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You don’t need 17,000 lumens (but it helps, ha ha) you can try it out with a smaller projector just to see the effect.

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Feel free to rip them from YouTube and play around with a projector you may have lying around. I’m pretty sure we didn’t use everything but we wanted lots of options. Searching through stock content is sometimes more work than just creating stuff yourself if you know what you want.īelow is what we made.

QLAB KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FULL

Creating everything ourselves also gave us full control over the look. Things rendered nice and fast since they were so simple. Taking away a color from white to change the look is way easier than creating content in a specific color and then trying to get white instead.Īfter seeing what worked and what we liked I created some simple stuff in After Effects.

Take away green and you’re left with magenta for example. White is also easy to color correct into other colors. This gave us the most contrast possible for the beams to cut through.

I was really interested in beams for this show so white graphics with a black background seemed to work best. Not that all colored content look bad, color bars through the air actually looked really cool, ha ha. Instead of individual beams you can end up with a frosted look. The really busy gobos may look good on the ground or wall as a texture but probably don’t look as good in the air through haze generally speaking. The gobos that give the most distinct beams are typically the least busy ones. The more negative space in the image, the easier it was to read. We started to find that the simpler the better since we’re trying to discern images in mid-air using haze. We loaded up some content into Qlab and tried full color, complex stuff along with black and white, really simple stuff. This made it easy to add into our Ableton show control rig. It’s also controllable from a variety of ways, MIDI notes, keyboard shortcuts, MIDI Show Control, iPad app, lots of options. We used Qlab since it is a very reliable media player and the new version adds a lot of on the fly controls for manipulating content. Stuff you just can’t do with a normal moving light. With the room hazed out we were able to create some pretty sweet animations. We took a 17,000 lumen projector, put it upstage center, and faced it towards the audience.

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Pro tip: Use a comma in the macro name to insert a line break.For Not So Silent Night this year we played around with using a projector as a light source. The way I created it was to create a new macro, hit record, and make all of the operations one-by-one manually, then save. I just wanted it to be a fun effect I could blast on at any time. And again, I didn’t want to create an extra snapshot for this. I tried doing it manually a couple of times, but I was never fast enough to boost the lead vocal, backing tracks, reverb level, reverb time, reverb density, and then return them all to their previous settings in the space of 5 seconds.

There were two long transitions in the show between songs that I needed to punch up while people were clapping. Well, this isn’t a problem, per say, as an opportunity. Problem #3 – How do I create an explosion of reverb? There are probably several other ways to solve this problem, but I found the macro to be an easy global fix. The channels I needed where not on a visible layer and I didn’t want to create an extra snapshot so I created a macro to mute and unmute those channels. There were several times in the show when I needed mute all vocal FX when the Ringmaster would switch from singing to talking in the middle of a song. Problem #2 – How do I mute hidden channels? The SD5 has a midi out on the back and you can easily setup a macro to send the correct control message to Qlab. And what if you make a mistake and you need to hit the panic button? You better make sure it’s close by. Unless your Qlab keyboard is right next to you, which mine wasn’t, it’s a pain in the ass to move over to it every time you need to trigger a cue. Problem #1 – How do I control Qlab from the SD5? There are other more important problems that macros can solve.The 500 times that you save 2 seconds by using a macro to save your session will reduce your stress level.Why would I create a macro to save my session when I can just as easily click File > Save Session? When I first heard about macros I ignored them because they seemed unnecessary. In it, I show you how I created macros to save the session, control Qlab, dim the lights and screen brightness, open the chat window, easily satisfy producer notes, create an explosion of reverb, and unmute hidden channels. In this video, I describe how I used macros to create efficient shortcuts in my mix on the Digico SD5 as head of sound for the Out of This Word tour for Ringling Bros. UPDATE: This article appears in The Ultimate Guide to Creative Mixing on the Digico SD5.

Qlab keyboard shortcuts