(a collection of thoughts, some only loosely related to FocusTrack!)
A New Version
26th March 2013 - Rob
There’s a new version of FocusTrack - 2.338 - available for download now.
This is one of those ‘catchup’ release that rolls in lots of new little bits and pieces that people have been asking for. You can find the full details of what’s new here, but my favourites:
- New summary views in FocusTrack, giving a quick overview of which lights are used in which presets, and which presets are used in which scenes.
- It can import Eos cue timing data from the Eos log file, making it much easier to set up cue trigger time information for use by PowerTrack.
- FogTrack: it’s like PowerTrack, but for figuring out how much haze or smoke you put on stage during a performance. Useful for dealing with American Equity. Full details of how it works to follow shortly.
- It’ll import data from ETC’s rather elegant new Eos Ti console (which really just means we fixed the error checking to so it didn’t reject ‘Ti’ as a valid Eos console type!) I was lucky enough to get to play with this on a show a few weeks ago; more thoughts to follow.
- And there’s a small but useful speed bump to Eos imports. This will follow for grandMA2 imports soon.
Enjoy!
PowerTrack
4th March 2013 - Rob
PowerTrack, a feature that’s been in FocusTrack for at least a couple of years, seems to have caught everyone’s imagination just recently - suddenly there seem to be a lot of people curious as to what it does and how it might help them.
This is perhaps because the new generation of LED lighting fixtures suddenly seem usable in a theatre context - ie. their fade quality is good enough, their light quality and output is good enough and, in the case of profile spots, there’s now an option that looks like the traditional Source Four and is compatible with existing Source Four accessories (that would, of course, be the Source Four LED). But they are expensive - and so people are wondering whether that investment is worthwhile.
‘Worthwhile’ is, of course, a difficult thing to judge. A colour-changing profile front-of-house makes for a much more flexible lighting instrument than one you have to climb the ladder to change the gel in. And anything that uses less power should be good from a ‘green’ point of view. Sadly, of course, in the real world things often come down to money, so the question is: over the life of an LED light, will it save enough power compared to a traditional tungsten light to cover the (often quite dramatic) extra cost of the fixture itself.
To make an informed decision about that, you need data - how much power your lighting is actually using in the context of real shows. That data is often quite hard to come by - sometimes you can meter the dimmers, sometimes you can’t, sometimes you sort of can - getting a reading that includes other power used in the building. If you can’t just meter the lighting it’s quite hard to figure out what’s actually being used by lighting. Even if you can meter the lighting you really need some way of tying that back to specific moments in the show so you can see what your biggest energy users are.
PowerTrack gives you that kind of information. The graph above shows the power used during one performance of The Children’s Hour at the Comedy Theatre in London a few years ago. This is the show we use to demonstrate PowerTrack because we also have real, measured figures for the rear-of-house power of that show, which makes for an interesting comparison.
I’ll be expanding more on this, and on another project that has used PowerTrack to look at the power usage across an entire season of plays, soon.
For now if you’re interested, please get in touch to find out more - or come down to the ‘Green My Production’ event that Julie’s Bicycle are holding at White Light’s base in Wimbledon, south-west London, on March 27th. We’ll be there, hopefully see you then.
Social Event Of The Day
16th January 2013 - Rob
Last night, we were at the Green Lighting Social at London’s Bush Theatre - our first visit to the company in their new home, converted from the old Shepherds Bush library to give a quirkily interesting performance space.
Organised by Robin Barton from the Royal Opera House, this is more informal get together than trade show, and all the more fun for it: a bunch of people showing new products, and a bunch of people looking at them, and a lot of conversation all round. Great fun.
We were there talking about PowerTrack, one of those features in FocusTrack that most people probably don’t even realise is there. Since FocusTrack already knows about your rig (that channel 1 is a 1000W Fresnel) and about all of the cues in your show (that cue 1 has channel 1 on at 50%), we can calculate that cue 1 is therefore using about 500W of power. But we can also extend that: if you teach FocusTrack that cue 1 comes up at 7pm and stays on stage until 7.30pm, we can also calculate that the total consumption of that cue is 0.25kWh (since it’s 1/2kW for 1/2 an hour).
