Youtube daily Follow Sep 22 2017

When you're working with sequences, sometimes you want to create what are called 'auto-follow cues.'

An auto-follow cue is simply a case where, when you hit [GO] once,

multiple looks get played back one after the other.

Auto-follows in Cobalt can be done with either Wait or Follow times.

In this tutorial, I'm going to describe the difference between Wait and Follow times,

and also tell you about the third option, which is called an Alert time.

Wait times, which are the first option in the Wait/Follow/Alert column, are used to

execute a step based on the completion of the previous step.

So, in my Sequence, I have two looks.

I have this white wash look and I have a blue wash look.

And what I want to have happen is, right after the white look completes,

the blue look gets executed.

If I want that to happen immediately after completion, I can use a wait time

on the step that contains the blue look.

The way I can do that is either in the Sequence List Editor,

or I can get to it right from the main playback

by double clicking on the WFA cell of that step.

This gives me the Time Editor for Preset 3002.

The Wait and Follow times are found right at the top of this dialogue.

If I want 3002 to execute directly following the completion of 3001,

I need to put a very small time in the Wait column.

In this case, 100th of a second.

That's as small a time as I can enter.

And what it will do is it will cause, when I [GO BACK] and then [GO] back into 3001,

right as it completes, the blue look will execute

100th of a second after the completion.

So I like to think of Wait times as, "I'm waiting for the previous step to complete."

So that's where I put the wait time, is on the blue look, because the blue look is waiting

for the white look to complete,

and then it will be executed

after whatever countdown time you have entered into the Wait cell.

We'll get rid of the Wait, and we'll do this math slightly differently by using a follow time.

Now, a Follow time counts from the [GO] of the previous step.

So a follow time can be set to actually be longer or shorter than the cross-fade of that step.

If you want the blue look to stomp on the white look as it's fading in,

so it doesn't actually reach its completion state,

you make the Follow time shorter than the cross-fade time.

If you want there to be a gap,

if you want the white look to complete and stay on stage for some time

and then execute the blue look,

you make the follow time longer than the cross-fade.

So let's look at that.

We'll double click on that cell, and instead of W here, I'm gonna hit [MODIFY] to change that to an F.

F is for follow.

I'll take the time here as two seconds because that's shorter than the cross-fade time,

and that will show us how we can stomp on the completion of the white look.

We're gonna go back to the previous state,

and then we'll cross-fade back into the white wash look,

and two seconds in, the blue look will be executed.

So here we are, and two seconds in, the lights take off into the blue position.

If I go back and change that follow time to longer than the cross-fade, say, five seconds,

again, I'll go back one step before the white wash happens.

I'm going to hit [GO],

and you can start seeing the Follow time counting down immediately from pressing Go,

and now the blue look is executed.

So the way I think about Follow times is, "Follow me in five seconds from when I hit Go,"

as opposed to the Wait, which is, "I Wait for you to complete and then I go."

The last time I'm gonna talk about,

we'll get rid of this Follow,

is called an Alert time.

An Alert time, and I'll make this slightly longer so we can see it actually execute,

is a guide for you, as an operator,

in situations where you don't necessarily have a Stage Manager telling you what to do next.

I find it really useful for things like dance performances

or any production where you don't have anybody giving you that prompt to go to the next look.

An Alert time does not execute anything, but what it does do, is it counts down.

So if you look in the Playback tab, you can see that it's green, which means we're in a safe time.

At 5 seconds of Alert, it turns yellow as a standby,

and when alert turns 0, it turns red, and that's when I'm supposed to hit the [GO] button for the next cue.

I manually entered this Alert time on this step as a reminder to myself,

but I could also come into the {Times} soft keys,

and here I can see the {Learn Alert} button.

So if I do this a different way and [GO BACK] into that first look and hit {Learn Alert},

now the system's going to count for me

and establish those Alert times based on how much time it takes between [GO] presses.

So the longer I talk to you now, the longer that Alert time becomes

and it will stamp a much higher value, almost 10 seconds in this case, on the next step.

When I'm done, I hit {Learn Alert} again, it turns the learn mode off.

And when I go back to the start, once again, you'll see that alert time.

Now, we jumped right into yellow because I'm within five seconds.

Oh, red, I'm supposed to [GO].

It crossfades. It's still counting.

We're in green, so I can relax.

Yellow, standby.

And when it counts down to 0, red, I'm supposed to hit the [GO] button on the next look.

If 5 seconds turns out to be too long of a standby time for you,

you can go into the Settings dialogue [SETUP]

under {Crossfade}, and right at the bottom of that dialogue, you'll find what that

Alert alarm time is when it turns yellow,

and you can make a change here to have a bigger or a smaller standby time.

You can also tell the console whether or not it should beep

at you at the time that you're supposed to hit the [GO] button.

So that's what an Alert time is, and what Wait and Follow times are, for creating auto-follow cues.