Chapter 71. Version 1.8.6.4

The colour picker has been upgraded. It is no longer limited to controlling just red, green, and blue fixure emitters; it can control all emitters at once.

Colours can be chosen from a CIE 1931 x,y chart, a colour wheel, and a special chart for choosing blackbody colour temperatures.

The following indirect colour channels can be controlled through faders or encoders: huminosity (relative to fixture gamut), CIE 1931 x and y, hue, saturation, sRGB red, green, and blue, colour temperature, and delta-UV. Changing these colour channels causes the colour picker to match these to emitter levels in the programmer in real-time.

The colour picker is no longer a dialog, but a core MagicQ window; it can be moved and saved into layouts like other windows. It can be controlled without being focused, although it can only take control of the encoder wheels when focused.

The VIEW PALETTES view has been removed for now; it was redundant with the colour palettes window.

The VIEW GELS view remains unchanged; it may be upgraded in future to perform more precise colour matching.

In order for values to be controlled accurately, fixture personalities need to have colour data (colourimetry) added to them. In the head editor, a new view has been added to edit this data. Under VIEW GENERAL, choose "Options" and then press the "VIEW EMITTERS" soft button. Emitter data can be edited for each individual colour attribute used in the personality. For each, a CIE 1931 x and y value should be defined, along with the relative luminosity of each emitter. This should ideally be in lumens, although if this is unavailable, any value that is proportional to this will suffice; illuminance (lux), luminous Intensity (candela), or relative brightness (%).

If a personality has no colourimetry available, then default values will be used, derived from the fixture type.

When importing a GDTF fixture file, if the GDTF file includes colourimetry, it will be imported.

We are making efforts to add this data to our personality library; if you have data for other fixtures available, please share it with us so that we can expand our library.

Two additional Group windows have been added; enter 2 Group and 3 Group to open the second and third Group windows respectively. It is possible for one Group Window to show Groups, one to show Heads and one to show Elements.

There are now three group types which affect how the group is recalled:

The group type can be set using soft button E. Groups that are set to Elements only show as "E" in the top right corner together with the number of elements stored in the group. Groups set to Sub Groups show a "S" in the top right corner together with the number of sub groups stored in the group.

Note soft button E was previously used for head selection - this has now been moved to soft button Y to keep consistency with other MagicQ windows. Selection order can also be changed by pressing and holding the ALL button.

MagicQ now stores sub group information in groups. If multiple groups are selected and then recorded into a new group, the new group will store the selected heads and also store the groups that are active.

The original groups active when a group was recorded can be recalled by using INCLUDE and selecting the group. If the group is always to be used for recalling sub groups then the Group type should be set to Sub Group.

There is now a new view in the Group window - View Elements. This view shows the current element selection and enables one or more elements to be selected or deselected.

Each element has a newly supported priority which is shown in the top right corner of the element. Elements can have the same or different priorities enabling either sequential element usage or simultaneous element usage.

When an element selection is active, FX are now only applied to those elements. If the option "Inc Element (synced)" is chosen then the element priorities will be used in playing back the FX. Both Group FX and Normal FX take the element selection and priority into account.

For example, if half of the elements have priority 1 and the others have priority 2 then the FX offset is split into two - all the elements with priority 1 will have the same FX offset, whilst all the elements with priority 2 have the same (opposite) FX offset.

When elements are selected from the keypad then they automatically get increasing priorities - e.g. if you enter . 6 THRU 10 then elements 6 to 10 will be selected with increasing priorities 1 to 5. If you enter . 10 THRU 6 then then elements 6 to 10 will be selected with decreasing priorities 5 to 1.

When individual elements are selected in the View Element window then they get increasing priorities. When the programmer is cleared or all elements are deselected the priorities are reset.

It is possible to set priorities directly to one of more elements using SET.

Element priorities are stored when Groups are recorded and are recalled when groups are selected - therefore it is possible to create groups with the same heads but different element priorities.

In the Head Editor it is now possible to specify a custom element layout for a Head, which is used when inserting multi element heads into Grids and for Group based Grids. This is particularly useful for heads with multiple elements arranged in clusters or circles - each of which has a completely different element ordering.

In View General, Multi, set the Order field to "Custom". This enables the "View Elements" view where it is possible to drag and drop elements into the pattern then best represents them on the grid. By default the elements are placed in a square - by pressing the "MOVE DRAG" soft button they can be easily dragged to the correct position.

Note that this grid organisation is designed for pixel mapping where heads fit onto a fixed grid - the "View Ele Data" has dat fields for X,Y,Z position to enable mroe accurate real life element positioning - in the future this will be used in MagicVis and in Plot View.

Added support for linking Cues in a Cue Stack to other Cues in the Cue Stack or to a Cue in the Cue Store. The top soft button now has SHIFT + LINK/UNLINK. SHIFT + UNLINK works as before unlinked the Cue at the cursor location. To link a Cue you put the cursor on the Cue(s) that you want replaced then press SHIFT LINK. Then press ENTER on the Cue that you want those Cues linked to.

Alternatively type the ID of the Cue in the Cue Store on the command line of the Cue you want to link to then press SHIFT LINK. For example to link to Q2550 type 2550 and press SHIFT LINK. That step will then be linked to Q2250. It is possible to cursor select multiple Cues in the Cue Stack and then link them all to the same Cue.

Added support for Intensity Masters to control LTP channels. This is enabled via the Setup option, View Settings, Playback, "Int Master applies to LTP chans".

Support for copying of Groups between Group windows.

Added support for Layouts 13 to 48 on MQ500 main display - press CTRL to select the four different pages of Layouts.

It is now possible to morph from a Duplicated element head that is entirely made up of duplicated elements (no channels that are not multi element) to multiple non duplicated heads - e.g. to split a Duplicated 10 channel LED fixture into 10 seperate RGB fixtures.

Pressing ALT + ADD SWAP or F12 will take a screenshot of the main screen (and external monitor, if present), and save it in a folder called "screenshots/" in the MagicQ home folder.