate fader to be able to easily adjust live timing of color transitions independently from effects and intensity transitions (e.g. to fade slowly from one color set to another as a song builds)
- Effect cues (separate cuelists for intensity, movement, gobo, and focus/prism effects) — we have these tied to a master effect speed fader as described in this video, with all of the effect rates synced so that the master speed will create a cohesive look no matter what effects are applied (e.g. intensity effects are often at a 1x rate unless they contain 20+ fixtures, while movement effects are often at 1/8x or 1/10x rate)
This setup produces a lot of cuelists with just 1 cue each (and a few timed cues that follow automatically for timed effects or on/off sequences, e.g. hazer boot up and shut down)
It’s definitely not the easiest to run - I would recommend cuelists for each song in a praise set or theatre performance where you have everything programmed into multiple cues to follow the progression of the song/scene so that you can just advance through the cuelist during the performance. But the above gives the most flexibility while tying it to physical controls on your console rather than virtual buttons like just using presets would, making it a bit more accessible for minimally trained (like 1 hour before a show) volunteers in my experience.
Hope this helps!
This is great, thank you! Is that what Crossfade is for, or is that something else?