Tracking and Avocado Toast

This week, I’ll join the many who put their spin on explaining tracking.  It’s an important concept to fully unlock since many of the most powerful programming functions are tied to it.  We are going to cover what tracking forward and backwards is as well as blocking in both a simple straight-forward way, and then from a slightly more complicated point of view.

Straightforward

Let’s say you are sick and tired of a Certain Generation commenting on how much you spend on Avocado Toast, so you decide to track it to prove them wrong.  You make a small spreadsheet and enter the number (let’s say $3 since you make it yourself).


Avocado Toast
Monday$3

Each day, the expense is the same.  So instead of copying the value in every day, you do this:


Avocado Toast
Monday$3
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Those “dittos” are indicating the same thing each day.  This is tracking in a nutshell.  Rather than write the same value over and over again through the cues (represented by Days), you simply indicate that there are no changes.  But what if there was a change?  You realize that you didn’t count the olive oil you drizzle on top, which adds $0.30.  You update the number at the top and the dittos already exist to track the values forward through the week.


Avocado Toast
Monday$3.30
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

If you are in the middle of the week and the price of avocados rise, you would update the number on Wednesday and the dittos would track the value forward the rest of the way.  One entry of a number results in five total days written at the higher value.


Avocado Toast
Monday$3.30
Tuesday
Wednesday$3.50
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

All of the previous examples are examples of tracking forward.  In general, people are fine with a tracking console when they are writing through the cue stack the first time.  It’s when you start revising things in the cue stack that things get confusing.  So let’s talk about blocking, as it is your best friend for having a good tracking experience.

As designers and programmers, our work tends to be in segments.  Divided by scene or by the song, dance or whatever.  Since each new section is a new “world” if you will, you would want to make sure you couldn’t accidentally change something and have it go from one scene/song into the next.  This is blocking, and it’s easy.  Let’s return to the Avocado Toast.

For purposes of our example, you track your expenses for Avocado Toast in a small notebook that is easy to carry around (I know- almost no one uses notebooks any more) and each week fits on a tiny page.  So if you wrote the dollar amount at the top of the week and turn the page, you would most likely write the number again at the top of the new page so it might look like this.  

Week 1Avocado Toast
Monday$3.30
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Week 2Avocado Toast
Monday$3.30
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Within this example, allow me to be silly with time and material costs.  Looking at the two weeks, you can see that if something changed mid-week in week one (sudden run in the market on lemon peel) that brought the cost up, there is already a dollar amount entered at the top of week two that means the dittos refer to the “usual” dollar amount.  In the simplest form- a new value blocks tracking (in EOS, this is the lower case b that shows up in your cue stack).  If you do it on one or several channels, this is a partial block.  If you want to protect the separation between songs or scenes, you would put a block on the whole cue and the console would give a hard value to every channel and parameter.  

To discuss Tracking Backwards, we will leave the Avocado behind for a minute.  Let’s say you are lighting a dance piece. The choreographer is ignoring you, since they need to space the dancers.  You decide it’s a red piece and start cueing.  Near the end, the choreographer comes to you and says this is not a red piece at all, it is obviously a magenta piece.  No problem.  You change the stage to magenta, the choreographer is mollified, but you are near the end of the piece and you don’t want to stop and go back to the original cue.  You don’t need to. In any major console, there is a function where you would make the color change and tell it to go back to the original source of everything that was Red and change the original reference to Magenta.  In EOS it’s Update Trace, in Hog it’s Track Backwards, in MA it’s Update Original Content.   It’s a slick function that goes back to the beginning of the “avocado toast week” and updates the price starting on Monday.

Slightly More Complicated

All the major consoles let you know you what is tracking in a cue and they do it by showing you all your values color-coded.  In EOS- magenta is a tracked value.  But be aware that you could have a non-tracked intensity with a tracked color in the same light.  It’s one of the kinds of things that I see confuse people.  Remember- the cost of avocado toast isn’t limited to the avocado.  There’s olive oil, salt, pepper (or crushed red pepper), lemon peel and the actual toast.  Lights are made up of multiple parameters and each aspect is tracked individually.

Tracking in Theater desks isn’t too hard since the consoles make assumptions that support theater ideas.  Example: You have a busy sequence and in cue 101, you need to tighten the zoom on Channel 1.  In a theater console, if you copy cue 101 to a cue later in the stack, you get a “what you see is what you get” copy of the whole look including the tight zoom for fixture 1.  

Tracking in a Busking desk is very different.  If you do copy the same cue as we just discussed on the Hog or the MA or Chamsys, you will only get Channel 1’s zoom value.  Why?  Because if the console doesn’t see a “hard” value, meaning a value that was entered directly into the cue and NOT a tracked value, then the console acts as if nothing is there.  

Ch 1 Zoom2345678910
“tight”

This makes tracking feel far more complicated.  But to me it’s confusingly simple- it’s a computer being so literal that you can’t understand what it did.  Why would this be good?  Let’s think about a Tex-Mex restaurant for the answer.

Obviously, there are many kinds of Tex-Mex.  I’m talking about the places that need to serve food FAST.  So how do they do that?  They chop/cook/prep fresh ingredients, salsas, beans, cheeses, tortillas and such so that on a moment’s notice, they can assemble whatever you order.  Concert consoles are designed to make this easy.  You can prep lots of different events (ingredients) like color changes, position changes, intensity changes, beam changes and effects but keep them separated on different faders so that at a moment’s notice, they can assemble the thing that is desired.  If the band starts a ballad, you can quickly set the mood, if the band starts a kicking arena tune, you can make the lights react in real time.  Just like with food prep, it’s important to keep your prep food separated.  If you get cheese in any of your veggies, your lactose intolerant customers will be very unhappy.  Tracking to isolate only the zoom parameter in a cue is great for this- it keeps your materials separated.

Who knew what you were missing in your understanding of tracking was avocado toast and Tex-Mex?  I hope this was helpful and deepened your understanding of this important concept.  Hit me with comments, questions or requests in the comments.

1 comment

  1. Dean - Reply

    This does help.
    I’ll keep this in mind as I program for theatre.
    I also really enjoy avocado toast too.
    Thank you.

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