Help - Track Issues

[Tim_L]

I am having some track issues. I am putting a new sequence together and have laid the timing out for both the main sequence (track 1) and a talking "Santa" (track 2).

The problem that I am having is that anything that I put into track 2, does not show up on my animation window when playing back the track.

Track 2 "Santa" has the same channel settings as the main one. I have checked and verified that several times. If I put the fades etc. into the main track, it shows up fine.

Just for kicks, I made a 3rd track that has just the "house red" channel in it.
device type=lor, network=regular, unit=01, circuit=02 which is the same as in my main channel config and this does not show up on my animation either.

Am I missing something?

[Tim_L]

Ugh! I got it sorted out. The channel must be moved or deleted from the track 1 in order for it to work.

[bob]

Tim,

If I understand what you're describing, then the way you're trying to share channels between tracks is not the way to go. It will cause problems, such as the one that you found.

Specifically, when you say:

Track 2 "Santa" has the same channel settings as the main one. I have checked and verified that several times.

I am guessing that you mean you have some channel in Track 1 that you set up to be (for example) unit 3 circuit 7, and then in Track 2, you have some other channel, and you also went into that one's properties and set it to unit 3 circuit 7.

That will not work in the way that you are expecting. The problem is that you have two totally different channels that happen to be set up to control the same unit/circuit, so they're going to compete for control of it.

It would be as if you ran two different sequences at once in your show, and both of those sequences were trying to do things with unit 3 circuit 7. They're going to be competing for control of it, and as a result the lights won't behave as you hope.

Instead, what you want to do is share the same channel between the two tracks. Not just "two channels with the same unit/circuit"; but really the same channel.

The way you do that is by copying the channel from one track to the other. For example, click on the channel button, and select "Copy to Other Track" from the menu that pops up.

Or, if you want to share all (or most) of the channels in a track, select "Duplicate Track" from the "Edit" menu. A new track will be created, including all of the channels from the original track.

If you do either of those things, the same channel will be in both tracks, and things will work well.

If you instead just manually set the unit and circuit of two different channels, they're still going to be two different channels, and it won't work well.

Please let me know if this is not clear, or if you have any additional questions on it.

[Tim_L]

Makes perfect sense Bob. Thank you very much for the detailed explanation, that helps a lot.