PowerTrack extends those calculations through your entire rig and entire show, so it can tell you the power consumption of a particular cue or of the entire show. As a bonus it can tell you the peak load during the show and which cue causes that load. If you’re planning a tour, that means you can specify the actual mains feed you need in each venue, rather than just making a guess based on some fraction of your total connected load.
Because it’s a calculation it will not be as ‘precise’ as metering your mains, of course. But metering the mains is hard to do in some venues, and the measurements will often include things that aren’t actually related to the performance lighting (ice cream fridges and emergency exist lighting being two common examples). The production we were showing was Children’s Hour at the Comedy Theatre a couple of years ago. Co-incidentally, while we were using FocusTrack on the show, Mark White was measuring the power use for the theatre’s owner, ATG. We have his results, and they do confirm that FocusTrack’s calculated results and real-world measured results are very similar.
It was rewarding to find PowerTrack causing quite a lot of interest at the Social, both from those who work to ‘green’ theatre (including Julie’s Bicycle and the Theatres Trust) and those actually working in theatre - including the visitors who’d come furthest to attend event, coming in from Indiana in the USA. I think they were here for other reasons rather than just to attend the Social, but it makes for a better story if we say they were just there to come to Shepherds Bush for the evening!
If you’re using FocusTrack, you already have PowerTrack - get to it from the Main Menu screen in RigTrack. To do power calculations you have to teach FocusTrack how long each cue is on stage for. To do this, go to the Cue List Main Menu, go to Power Totals then press Learn Cue Timing. Then every time you hit go on your lighting desk, press return on your computer. FocusTrack will record the time each cue was triggered. Once you’ve done that, go to PowerTrack inside RigTrack and press Calculate PowerTrack.
What can you do with the resulting information? That’s up to you, of course. One theatre is currently carrying out an in-depth study of their power usage as part of planning a new building; we’ve been sworn to secrecy about this while the work is in progress, but hopefully we can share more once the results are known.
We were slightly distinguished last night by being the only table not to feature some form of LED lighting! Surrounding us were products from ETC, Strand-Selecon-Philips-Vari-Lite (does one company really need so many names?), GDS, Intelligent LED Solutions, as well as an assortment of products being shown by White Light and Stage Electrics. But showing a definite trend, one other exhibit was a power monitoring system using that does actually measure the current drawn by the dimmers and records that over time into a database, with the ability to also listen to MIDI to recognise when cues are triggered. This re-inforced one of the main topics of conversation during the evening: that talking ‘green’ is all very well, but that the talk really needs to be backed up by hard data, which is what has often been missing up to now. Hopefully PowerTrack and the other related tools will give us the means to compile that data.
You can read more about the Social on Tim Atkinson’s Entertaining Sustainability website, here. There’s another Social planned for later in the year, which we’re already looking forward to.
There’s more information about PowerTrack here.
Happy New Year!
1st January 2013 - Rob
Welcome to 2013. Hope it’s a good one for you...
A Big (Wet) Mass Of Cable
21st November 2012 - Rob
Somewhere between me posting this and you reading this is a mass of cable that looks like this.
It’s a miracle that any of this internet thing ever actually works! And, in the case of these pictures from New York, it doesn’t any more.
Apologies For The Silence!
8th October 2012 - Rob
Apologies for the radio silence, but we’ve been a little busy working on a new show (Finding Neverland in Leicester), supporting a number of new FocusTrack users, and working on a lot of things behind the scenes on FocusTrack and SpotTrack. There’s a new version of FocusTrack out now that you should start using as soon as you can - it fixes a couple of quirky import issues with Eos, and improves the speed and reliability of console control via onPC on Parallels or Fusion with grandMA1. As always, you can find more details of the changes here.
