Scene Theory

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Scene Theory

Postby gdougherty » Thu Jun 28, 2012 11:11 pm

This is just an intro to general scene possibilities in SAC, not so much a step-by-step How-To.

A general description: A scene stores, for later recall, some set of settings taken at a particular point in time. While a scene recall within SAC can be very granular, internally a Scene stores everything about the state of SAC's input, return and output channels when it is created or updated. This allows you to create or update a scene, then later modify the actual settings and channels affected. This is particularly handy since you may discover after creating a scene that you're recalling either too much or too little information and you can adjust the recall without having to recreate the settings you originally wanted. As a side note, scenes require the creation of a session file since they are stored within a Scenes sub-folder in the directory where you create your session.

Some terminology: Scenes can be created, imported, updated and deleted. The properties of a scene can also be updated. Creation, importing, updating and deleting all impact the channel settings underlying a scene. Updating the properties only impacts the selection of settings that are recalled, no changes are made to the settings underlying a scene.

Channel selection: Channel selections stored within a scene are made on a per-mixer basis. Do not forget this, they do not cascade across mixers. They behave just like channel selections behave. Select a channel on the FOH mixer and flip to a monitor mixer. Note that same channel is not selected on the monitor mixer. The behavior here is consistent. While this may be a pain if you want just certain inputs selected across multiple mixers, it does afford a depth of flexibility that is otherwise unavailable.

There are several things you can do to help speed the process of channel selection. The first is to store a channel selection on one mixer as a group. Right-click on a mixer window header, hold down Shift and click on a group. Give it a name if you want. Now flip to another mixer, hold down Ctrl, Right-click on a mixer window header and click on a group. The Ctrl modifier will add the selection on the current mixer to the current selection across all mixers. While it would be nice to store the selection across multiple mixers as a group, you can't. You can however store the selection within a scene. Click the New button in the Scenes window and give it a name. Perhaps call it "Select" or prefix it with "Select" so you know what the scene is for. If any of the input, return or output settings are checked, hit the respective Clear All button, make sure the Mixer Chan Order is not selected and you can Clear All the mixers as well. The only thing you want checked is the Select Partial Chans option. Viola! Your complicated channel selection is now stored for easy recall.

Another handy tip is that you can adjust the partial channel selection while you have the Scene Properties window open. Click on a mixer view, add or remove channels, click back on the Scene Properties window and click the Update button at top left. You can double-check the channel drop down just to the right of the button to verify your selection was updated. Speaking of that drop-down box. Its only purpose seems to be displaying the channels you have selected. You can't select a channel from the list and make changes in the recall selections for just that channel.

Updating a scene: Make your adjustments within SAC, select a Scene in the list (careful not to double-click the scene) and click the Updt button at the top of the Scenes window. Make sure you select the proper scene first as the entire SAC state is overwritten onto the currently selected Scene. You can seriously hose yourself if you forget that but it's an easy lesson to learn the hard way. If you accidentally forget, hopefully you remember in time to hit Cancel on the confirmation dialog. Once you progress to the Scene Properties window the settings are stored. At that point there is no way to exclaim "Ooops", or something more severe, and cancel the update.

Updating a Scene's properties: Like updating a scene, make sure you select your desired scene first. Whatever is the currently highlighted scene is what gets modified. Right-click the scene list and you'll get the standard message about whether you want to update the Scene Properties or not. Say yes or no depending on what you want and you can change up the Scene property selections when the window opens. Unlike updating a scene, updating the properties is non-destructive. Check and un-check boxes all day long without any worries that you're modifying any of the underlying settings.

Scene Properties selections: From here, the rest is pretty simple really. Select the channels you want to recall with a scene and select as much or as little as you want to recall in the Scene Properties window. The interaction of the selections is also fairly simple. The big thing is to pay attention to how the selections interact. You have 3 types of channels; Inputs, Returns and Outputs. The selections are granular enough to capture all the major sections of each channel type. To the right of the channel data there's a big list of all the mixers. Select the ones you want to affect. What is recalled by a scene is the intersection of the partial channel selection, the channel data selections and the mixer selections. Do note that you can select all the partial channels you want on a mixer. However, if the mixer itself is not selected for recall in the Scene Properties window, nothing on that mixer is recalled.
http://softwareaudioconsole.wikidot.com The start of a wiki. It's slow going and there's a ton of info that should be in there yet.
Biggest item is the Command Reference on how to do most actions within SAC. It's 90% of what you need for UI proficiency.

g is for George
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby RBIngraham » Wed Jul 18, 2012 6:14 pm

More info about writing of scenes can be had on my web site. (so glad I kept these things on my own personal web site and didn't rely on the forum always being there!)

http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/SAC.html

3rd link from the top is a pdf file about how I use Scenes within SAC.
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby gdougherty » Tue Aug 14, 2012 8:51 pm

Handy thing I discovered about scenes after reading about the SD7's on tour with Springsteen.

http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/dual ... orld_tour/
Relevant Quote:
“We never know what Bruce will do next or what song he will pull out, so being able to load those snapshots quickly is a challenge,” adds Milner. “I use the keyboard and just type the first letter of the song and it will jump through all those snapshots starting with that letter. Then you can fire the snapshot with the space bar very quickly. This is usually not a problem on other tours but with over 150 snapshots it can take time to go through them all.”

