Remove unused fixtures from show

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  • I'm trying to clean up a showfile by removing all unused fixtures. Doing it manually (opening every sequence and looking at the content) takes ages.
    Is there a way to filter unused fixtures and delete them from the patch automatically?

  • SelFix Sequence *
    Selects all fixtures used in all sequences

    then
    Invert Fixture *

    Selects all unused fixtures in all sequences

    Then you know which IDs you can remove from the patch manually.

    If you only have fixtures with one instance and no grouping fixtures it works.

    But not with multi instance fixtures.
    You maybe have stored a Subfixture instance but not the top instance of that fixture and the result is wrong.

    Invert Fixture *.*

    can not solve the problem with subfixtures.

    Very complex.

    The 'cleanup' command is nice to remove unused data but clean up the patch is another story.

  • What doesn't seem very complicated is to create a plugin that enumerates trough all the sequences and creates a table of all used fixtures (including a fixture if at least one subfixture is used). Then the plugin can compare this list with the patch and remove all used fixtures.

    This will take some time on a big show, but much less then a manual cleanup.

  • What may seem not very complicated to one person may be totally out of the realm for others.

    I'm all for sharing ideas but the kinds of posts that say "it's easy, you should just use x" when the OP doesn't know how to do that doesn't help a lot.

    Perhaps someone could offer to write such a plugin for the OP?

  • What may seem not very complicated to one person may be totally out of the realm for others.

    I'm all for sharing ideas but the kinds of posts that say "it's easy, you should just use x" when the OP doesn't know how to do that doesn't help a lot.

    Perhaps someone could offer to write such a plugin for the OP?

    Sorry for that. It was late last night and I simply wanted to share the base idea to see if you like it or if someone would come up with a better solution before actually writing any code. Of course, I´ll post the (example) code here. Just give me some time.

  • Thanks for the answers!
    Indeed, a plug-in to do this automagically would be a godsend.
    Unfortunately my lua knowledge is beyond limited.
    I thought of making a macro that goes thru all the cues in a sequence using "IfOutput > @Full > Merge to Sequence 99 Cue 1" ...repeat for all sequences.
    Theoretically this will give me a single cue containing all used fixtures at 100% Dimmer. From there (with pen & paper) it should be easy enough to recognize and manually delete unused fixtures from the patch.
    ..now to actually get the Macro's syntax right...

  • Well, I created a fast setup for a plugin that identifies all patched fixtures that are not used in any sequence. It´s kind of rough still, but it creates a list of all fixture numbers in the commandline history. I have not figured out yet how I can delete these from the show but it´s a start...

    The plugin first creates a table of all patched fixtures and then removes the used fixtures from the list. The list holds only complete fixtures. If a sub-fixture of a multi-instance fixture is used in a sequence the plugin removes the whole fixture from the unused list.

    Note that I assume in this plugin that the main fixture and it´s subfixtures always have continuous subfixture indexes. This is true in every show I tested, and is probably true for all shows but it is not documented...

    Edited once, last by A_art (January 13, 2023 at 12:52 PM).

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