It also - we weren’t going to talk about this until it was done, but what the hell - starts adding support for the grandMA2, which is why you’ll notice the big step up in version number. This work is not finished and is very much in ‘beta’ phase; because of that it won’t work by default on the currently released version. However, if you want to help beta test it just get in touch and we can tell you what you need to know...
A Life On The Road
5th September 2012 - Rob
It’s hard to capture the craziness, tedium, fun, glorious randomness of a life in showbiz or a life on the road in words.
It’s done incredibly well here - well worth a read whether you’re a particular fan of Coldplay or not.
If the BBC Olympic Music Has Dug Into Your Brain As Much As It Has Into Mine Over The Last Two Weeks...
10th August 2012 - Rob
... then you might find this interesting....
How Long?
9th August 2012 - Rob
A good question yesterday from a new FocusTrack user: how long should they allow to photograph all of the focuses in their show?
While there’s no way of giving a definitive answer to this, since there are lots of possible variables, what we’ve learn from experience is that if you’re using FocusTrack to control the console and possibly also the camera (see here for how to do this), you can average about five pictures per minute over a four hour session. That average was achieved recently on both Evita and Nice Work If You Can Get It in New York, which we think are currently tied for the fastest photo-shoot using FocusTrack; in both cases it included both the time spent moving scenery between scenes and a morning coffee break.
That means that if you have 1000 lamp-focuses in your show (ie. 100 lights in 10 focuses each; this is the ‘Total:’ number you see in the middle of FocusTrack’s Main Menu screen), you could expect to get them all photographed in about 200 minutes, or about three and a half hours.
Once you get into a run of pictures, you’re actual speed will be faster than that - maybe a picture every 7-8 seconds, or about 7 pictures a minute, possibly even faster for conventional lights in RIgTrack where you’re not having to wait for a light to move to a new position each time.
The things that bring the average speed down are:
- Getting in and turning everything on to start with. To help with this make sure everyone knows what you’ll need (eg, ethernet and power at the circle front or whatever position you’re using to shoot from), and make sure you have everything ready to go (ie. tripod, the right lens, the right cables, camera battery charged etc). It’s always worth making sure your laptop and FocusTrack can talk to the console properly the day before a photo session, just to be sure. Also, scope out the best location for taking pictures from in advance - part of the reason you can get things done so quickly with FocusTrack is that it lets you just get on rather than having to stop and think between each picture, and that should start the moment you walk in for a focus photo session.
- Setting up scenery then moving it around - things go much quicker with single-set shows! To help with this, try to arrange the order you take pictures to minimise the number of times you have to change the set-up on stage - ie. if the same set is used in act 1 then in act 2, sort the records in FocusTrack so that you’re taking all of the pictures relating to that set in one go. FocusTrack can help work out which focuses relate to which scenery if you add information about scenic setups to the FocusTrack Cue List; more about that here.
- How fast your moving lights are - ie. a VL6 gets to the next position much faster than an ETC Revolution. Remember to wait not just for the light to get into position but for all of the other settings - zoom, focus, gobo, frost - to finish adjusting themselves before taking the picture.
- If you’re having a person stand in each light for each photo - a very useful thing to do - how long it takes them to move to the next position. If you want to minimise the amount of time they spend moving between lights, try sorting by Pan/Tilt or by Tilt/Pan (under Special Sorting) before starting a photo session; this tries to arrange the lights in pan/tilt order, hopefully minimising the amount of movement between pictures.
- Unexpected things, like lights breaking. If a light doesn’t work, it’s usually better to skip it and move on than to hold everything up trying to fix it. If you’re using FocusTrack’s Photo Loop, it checks off lamp-focuses as you photograph them, making it easy to find things you skipped over later on.
- Coffee breaks; make sure everyone’s back promptly and that you’re ready to go when they are.
