This past week I needed to be ready to go from one moving light acting as a follow spot for the Hero entrance with three movers doing a ballyhoo through the audience to the fourth light joining the Bally to all four lights stopping their effect going out, and pointing a certain direction. In film, things can happen in any order at any time, so it’s not often that I choose to make a secondary cue list.

So I had the spot/three Bally lights in the cue, then two Submaster faders.  The first brought the “spot” light into the Bally and the last stopped the effect, faded the lights out  and pointed the lights how they liked.  I feel like there’s no reason to talk much about the first two, but the third might have value.

Did you know that Stop Effect is a actual value for a parameter or parameters?  So I recorded a Sub that had Stop Effect for Pan and Tilt, Zero for intensity and the new Pan and Tilt values they wanted.  For Stop Effect, I used the button above the Primary Go button. 

Standard Sub settings apply for me- Record Exclude, a higher priority than either the main cue list or the sub that puts the “spot” into the Bally.  

I guess the reason I’m writing this post is (besides my usual hope that it’s useful) is I thought that when Eos wrote in STOP on a value that it was maybe more of a note to the user so they knew what had just happened, rather than a actual value.  Obviously, anyone who does a lot of busking already knows this, since this is super helpful for that task.  But since I do very little busking on Eos (I’d prefer a non-linear console for busking), I hadn’t really had a need that made me test my assumption. Having Stop with no other data present can have many uses.

What assumptions have you made on Eos (or any other console) that you learned were incomplete or incorrect?  Hit me in the comments.

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Mark LaPierre is a programmer in film, television and theater based out of Albuquerque.  He grew up in live entertainment and has been a designer/programmer for musicals, concert dance, live music, circus and corporate.  Mark is a proud member of IATSE Local 28 and 480, an ETC Eos trainer and an enthusiastic trainer of many other platforms and subjects.  He offers remote console coaching in 30 minute to 4 hour times as well as a full range of training in person.  If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.