SAC's scene list does this exact thing. Do wish it would allow you to type a few letters to get to a specific scene, but it's better than nothing.
http://softwareaudioconsole.wikidot.com The start of a wiki. It's slow going and there's a ton of info that should be in there yet.
Biggest item is the Command Reference on how to do most actions within SAC. It's 90% of what you need for UI proficiency.

g is for George
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby RBIngraham » Thu Aug 16, 2012 9:49 pm

gdougherty wrote:Handy thing I discovered about scenes after reading about the SD7's on tour with Springsteen.

http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/dual ... orld_tour/
Relevant Quote:
“We never know what Bruce will do next or what song he will pull out, so being able to load those snapshots quickly is a challenge,” adds Milner. “I use the keyboard and just type the first letter of the song and it will jump through all those snapshots starting with that letter. Then you can fire the snapshot with the space bar very quickly. This is usually not a problem on other tours but with over 150 snapshots it can take time to go through them all.”

SAC's scene list does this exact thing. Do wish it would allow you to type a few letters to get to a specific scene, but it's better than nothing.


Well I see Bob is making noise about finishing the Sequence and Control view for SAC again. Some of that kind of stuff would go a long way towards making SAC play a bit nicer with other products as show controller, without having to use SAW to make it all happen. But I doubt what you're talking about would be part of that and of course I've been waiting for those to be finished since 2009.
Richard B. Ingraham
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http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/
SAC details and goodies at: http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/SAC.html
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby shmick » Sat Dec 01, 2012 10:18 pm

I rarely use scenes, but tonight I was setting a bunch of them up, but then when it came to updating them, I managed to make them more of a chore than a time saver, so maybe someone here can point me in the right direction.

Here's the scenario:

10 scenes have been created, each scene has Input mutes and faders selected and all 25 mixers selected.

I now want to mute 3 inputs and keep them muted across all 10 scenes, but I wanted to be able to do this without recalling each of the 10 scenes, muting the channels and then updating each scene.

Can this be done? If so, I'd appreciate the info on how to efficiently do so.

Thanks.
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby gdougherty » Sun Dec 02, 2012 12:32 pm

Not that I've seen, unless the scene update works differently from how I understand it. It would be nice to have scenes allow just updating of the selected settings on the selected channels into a selected scene's collection of the entire mixer state.
http://softwareaudioconsole.wikidot.com The start of a wiki. It's slow going and there's a ton of info that should be in there yet.
Biggest item is the Command Reference on how to do most actions within SAC. It's 90% of what you need for UI proficiency.

g is for George
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby jlepore » Sun Dec 02, 2012 5:18 pm

There is no way to do mass updates to scenes. I generally wind up writing another scene with just the specific things I want to mass change, and then doing the recall original, recall patch, save original thing over and over. So much better paradigm than any other console of course :)
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby RBIngraham » Sun Dec 02, 2012 8:42 pm

Nope, not really an easy way I'm afraid. What I would do is write a scene that just mutes those three channels, nothing else. This will be a temp scene you use to update the others. So recall scene 1, run your temp scene, then update scene 1, say No to the question about updating the partial scene data, then recall scene 2, recall the update scene, etc, etc, etc....
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http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/
SAC details and goodies at: http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/SAC.html
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby davidss1 » Fri Feb 28, 2014 9:18 pm

hi guys,
i am trying to learn about scenes, partial scenes etc. and would like to ask a question;
after a partial scene is recalled , is there any way to NOT have the selected channels from the recall already highlighted (black) without cancelling them by a 'right' click'? i am a bit afraid that if an operator recalls a scene then proceeds to make any parameter changes before cancelling the blackened channels it could be a big problem.

cheers,,,dave
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Re: Scene Theory

Postby RBIngraham » Fri Feb 28, 2014 9:57 pm

There is a check box in the scene properties window, called select partial channels. If you have that selected, then the channels will be selected on recal... turn that off, and you will get the behavior you are looking for.
Richard B. Ingraham
RBI Computers and Audio
http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/
SAC details and goodies at: http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/SAC.html
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