- If you’re using FocusTrack to trigger your camera: some cameras try to upload each picture to your computer as it is taken. This can slow things down as you have to wait for that process to complete before taking the next picture. I turn that option off if possible; time in the theatre for a focus photo shoot is precious, but there will always be time later to upload images.
- And, as with everything, practice makes perfect: allow a bit more time if you’re doing this for the first time.
All that done, you should be able to speed through a focus session much more efficiently when using FocusTrack. In fact, one of the nicest compliments we’ve ever received came at the end of the Evita focus plot session, where we ended up being given just three hours to focus plot quite a complex show and we got it done in time. The production carpenter said something like, “I’m impressed, that’s the most organised I’ve ever seen that; normally it just drags on forever!” Very proud!
There’s more about the whole process of importing a show then photographing focuses here.
Beware The Cloud
8th August 2012 - Rob
If you have accounts with Apple, Amazon or Google, if you use iCloud or another cloud service, if you have any kind of software that allows remote deletion of your electronic devices, indeed pretty much if you use any computer service that involves passwords, it would be well worth your while taking a few minutes to read this article, about Wired journalist Mat Honan and how his ‘digital life’ was destroyed in just a few minutes by hackers who just seemed to be out to cause mischief.
It will make you scared. It will make you paranoid. Hopefully it will make you take a few minutes to think about how things are set up in your digital life, and perhaps take steps to make it more secure. It might also make you consider the risks posed by decisions made by big companies that should have the time and talent to know better - in this case the biggest security flaw seemed to be that Apple will accept the last four digits of a credit card number as proof of identity, while Amazon displays those same last four digits to show which credit card you’re using (or, at least, they did: both seem to be changing the way they deal with this today).
In particular, it should serve as yet another reminder that backups are crucial. They are so crucial that they deserve to have a lot of care and thought put into them. I’ve walked so many people through the considerations of a good backup scheme that I’m about to write it down and share it with everyone. In the meantime, Mat’s article provides a timely reminder of not only why backups are crucial, but also that online services such as iCloud, which promise to look after our data for us, should not be our only backup, since ultimately we have no control over them.
You have been warned...
Another New SpotTrack Version Online Now
1st August 2012 - Rob
If you’re familiar with SpotTrack, our tool for making followspot cuesheets, you might recognise that there’s something wrong with the screengrab above.
Or maybe let’s not say ‘wrong’, rather just ‘different‘. Or even ‘new and improved!’
Until now, SpotTrack has always presented spots in the order 1-2-3-4.
When the new US tour of Book of Mormon became the third show to ask to change that, it became clear it was probably time to let people arrange their spots however they want. The new version of SpotTrack, v1.36, released today, lets you do just that.
Though English speakers usually read and number things left to right, theatre lighting - for reasons lost in the mysts of time (and I’m always happy to hear suggestions as to why!) has traditionally numbered lights in the other direction. Or, with followspots, there might be a different scheme altogether - maybe spots 1 and 2 in a centre booth, spots 3 and 4 on side stage positions.
Regardless of why, it makes sense to let the order you see things on screen and on paper match the physical layout of the spots in the building. This helps with what I always think of as ‘Leone’s Rule’, after the lovely Broadway lighting associate Vivien Leone, who is very clear that lighting paperwork should involve as little ‘mental re-mapping’ as possible (- the example she usually quotes is about not printing one page landscape, the next portrait to avoid having to constantly rotate sheets of paper. I think of it as minimising the differences between what you see and what the rig is; you’ll now find people increasingly number their lighting rigs left-to-right so that the order of channels on screen matches the order of channels in the rig, for example).
In the new version of SpotTrack, if you go to the ‘About SpotTrack’ screen, you’ll now find that you can customise what each spot is called (so you could reverse it to 4-3-2-1, or move it to 1-3-4-2, or even make it 6-7-8-9 if you wanted), and also re-arrange the keyboard shortcuts to suit the new spot layout.
Give it a go. It’s possible we’ve missed some quirk of operation in making this work - if so, do please let us know.
