On this last tour, I inherited someone else’s show file. I’m more than enough of a control freak to be cautious about that. So I dug into the show file for two straight days before I flew in. But right off the bat, there was a problem. On any version of Nomad, the show file made Eos freak out.
What do I mean by that? I rolled the first cue, and it never completed. It just stuttered between 4.9 and 5 seconds. Compounding this problem was the fact the first cue trigger a macro…which repeated on an endless loop. This wasn’t workable. In a bit of a state of anxiety- I experimented to see if the show file would open on my IonXE. It did, and I was able to get my work done. Jumping ahead- it also worked on every console at the venue, so I kind of forgot about it. Until Monday.
Monday was a dark day and the day I needed to do a ton of homework to be ready to leave the show Wednesday morning. I needed to create a bunch of content for the Head Elec to update presets and focus palettes with. But again- the show file was locking up the system. So I called into tech support. The eventual solution to the problem isn’t as interesting to me as the way we found out what was wrong. If you’re having trouble with your show file- read on.
We opened another show file and tested if it worked. It did. We imported patch from the tour show file and wrote some cues to test with- that also worked. So to identify where the problem was, we Mergeded one category of data at a time. Eventually, I found problems in two areas of the show file: Macros and Setup.
I’ve done hundreds of shows with my macros, but the show file was full of other programmers macros. If I just imported mine, everything was fine. And truth be told- I prefer my own Setup configuration (no surprise), so I imported the one I have assigned to my template show file. Everything was working again.
I may do an obsessive deep dive and spend hours importing one macro at a time to see where the problem was. Harder to break out individual elements in Setup though. Regardless- I’m super grateful to the on call ETC person who helped me, because I now know this great process to engage with in troubled files. And so do you!
What other pieces of troubleshooting gold do you use? Share them 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, an ETC Eos trainer and an enthusiastic trainer of many other platforms and subjects. He offers Zoom console training as well as in person. If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.