Newbie help for the At Copy function

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  • Hi there. I've very new to MA programming. Figured I'd learn some new skills during quarantine.

    I've been going through the courses for MA3 programming and I got to the At Copy section. I made a show file to practice along with the tutorials in the onPC software. I have a group of lights (12 Martin Aura XBs) and no matter what I do to follow the At Copy function to try to match one set of attributes to another it always does the same thing. Rather than copy the attributes to the entire range of fixtures it will copy to the first fixture in the list, skip two, copy to the next one, skip two, etc...

    I thought I was doing everything the same way the tutorial said. I have the instruments patched to FID 601 thru 612, so I grab 601 thru 606, adjust pan, tilt, color and intensity. Then I type [607] [thru] [612] [Please] followed by [at] [fixture] [601] [through] [606] [please]. I get the popup window, hit overwrite, and then it goes wrong. The same thing happens if I choose different groups or numbers of fixtures as well.

    I'm using onPC 1.1.3.2. I did a little rudimentary patching after watching a separate video just to get some fixtures in to manipulate and I guess maybe this is where the problem is. When I load up the demo show file everything works as described in the video so it's pretty clear it's just something I did. Any pointers would be appreciated, thanks.

  • You're not doing it wrong it feels like a bug to me.

    The issue is that if the fixture has Sub Fixtures it looks like it's copying incorrectly.

    If I patch 10 Aura XB in 25 Mode and do:

    1 Thru 5 At 0 Thru 100 so good so far 0, 25, 50, 75, 100 as I would expect *

    6 Thru 10 At Fixture 1 thru 5 I get Fixture 6 at 0 and 9 at 25.

    You get the same issue if you patch some Alienpix-RS, except you need many more copied fixtures to see the issue.

    If you patch some regular dimmers or Aura XB 14ch (that don't have SubFixtures) you don't get the issue.

    I just tested on 1.0.0.3 and I get the same issue

    * Sometimes I get a dimmer align that looks like it's taking into consideration the sub fixtures, but I can't figure out why

  • I won't lie, I have no clue what that means. I'm mostly an ETC guy and I just started with MA two days ago and am about 2/3 of the way through the training course. If I find out I will definitely let you know.

  • When you select some auras they get placed along the X axis of the selection grid.

    Now, because the fixtures have Sub or instanced fixtures you can also press the down button to select the sub sinstances, and you get a selection grid like this.

    Notice the 1.1 and 1.2 are on the same position on the X axis but different Y positions. Also if you press Next it moves along the it selects fixtures along the X axis and when you press NextY (in the MAtricks that selects along the Y-Axis) it selects along the Y Axis. All of this comes in really handy when you are building phasers or making aligned changes.

    However. the issue is I'm not sure you can copy from with instances without doing it one at a time, and that's probably not what you are looking for anyway, specifically since then instances don't have Position data.

    To me, it seems like a bug, but if give it a try with one fixture at a time to see if it does what you expect.

  • Hey there. Yeah, cloning seems to have worked. I will say that Shift+F1 didn't actually do anything with cloning for some reason. Again, not sure if I did something wrong but the onPC software didn't seem to notice me hitting shift and it just though I was pressing F1 which opened the At menu, and the help documentation didn't mention anything about pc keystrokes. But I typed in the sequence, then remembered that on MA I apparently have to type or signify "fixture" for everything, and, yeah, it worked right away. And, actually, the syntax for cloning is almost the same as the recall from function on ETC boards which I'm more familiar with so this might just be how I go about it in the future. Thanks for the tip.

    And, I'm clearly not at the level yet to be using the selection grid and instances for anything yet. I'm sure once I've gotten through the training in full and start making phasers this will be good to know though, so thanks.

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