Tonight’s Little Show In London
27th July 2012 - Rob
Good job, team Olympic Lighting. Good job.
(And good job everyone else involved, too! It was great.)
New SpotTrack Version Online Now
11th July 2012 - Rob
There’s a new version of SpotTrack, our followspot cuesheet tool, available for download now from the SpotTrack website.
No major changes; just some bug fixes related to printing that the lovely people on the Sister Act UK tour noticed, and a new US-Legal four-spot master calling sheet that was added during Evita in New York.
As always, it’s worth moving to this version if you are currently using SpotTrack on a show.
And if you’re not, why not give it a go? It’ll run in demo mode to let you play. And if you buy it, you get to choose which of two fine lighting charities it supports.
We Love The Internet Because...
23rd June 2012 - Rob
It brings you to things like this, which sort of defy comprehension:
Levitating Slinky
New Mac Day!
12th June 2012 - Rob
Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) started today. As part of that, they announced a number of new Macs...
As you may or may not have gathered, I’m a Mac fan. I’ve been using their machines since about 1990, through good times, lean times, near bankruptcies, then the company’s recent triumphant revival. This isn’t because I’m a ‘fanboy’, but rather because their machines have always just seemed to work, letting me get on with what I need to do rather than worry about making the computer work properly first. Of course, they sometimes freak out and need care and nurturing, but it feels like I spent a lot less time doing this than others I know who use Windows. FocusTrack also benefits from the great tools that Apple provides as part of their core operating system, which is why things like FocusTrack’s console control and camera triggering are Mac-only.
WWDC is where developers go to learn about Apple’s new technologies in OS X and iOS. But the company also uses the start of the week to announce new hardware...
The one that’s got me drooling is the MacBook Pro with Retina display. On a practical level, I don’t really need a new Mac right now. But I want one of these...
The most obvious highlight is the screen. This follows on from the approach Apple have taken with the iPad 3: it is a massively high resolution display, but rather than doing what everyone else has done with high-res displays (cramming as much information in as possible, with the result that on a physically small screen everything just becomes really tiny), Apple use the extra dots to smooth out everything you see. If it’s like the iPad 3, it will become almost like looking at paper rather than a screen - ‘retina’ supposedly meaning that at normal viewing distance you can’t make out the individual dots on the screen. With the iPad, it was one of those things that you didn’t really appreciate it at first glance - it only became clear when you switched back to an older iPad and realised just how ‘bad’ its display suddenly seemed to be.
To have that on a laptop is hugely intriguing and I can’t wait to try it out. Which will be as soon as the new Mac makes it into my nearest Apple store, and I get out of this weeks’ tech!
There are other interesting things. As expected, the new Mac abandons ‘spinning’ hard drives in favour of solid-state storage (SSD). If you haven’t tried a machine equipped with one of these, you should. The effect is truly stunning, since it stands everything you think you know about computer speed (ie. that more GHz = faster working) on its head. Apple have had this kind of storage in the MacBook Air for a while, and its why that machine can boot up from cold in just a few seconds, wakes from sleep almost instantaneously, and runs applications in a fraction of the time it takes normal laptops to get them going.
The downside is that it’s much more expensive than traditional hard drives, particularly if you need a lot of storage space - which you might if your laptop is your only machine, you want all of your files with you and you don’t want to get into the management of what’s where on external storage devices. It sounds silly, but every single time I’ve ‘off-loaded’ files I haven’t touched for ages onto an external hard drive to free up space on my laptop, I’ve almost immediately needed the file when away from home. Having everything with you is comforting, but you need a lot of space particularly as things like photograph files just get bigger and bigger as we moved to cameras with higher and higher resolutions (and, of course, particularly if you’re taking lots of photographs to document show lighting...)
