Saved views and looks
Two things you save once and recall in one click while you show a scene. A view is where you look from. A look is what the rig is doing.
Both are made for the same moment: walking somebody through a scene, a client, a director or a colleague, without fiddling with the camera or setting fixtures by hand in front of them.
Saved views
Views, beside the zoom column at the bottom right of the viewport, holds named cameras: Front of house, SR wing, Truss detail. Click one to go there, the pencil to rename it, the cross to delete it. + Save this view saves where you are looking from now.
The list is shared; the camera is not. Saving a view gives it to everybody who opens the scene, and deleting one takes it from them. But recalling a view moves only your own camera; nobody is dragged anywhere by someone else's click.
A view remembers its mode. Recalling a plan view switches to Plan and its elevation; recalling a live view switches back to Live.
It keeps the pan as well as the angle, so it returns to the exact framing.
Saving, renaming and deleting are ordinary edits and undo like any other. Recalling is not undoable: Ctrl+Z never moves the camera.
Clients get only the views you offer them. The share icon beside a view offers it to guests watching a shared link; it stays lit while it is on. Every other view, and its name, stays with the team. New views start unoffered. When you recall a view while presenting, guests following you are taken along like any other camera move.
Getting around the viewport
The same corner holds the rest of the camera controls:
- Gizmo
- One handle per direction: Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right. Click jumps, drag turns: clicking snaps the view to that direction, dragging spins the camera about that axis. In Plan there is nothing to spin, so the handles only jump. Hover a handle and the readout underneath names it in words; trust the word, not the letter on the handle, which is the renderer's axis. Double-click the gizmo's face to reset the view
- Zoom
- The column with the distance at its foot. The wheel zooms too, towards the cursor
- Frame
- Frames the selection; F does the same, Shift+F frames the whole rig
- Fullscreen
- Fills the screen with the viewport, gizmo, zoom and right-click menu included, so the plan stays workable. Escape, F11 or the button leave it again
How far you can zoom out depends on the scene: the range is taken from the whole scene's extents, so an arena-sized import can be looked at in full. It never shrinks while a scene is open, even when you hide a layer.
Looks
The Looks panel, in the right sidebar above the Library, holds up to ten named states of the rig. Set the fixtures up in Control, press Save look, and double-click the new entry to name it. One click recalls it.
A look is not a cue. No fade, no follow, no chase, no timing, no tracking between looks. It is recalled or it is not. That is deliberate, and a cue list is not planned as an extension of it. Looks exist so a scene can be reviewed, demonstrated and sold without a console attached.
Change something after recalling a look and it reads · modified, with three actions:
- Update
- Overwrite the look with the rig as it stands
- Save as new
- Keep both: save the rig as it stands under a new name
- Revert
- Put the rig back to the saved look and drop the changes
Nothing is written to a look until you choose one of these, so trying something and going back always works.
What a look keeps
Repatching does not break a look. A look records what each fixture is doing, by fixture rather than by DMX channel, so you can readdress the whole rig and every look still recalls.
A fixture deleted since is passed over; a fixture rigged since keeps what it has. Recall restores a state, it never invents one.
The lamp and its rotation in the can are not part of a look. You change those on a ladder, not at a desk, so recalling a look does not undo a lamp swap.
Looks and a live desk
Looks and a live desk never mix. With a console live through the Bridge, saving and recalling are unavailable and the panel says why: what the desk is doing is what you see. Disconnect the console to work with looks. Renaming and deleting still work, because they change nothing the desk is driving. Deleting asks first, and undo puts it back.
Looks in a shared scene
Guests watching a shared link can pick your looks from their lighting menu and preview them on their own screen; see What your client sees.
A scene holding looks cannot be imported into: MVR import needs an empty scene, and a look is the one thing no file can put back.
Showing and hiding panels
View › Active Panels switches whole panels in and out of the sidebars; a tick means the panel is there.
Hiding is not collapsing. A collapsed panel is folded to its header at the foot of the sidebar, one click from coming back. A hidden panel is gone from the sidebar, and this menu is the only way back.
Hiding a panel keeps whether it was expanded: switch it back on and it returns as you left it.
A panel the scene has nothing for, such as Groups in a scene without groups, is greyed out rather than unticked.