Framing Blades

The GUI is broken down into 4 parts which are highlighted in red below.

(1) View Ring - dragging this ring rotates the view of the GUI so you can line up the view with the real world beam you are trying to frame. It has no effect on the DMX output.

(2) Rotator ring - can be dragged to rotate the framing system on the fixture. The notch on this ring shows the limit of where it can be rotated, it cannot pass the darker semicircular ring.

(3) Blades - blades can be moved to control the position and angle of each blade.

(4) Blade Numbers - This is the best place to press and drag the blades, they are also a useful guide to know which encoder wheels to use to control each blade.

The GUI can be zoomed in and out with the soft buttons at the top, and also toggle through controls. The arrow controls the position of a blade or the angle of a blade. The corners control can be used to move two blades at a time and just move one corner of the quadrilateral. the arrows and corner controlls are shown in the image below.

Holding shift or toggling the FINE soft button will move the parts of the GUI more slowly for more accurate control.

The eight encoders on page 1 control virtual attributes. If a fixture has dual position control for each blade, the position encoders will control both channels to push the blade in and out together and if the rotate encoders are turned, one channel will be added to and the other channel will be subtracted, therefore rotating the blade.

Page 2 has two encoders for controlling which blade was the last one moved in the GUI. An encoder for rotating the framing blade rotation (same as the Rotator ring). There’s also encoders for adjusting Frost, Focus, Zoom, Pan, and Tilt. These encoders are added for convenience so you don’t need to keep switching between windows as they will likely be needed along with the blade control.

There’s a few extra soft buttons not mentioned yet, here is what they do:

RESET VIEW rotates the window view to default position

ZERO BLADES sets the position and rotation of each blade to zero and the rotator ring to zero. This is similar to locate but does not use the locate values (check the Troubleshooting section for why).

SHIFT+90 and SHIFT-90 buttons will copy the values from each blade and move them to the blade next to them in a circular pattern. The position and angle from blade 1 will be move to blade 2, the values from 2 go to 3 and so on.

MULTI BLADE is a soft button that changes the the behaviour of the blades to be able to control more than one blade at a time. It toggles between none, mirror, and all.

The mirror option will control blades 1 and 3 together, or 2 and 4 together. The blades will reflect each other.

The all blades option will control all blades at the same time.

It’s important to know, the multi blade options behave slightly differently for each of the ways the blades can be moved. Moving a blade in the GUI will make the other blades snap to a position. Moving a blade through an encoder will adjust the other blades encoder values by the same amount. The arrow controls will completely ignore the multi blade option.

The framing type is in the Options sub menu in the head editor. This tells the framing blade window what kind of framing system the fixture uses. Currently two are supported.

PATCH → EDIT HEAD → VIEW GENERAL → Options → Framing Type

Parameters that effect the dimensions and mechanical limitations of the framing blades can be entered in the Params sub menu in the head editor. All the parameters begin with “Framing Blades”.

PATCH → EDIT HEAD →VIEW GENERAL → Params → Framing Blades*

If the values in the parameters are set to 0, the framing shutters window will assume default values of 100% coverage and 45° angle and rotation.

You must save head before any of these changes affect the framing shutter window.

It might be that the attributes need to be reassigned if the order of the blades is incorrect. to do this go to:

PATCH → EDIT HEAD → VIEW CHANS

There are eight attributes for controlling the position and angle of the four blades: Frame1A, Frame1B, Frame2A, Frame2B, Frame3A, Frame3B, Frame4A, Frame4B, and one attribute to control the overall rotation of the framing shutter system, Cont 5. For the framing blade system to work correctly the attributes must be assigned correctly.

In MagicQ, Frame 1 is the frame top frame when inserted into the visualiser and pointed at the back wall. The rest of the blade numbers go in a clockwise order.

For dual position blade control: Frame1A is the left position of frame1 and Frame1B is the right position of frame1. The rest of the blades copy this pattern.

For position angle blade control: Frame1A is the position of the blade 1, Frame1B is the angle of the blade 1. The rest of the blades copy this pattern.

There is a soft button called AUTO FRAME ATTRIB. Selecting one of these blade orders will rearrange the attributes.