Interim is finishing up this weekend at school, so I thought I'd touch on a few of the highlights from the more technical lectures I attended.
Lightwright 4
I was incredibly lucky to spend an afternoon with John McKernon and hear him discuss some of the ins and outs of Lightwright. It was kind of nice to hear some of the reasons behind our favorite LW4 qwerks. So here is a small selection of some things I found interesting:
• If you expect to transfer files between MAC and PC, forget using the ° symbol in instrument names as it does not always transfer the degree symbol because of ASCII values.
• Lightwright was actually created before Excel ever came out. I think a lot of people don't know this, and might explain any frustration people have between the two programs.
• When is the next Lightwright coming out?
It has been a while since LW4 came out, but there are a variety of factors that affect LW 5's release. Primarily the coding language for the program has changed, and John has started rewriting the 180,000 lines of code from the ground up again. He's about ½ way through it.
• If you have spare units. Make sure to set their channel numbers all to 0. This way the lights will not be linked together. Example: If you listed them all as channels S1-S15 or all as channel 1000. If you delete any one of those lights, you potentially can delete all of them.
• If you record focus information like a shutter cut or bream focus, and you want to reset the field easily, just click the word associated with it…such as beam, SL, Top, Bot etc…
• For PC users, hold Ctrl-Shift to get the copy paintbrush tool.
SFX 6
This is basically a new program from Stage Research. Forget anything you ever learned in SFX 5.6. The entire program has been rewritten from the base up. It has gone through a huge facelift which has made it a much more flexible and desirable program. I am not going to go into that many of the new features in the program. (If you're interested check out this LD article about it Click ) All I am saying is, if you are going to upgrade to SFX 6, be ready for something brand spanking new.