Advanced Lighting

[ILoveC4]

I've never really messed around with lighting scenes since the Advanced Lighting agent came about.

I've got a question regarding their use or implimentation.

 

When a scene is "Activated", I'm guessing that regardless of any of the state of the lights in that scene, the scene executes and all the lights are set to the level determined in the scene...correct?

What happens when a scene is "deactivated"? Do the lights return to the state they were in before the scene executed? Do they turn off? Do they simply stay where they are?

 

I'm going to do some testing and feel silly asking some of these questions, but I was hoping someone could provide a bit of an "Advanced Lighting Scenes 101" for the neophites like me that haven't done any playing with it.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Cyknight]

A scene when activated will go to it's settings. If untracked this will trigger just like the old scenes.

A scene is only considered active or deactive based on it's tracking settings, so:

-Don't track, it works as the old style, every time you 'press' it sets all lights to the values in the scene.

-Track and based on the exact settings, it will not activate if already activated

-Deactivate will do NOTHING until you set a 'toggle' for the scene.

 

Tracking is availably for ANY or ALL lights.

-Any means if any ONE light is at the value determined per light the scene is considered avtice.

-All means if EVERY light is at the value the scene is active.

 

From there you determine which lights you want tracked and at what setting.

-the settings are pretty obvious except perhaps at 'final level' - if you have the newer type lighting, you can set SEVERAL steps for those lights, ie within the scene you can have the light ramp to 100%, wait several seconds, then ramp down to 30%. In that scenario it's ONLY considered 'tracked' at the final 30%. This may seem unimportant, but can take some consideration if doing long steps/scenes and motion tracking etc.

 

Ignore scene Ramp/Fade is on be default on older lighting - because only the newer options support it. This means that when tracking a light, you ramp the whole sene up/down as if it's a single dimmer with press and hold.

 

When programming off of active/deactive lights TAKE CARE- that programming WILL trigger whenever the scene is considered active/inactive.

-Example if you track ANY light on a house off scene, and you have a movie scene in your theatre that turns the front pots off, the house off scene becomes active. If you've programmed on 'house off becomes active' to turn all A/V zones off, starting a movie in the Theatre...ends up shutting the theatre off.

This is why you see the option 'trigger' in programming - programming fromt here ONLY triggers when the scene itself is called upon to become active (from a touchscreen, bound keypad or programming such as from a schedule), ignoring when it becomes active due to tracking.

 

Yes you can now properly 'bind' lighting scenes to a button (up/toggle/down) as if it were a physical light - complete with LED tracking built in - you can set the wanted LED colours in the scene itself.

[ILoveC4]

First of all, thank you for the detailed reply! I'm still not clear on everything though...can I ask another question or two?

 

Can you elaborate on the Toggle for the scene, please?

 

Does toggle mean you can turn every light in the scene on and off as if it was one scene? There is an instance I can think of where I'd like to do this (if my "night time" scene active 15 minutes before sunrise I'd like to turn those lights off). Right now I have programming that if the lights are set to the exact level the scene sets them to, it ramps them to 0. Just wondering if this would be a cleaner way.

 

Also, why is the "Deactivate Scene" button grayed out in composer?

[Cyknight]

Does toggle mean you can turn every light in the scene on and off as if it was one scene?

 

Toggle will toggle between the main scene and it's set 'toggle scene'.

What that is you determine - you can create a 'default' scene right within the main scene which willl just be the same loads and all of them set to off (so yes that would create what you describe), or you can create your own and select it.

 

For example, you can have a "Movie scene" and a "Break scene" Where Movie leaves only some decorative lights on in a theatre while Break ramps up some lights for exit and program that on a color button.

 

why is the "Deactivate Scene" button grayed out in composer?

 

Deactivate will be greyed out if there is no toggle scene and/or tracking available - because the system would never know what to do when deactivating, nor would it know IF a scene is active or not. Without those two things, an Adnvanced lighting scene becomes pretty much just the 'old' lighting scene.