I’m a huge fan of Selective recording.  What does that mean?  It means “Just these channels, just these attributes, record here”.  I always record Presets and Beam palettes this way on Eos, since they (debatably) are both capable of holding too much information to be useful.  Also, if you have a cue with color data and a submaster with intensity data running, and you add a new fixture in Live, you can keep the information separated by typing “Channel X, Color update Cue Y” and then typing “Channel X, Intensity update Sub Z”.  If this isn’t already familiar to you, I find these things invaluable and I couldn’t program the way I do without it.

Let’s take it a step further.  You can create a new cue while leaving half of your data manual if that’s helpful.  Let’s say you are getting notes from a Gaffer (or perhaps a client who is dictating changes, but is not good at thinking in sequence) and you have a dozen manual changes in Live and aren’t sure if the first half go into cue 1 or cue 2, but it’s time to record cue 2 ready or not, you can say “Channels x thru y Record Cue 2” and the console will record the cue, put you into the cue, but leave the unspecified channels manual until you tell it what to do with them.  I’m surprised by how many times this has been helpful to me.

What way do you use (or will you now use) selective recording in your work?  Hit me in the comments.

(Featured Image Photo by Craig Pattenaude on Unsplash)