Vista inserts Releases into copied cues

[Cindy]

Hi! I am using Vista 3 R4 Build1679. I have had a problem for a while now where when I copy a set of cues (usually in the 20-40 range, but even for 1 or 2), Vista inserts a great deal of Release commands for many or all aspects of the fixtures (intensity, color, gobo, etc). These Releases are the type that are in red text and can be selected and deleted (not the light grey that cannot be interacted with). It used to be that this would happen on the second cue of a 20-40 cue selection (with a Blocked first cue), and not elsewhere. While it took me a while to figure it out, this eventually made sense to me, because it was only doing it for aspects of fixtures I had not assigned a value to. The problem is, it now seems to do so every cue or every other cue. An important part of my process involves bringing 1-4 songs I’ve previously designed into a single cuelist for a set/weekend, because I spend so many hours on each one and I want to reuse it (and it’ll be months if not years between uses, so it’s not repetitive). This is supposed to be the quick part, so I can focus on whatever music is new or work on backgrounds in a different program. My workaround is to go through cue by cue and remove all of the inserted Releases. I am very thankful that it has never, as far as I’m aware, overwritten anything I had in the cues. But it does stick them many/most other places. Is this a bug, or could I do something differently to avoid this?

Edit: I should add that I am almost always copying between 2 open cuelists when this happens.

[jack.moorhouse]

It’s not a bug. It’s intentional, you just perhaps don’t understand what or why.

Do you get the correct stage state?

When you copy and paste something in Vista you paste the “look” of the cue by default.
Therefore Vista will automatically add (or release) whatever it needs to to paste the look of the cue you are copying from.

I can show you both sides of this.
Take a look at this example.

Cue 1 has intensity, position (1) and color.
Cue 2 has only color (With intensity and position tracking forwards from cue 1)
Cue 2 has a color and position (2) change.

The only events in cue 2 are color.
However if I copy and paste it to cue 4:

You can see that position1 is automatically added to cue 4, because that is what is needed to paste the look of cue 2.

A slightly different example:

I have added an additional cue 4 to the original 3 cues. This adds 10 extra lights. They are all on in cue 4.
Now if I copy and paste cue 2 to cue 5:

You can see that the fixtures that were not in cue 2 are automatically released.
Vista has given me the look of cue 2. - It’s perfect! Even with those release events in there. They have to be.

If you really dont want to paste the “look” of the cue. You can do a “paste special” action and select to paste the “events of the cue”.

If I did the exact same example, cue 2 to 5, I would get :

Changing subject slightly: Do you have a cuelist per song in your “library” ?
If so I wouldn’t even bother copying and pasting them into a master cuelist. You are arguably wasting your time, and potentially a lot of it.
If it were me, I would use snapshots at the end of each song to load the next song into the superplayback. Then all you need to do is to insert a single command into the end of each song when you are arranging your services and you are good to go.

Hope this helps!
Jack

[Cindy]

I know what you mean about pasting the look of a cue - very useful! What I am encountering is a bit different, and it’s not consistent (it doesn’t always happen). For example, recently I was Lighting, and I had unusually little time to prepare. I had copied in a song that was semi-recent, and not had time to check it for these sorts of problems. So we are rehearsing, and I go to hit the second cue in the song, and loose every fixture in the place except what I have on in Unison (hardware/software that lets one turn on some lights w/o Vista being up). Everybody looks at me like “Why’d you turn all the lights off on us?!” I think I just laughed and gave the lighting staff guy a look and said “You KNOW what just happened.” He’s like, “Oh yeah…that release issue.”

It has honestly done this release-stuff-on-second-cue-of-copied-items for a very, very long time. I can live with that - I only have to sort 1 cue out. The new part is that it now does that AND sprinkles in releases all through the song. It seems somewhat linked to events in the timeline. Like maybe I change the color FX going on a group, then 2 cues later that and only that is released for no reason I can determine and it wasn’t in the original cuelist. That might not be so problematic if I didn’t have a propensity to change up to 6 or 7 different groups - 270 some fixtures - on a large percentage of the cues.

Keeping the songs in individual cuelists - this is a very viable idea, thank you! I must think on that. It would require some changes, though, like the fact that I sometimes keep more than one copy of a song in that song’s cuelist, and that the person who is “calling” the events usually puts the cue numbers into the detailed order (and the weirdness of doing that if all of a sudden it’s 5 cuelists) and has a monitor that shows them what I’m doing on my 3rd screen (where I keep the Playback window), and they watch the cuelist progress.
BTW I really appreciate your idea some time ago in the help ticket to changing cuelist properties to Ignore Release All to On. That has been super helpful!

[Cindy]

@jack.moorhouse

If you really dont want to paste the “look” of the cue. You can do a “paste special” action and select to paste the “events of the cue”.

I wonder if I could use this to prevent the problem I am seeing…? I must try it out.

[jack.moorhouse]

I struggle to follow your example to be honest, but my gut feeling is that Vista is likely still doing the right thing from it’s stand point.
Feel free to submit a support ticket with your showfile and some basic instructions. For example:

1. Open List ID XX
   Select cues X through X
   Copy and paste this into LIST XXX at the cue X position
   take a look at cue X - this happens.

We should be able to further advise on what you are seeing.

[Cindy]

Here is a 1:03 video I made trying to show what’s going on. It’s the first I’ve ever done like this, so I’m sorry about the framing.
I have been using your idea of Paste Special → Paste only the events of the original cue, and that has worked REALLY well!! I’m not sure if it’s 100%, but it’s so so much less clearing out releases than before. Thank you SO much! This may be a sufficient solution. I can still submit a support ticket if desired.

Chroma-Q Vista Release Issue