So,
is FocusTrack a bit like WYSIWYG?
No. WYSIWYG and other lighting visualisation tools
will show you what a light is meant to be doing in an
ideal world. FocusTrack is intended to let you record
what a light is actually doing in a show - where
it’s actually pointing, why it’s pointing
there, exactly how sharp or soft the gobo is, the
gobo alignment, the shutter cuts.
The two tools can complement each other, though. If
you’re pre-programming a show you could take
screen grabs showing how the lights were focussed in
WYSIWYG and store them in FocusTrack along with
descriptions of what those focuses were used for;
when you got to the real rig you could check your
focuses against the WYSIWYG ‘ideals’
stored in FocusTrack, adjusting as required to
compensate for ‘real world’ factors
(lights rigged off-level etc).