On-line storage - things like Dropbox - is touted as a solution for this, the files floating in the cloud until you need them. But that model also breaks down slightly when you’re dealing with really massive files (again, like lots and lots of focus photographs) and/or less-than-brilliant internet connections. Especially - and this often gets overlooked - because of the ADSL connections people often have at home. The “A” in ADSL stands for asymmetric - the connections are deliberately designed to upload much more slowly than they download, which can mean getting those big files into the cloud in the first place is a real pain. And that’s even before you get to working deep in a dark theatre where the internet connection is sporadic or even non-existant.
Apple have never been afraid of looking toward the future, and that’s clearly what they’re doing here, though. And the speed advantage is certainly compelling enough to let you just deal with this until internet connectivity gets fast enough to keep up.
They’re doing the same thing by not having any kind of CD/DVD optical drive in the machine - which is what allows it to be so thin. I have slightly mixed feelings about this. My traditional workflow in FocusTrack has been to do all the work, complete the FocusTrack with all of the information and photographs, then to burn that onto a CD (for a small show) or DVD (for a big show) to leave with the crew in the theatre. They’ll probably copy that information back onto their laptop so FocusTrack can run more quickly, but it means that there is a real, physical, undamagable version of FocusTrack sitting in the theatre somewhere that they can always get back to, however badly things go wrong (files deleted by accident, coffee spilt on laptop or whatever). (As a bonus, I have a line of matching DVDs on my shefl at home, the modern-day version of the old shelf full of show binders).
To make that, DVD I use the DVD burner in my MacBook Pro. I don’t use it very often, but I’m glad it’s right there when I do need it. I think I’d miss it in the new MacBook.
On the other hand, just last night someone sent me some show photos on DVD, which I had to sort through and extract to email to someone. I didn’t just want to copy the files to my laptop (it’s a bit full), but the process of viewing them from the DVD was frustratingly slow, and made me want to turn to the future. Except, of course, even if I’d bought my shiny new Mac without a built-in drive, I’d still have been sent the photos on DVD. Which means that if I bought one of these new MacBooks, I’d have to buy the external DVD drive Apple make for it; I guess the Apple-cynic might just say this is Apple’s way of charging you more for a laptop...
I think in the future the answer may be moving to USB memory stick to hold the ‘final’ versions of FocusTrack, with 16Gb sticks now available for less than £10 (for comparison, the Evita FocusTrack is about 3.5Gb, including the FocusTrack data and application, 1427 focus photos and 378 cue photos, these all at medium resolution . It would just be nice to have a way of absolutely locking the stick...
One last omission from the new hardware, which I overlooked at first: there is no physical ethernet connection, the laptop intended to connect wirelessly. For all the hype about wireless, and its convenience, can it really just be me that prefers a physical, wired connection where possible? It is always faster, and always more reliable. Plus there are some things in our world that just don’t work wirelessly - connection from client software to either the Eos or grandMA consoles, to name just two. There will be the inevitable adaptor, this time from Apple’s new Thunderbolt connector to Ethernet, but that’s just another thing to remember to put in the bag...
Apple are still offering speed-bumped versions of their existing MacBook Pros, which still have a real ethernet connection, a real DVD burner and a real hard drive - and are also considerably cheaper. Yet still it’s the new one I want, for all its technological advances but also just because it weighs less... I guess that combination of progress and refinement is why Apple is flying so high today. Plus, as others have pointed out, the new MacBook is clearly a pointer to the future, just as the original MacBook Air was, and all of its features will doubtless became available in more affordable machines as time goes by.
(One more thing: for those of you who spend your time fighting with the noise of fans in lighting equipment, take a look at the MacBook Pro video, particularly the section talking about how Apple have dealt with exactly this issue...)
A New Face At FocusTrack
1st June 2012 - Rob
On the same trip to New York, we finally formalised something that’s been kicking around for ages. You’ll see an ‘official’ announcement about this soon, but I’m pleased to announce that the lovely Kevin Barry will now be FocusTrack’s ‘minder’ in America, particularly in and around Broadway. Though I’m sure we’ll invent a better job title for him before the press release goes out...
