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Front Designer
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The Front Designer is a utility that allows you to automate the process of building sequences of multiple shots that fire in one of many preset patterns. The firing angles and times will be automatically calculated to achieve a wide variety of common sequences, then the cues or buckets on a given cue will automatically be generated in your script.

The Front Designer (previously called the Front Wizard) had many new features added to it in the version 4.0.5.1 release, so if your screen looks different than Figure 1 then you will need to upgrade your software to the latest version for the instructions given here to apply. The Front Designer is now a floating window that still allows you to work in other windows without having to close it, which is useful for applying the same front to many different groups of selected cues. A preview button has also been added which allows you to click a button and see a simulation of how the front will appear in your show without having to actually add it into your show and play the simulation. This feature alone will save a lot of time and hassle since you get instant feedback on how the settings in the Front Designer affect your front without having to change anything in your actual script.

The Front Designer is accessed either by clicking the Fronts button on the Script Editor or the Front Designer button on the timeline. This will then bring up the window seen in Figure 1. If there are any selected cues then the Positions Used list will be pre-loaded with the positions used by those cues.

Setting Positions
The first step in setting up your front is to select the positions that will be used using the lists seen in Figure 2. The Positions Available list shows all the positions defined in your show, while the Positions Used list shows which positions will be used to create the front. To add positions to the list on the right, you can either double click individual positions from the list on the left or use the mouse to highlight one or more positions on the left and then click the Add button to add them to available positions list.

The positions used should be organized in the list so that they appear organized in the order that the sequence will need to progress across the screen from left to right. So if you will be using any of the progressions in the Sequence settings, you will need to insure that the positions which appears at the leftmost position in the field is at the top of the list and the position at the farthest point to the right is at the bottom of the list. All other positions between these two should appear in the same visible order from left to right. Without the proper list order from left to right based on field position, the auto-generated sequences will not fire with the expected patterns. Individual items in the list can be moved up or down using the arrow keys under the list, or removed using the Remove button. The position order can also be reversed using the Reverse button, although this would cause the sequences to fire in the reverse order than their descriptions so you would not normally want to do this.

Note that each item in the position list also includes an effect description to the right. This indicates what effect will be fired from this position. A default value will be created based on what is currently selected in the Effect Browser, but you can also reassign effects to each position by first selecting them in the list and then drag-dropping effects over from either the Effect Browser or the Inventory Editor. You can also drag-select multiple positions in the list and drop effects on them to reassign more than one at a time.

The same position can be used more than once in the list, which can be useful when you want multiple different effects to be layered on the same position. For example, Figure 3 shows you can have both a comet and mine fire at the same time by using two entries for the same position, one having the comet assigned and the other having the mine assigned. In this particular example it is also necessary to have the “Apply sequence on each position” option checked to get the desired effect (more on this later).

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Figure 1: Front Designer screen
Figure 1: Front Designer screen



Figure 2: Position lists for defining what positions the front uses.
Figure 2: Position lists for defining what positions the front uses.



Figure 3: An example of using copies of the same position to layer multiple effects on each shot.
Figure 3: An example of using copies of the same position to layer multiple effects on each shot.


 


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