I had a reader (Jack S) reach out to ask how I handle switching between locations and stage where authorization count might be lower on location than on stage.  It seems like this might be a common question, so I thought I’d share my approach here.

I’ve used an IonXE on locations for most of my career with an RPU or an APU set up on stage that I client into for more outputs.  I understand many programmers have separate show files for stage and locations, but I try to have my entire film be one continuous show file.  That way, if the gaffer asks me any question about a light throughout the shoot, I can look back and answer.  Since the Ion is limited to 24 universes, the way I work around that is to channel in order of importance. 

Eos authorizes output in order of channeling.  The universe number has nothing to do with whether the channel will be authorized. So if the first channel is in universe 600, address 1- it’s going to be the first authorization priority. I lay out my channeling like this:

• Truck package between channels 1-350
• Locations between 351-700
• Stages from 701 up 

When I’m on the (24 universe) IonXE on location, the desk will authorize the truck package and the location, but cut off however much of the stage it can’t fit.  For stage, there is an unlocked Apex Processor that serves our needs. So far, it’s worked great.

In the ideal world, we would have equal output counts across all our consoles, but there are so many reasons to use different setups.  One is simply economics.  It’s very expensive to get into programming, and many start with a smaller output setup and eventually buy bigger authorization consoles as they progress to bigger jobs.  But another reason is protecting your most expensive gear.  On this last film, my primary programming surface was a Pelican case Nomad system I built a while ago.  As I shoot in the desert, having the less expensive CMDKeys, JOSC encoders and the Nanokontrol2 faders being at risk from the dust, rain and snow was far less stressful than setting up the Ion, never mind my Apex.  It’s good to think strategically on what you will program on from day to day.

Hopefully this was useful to some of you.  If you have a different approach to switching between different output count consoles, I’d love to hear them.  I figured out many of the things I do in film on my own, so I’m always interested in hearing other approaches.  Hit me in the comments!

Photo by Markus Krisetya on Unsplash