This isn’t really new news. Kevin has been using FocusTrack since Mary Poppins in 2006, one of FocusTrack’s first outings. He seemed to quite like it, and has been a great advocate ever since. He’s been using it on the shows he’s worked on as head electrician since (including Billy Elliot - you can see him on a video about the show here - and now Evita). He’s already been supplying support to others who’ve used the show in New York - it’s been great having someone in the right time zone when people have questions or issues.
For those who don’t know him, Kevin is a great person - one of those fantastic ‘can do, nothing is a problem’ people - who looks after some of the biggest shows in New York. He’s also one of those people who likes solving problems. His current pre-occupation is getting the console to trigger FocusTrack so that it can follow along as he runs a show, so FocusTrack’s focus information is automatically showing him the right information for the cue he’s in. I think he’s very close to getting this working, so hopefully more soon...
(If you’ve looked at any of the trade press lately, you may also have seen Kevin gracing the ads for the ETCP programme. He’s very photogenic...)
Broadway Lighting Master Class
23rd May 2012 - Rob
I was very pleased to be given the chance to talk about FocusTrack at the Broadway Lighting Master Class in New York, organised by the lovely people at Live Design magazine. I’ve been going to the BLMC on-and-off for a long time now - since 1999, maybe? It’s always felt like a great couple of days because it concentrates on the ‘art’ of lighting, with the technology taking a definite back seat compared to the various trade shows. Hearing Jules Fisher speak is worth the price of admission alone - it always reminds me why I got into lighting in the first place, and of the power of what we do to affect a show and an audience. The other talks are also interesting, particularly Beverly Emmons and Clifton Taylors’ colour talk - all stuff we sort of know, but rarely get the chance to actually see in action outside of the high-pressure environment of a tech (sidenote: if you haven’t visited Beverly’s Lighting Archive site, you must). I think the talks about the featured show were also great, but since the show was Evita and I was part of the panels alongside lighting designer Neil Austin, I might be a little biased...
Some technology does feature: there is a manufacturer’s showcase during the lunch break, but even that is made more enjoyable by getting given lunch!
Because the venue this year was smaller than in previous years, talks ran simultaneously with the showcase to split people up into smaller groups over lunch. On the first day, Kevin Lee Allen spoke about using VectorWorks. On the second day I ran two sessions walking people through FocusTrack, what it can do and how it can be helpful on shows. I always forget how much easier FocusTrack is to understand when you see it rather than when you read about it. We’re now planning some walk-through videos for this website so that everyone can get a chance to see FocusTrack for themselves even before downloading it - stay tuned for these.
That said, we seem to have piqued people’s interest, judging by the number of downloads of FocusTrack (and also SpotTrack, which I didn’t actually speak about) in the days after the talk. Hopefully everyone is liking what they’re seeing...
(Thanks to Live Design magazine for the photo; see more from the BLMC here)
A New Version
19th May 2012 - Rob
There’s a new version of FocusTrack available for download now - 2.223. It’s available as either an empty download or with our little demo show - extracts from the British tour of Equus - pre-loaded to give you something to experiment with.
This update is mainly bug fixes, of the kind that always happen when I get to use FocusTrack on a show of my own (mainly Evita in New York in this case). Sometimes this is things that annoy me; I’m sure they annoy others too but maybe not enough to complain about. We’ve tidied a few of those up. The show also revealed a few things that have somehow got broken; hopefully those are now fixed too. As always, you can find a list of changes in the ‘About’ screen in FocusTrack, or on the website here.
Welcome!
15th May 2012 - Rob
I’ve come to realise that there are all kinds of bits of information about FocusTrack (and things relating to FocusTrack, like computers or cameras) that people hear from me in person, but which don’t fit into any of the categories on this website - they’re not really news, not really tips, not really information about something FocusTrack can do. Hence ‘Making Tracks’, a repository for all that kind of stuff. You may find some, all or none of it useful...