connectors, for connecting to touchscreens, mice, keyboards or USB storage. Power in is through an IEC connector which will accept either standard or locking IEC plugs - the increasingly common Powercon connectors were too deep to fit; there is a real mains on/off rocker switch next to the IEC connector. The console should autoswitch across 120-230V and 50-60Hz; it does not include the UPS of the big MA consoles, and you need to be a bit careful about this since like all MA consoles, if the power goes off (and, actually, if you just switch it off) you ll lose anything you ve done back to the last time you saved. You should turn on autosave, and even then make sure you save before powering off. 3 Time from power-off to usable is about 80 seconds - it s a shame no-one can now match the mere moments it used to take consoles from a couple of generations ago to get going. There is a fan, which seems to run only when needed. Storage is all solid state, so no hard drive noise or shock-damage risk. It s a neat package, little in the best senses of the word and at 427 x 546 x 161mm and 7kg in the case of the dot2 core, one that s easy to pick up and carry around. SOFTWARE What s on the outside is only half the story, of course. It s the interface to what s on the inside, but those software innards are ultimately what define the power of the machine. That said, one can imagine that dot2 might appeal to three quite distinct user groups: those just starting out in lighting, who may previously have used simpler consoles or perhaps never used a console at all; those who just need to get some lights up and running; and those who have used bigger consoles, particularly grandmas, who find themselves working on a smaller show where, for reasons of space, ease of handling or maybe tight rental budget, the dot2 will 3 4 5 6 4 New Showfile Patch Graphical Fixtures Fixture Sheet 5 6 work just fine. In setting out to make a console that will work for all of those groups, MA have set themselves quite an interesting challenge. One of their tactics becomes clear the moment you first turn the console on: an attempt to provide guidance at all times. An empty dot2 starts with a screen of text explaining that your showfile is empty and that you ll need to add some lights, then has an explanation of how to do that, with all of this text available in nine languages so far (see Fig. 3). If you have an external screen connected, its default is to automatically show the help page for whatever you re doing, and any time there s an option there will be some explanatory text nearby. There s a sense of always being walked through a task, but on the other hand, once you know what you re doing, it s generally easy to just ignore all the text. Patching is familiar from MA2, but simplified: the distinction between channels and fixtures has gone; everything is a fixture here (see Fig. 4). There s the comprehensive Carallon fixture library, but no ability to edit fixtures in the console: for that, including customising gobo or colour loads, you ll need MA s Fixture Builder application, available for Mac or PC. The patch starts revealing some limitations of the hardware: from our touchscreen phone experience, the anticipation now is that you push the screen to scroll, but this doesn t always seem to work reliably; I think the screens themselves are single-touch rather than multi-touch. A mouse might be a work-around, except that scroll wheels don t seem to work, and the mouse is only active on an external monitor. The preferred approach is the familiar MA one: using the rotary encoders as scroll wheels, clicking to select. You are 16 0 SEPTEMBER 2016 LSIONLINE.CO.UK
still often required to interact with the touchscreens, though; in this it feels like some of the touch targets are a bit small and hard to hit cleanly. Fixtures patched, you can get on and start manipulating your lights. To let you see what you re doing, dot2 has two default displays, one showing a channel box for each light, with intensity as a value and a bar graph, plus, graphically, the colour and gobo of the light if a moving light (this seems to arrange dimmer-only lights first then more complex fixtures) (see Fig. 5), one that shows all of the values for all of the lights attributes, like MA2 s fixture sheet (see Fig. 6) and then five editable, graphical displays, where you can lay out your lights however you want. Sadly missing is a spreadsheet-type view for following lights through a show. For all but the very smallest shows you ll want an external monitor for these views to live on (you can arrange what you see on this monitor, though you re deliberately limited to a choice of pre-defined layouts rather than the free abandon of MA2), leaving the two internal touchscreens free for manipulating lights or selecting and storing palettes. 7 8a Missing from dot2 is any kind of auto-create for palettes (MA s comment is that it often just makes lots and lots of palettes no-one ever uses). However, the environment for controlling lights is well thought out: select a light by number or by touching it, pick the parameter type you want to edit (dimmer/position/ colour etc) from a tab on the right touchscreen (see Fig. 7). This brings the relevant controls onto that touchscreen and on to the encoders (see Figs. 8a/8b), and switches the left touchscreen to show the appropriate palette type; the console is trying to show you something relevant at any moment. Slightly frustrating is having to reselect a parameter type each time you select a new light. MA2 s align function for fanning lights is also present and correct, as is a set of MAtricks for selecting sub-groups of lights. As with MA2, lights are manipulated through a programmer, which captures parameters that you modify. MA2 users will find there s one less programmer state than on the big console: in practical terms, you only need to press clear twice rather than three times to get everything back to where it originally was. You can store into palettes (which are divided into parameter types, and strictly only accept data of that type - so colour palettes can only store colour; an all 9 7 8 9 8b Parameter Tabs Touch Screen Controls Gobos, Colour Colour Names palette type allows combinations of attributes) or cues as is now traditional. Dot2 does one incredibly nice thing when you store a colour palette: it gives it a name conjured somehow from the colour mix values - red for red, but also things like light lavender or light sea green (see Fig. 9). Store, by default, stores anything active in the programmer, shown in red; when you press store, the fixture display contracts nicely to make it clear what will be stored. Storing cues, you re always asked whether to 16 2 SEPTEMBER 2016 LSIONLINE.CO.UK
merge, remove or over-write, tracking or cue only (see Fig. 10). The way store works seems to reduce the MA2 s high risk of failing to actually store the look on stage correctly and perhaps not noticing until much later, a fate that has befallen many a new MA2 programmer. Safer still is to press MA (effectively shift) then store, which puts StoreLook on the command line. This takes all the parameters of everything active on stage and puts it into the cue, ensuring that in the heat of the moment the actual state you re looking at does get saved. So sensible is this function that it s already migrated back to the bigger console. Making store easier and safer is important for dot2 s target audience. But it s as you start storing things that, if you re familiar with bigger consoles, you realise what s deliberately been omitted from dot2 in the cause of making it simpler to learn. You can almost always find a way to do what you need to do - but you might find yourself frustrated that there aren t more efficient ways of achieving things, which means that you re really just having confirmed that the big consoles have all those functions because there has been a need for all of them. Taking things out for the sake of simplicity sometimes, ironically, makes it harder to do what you need to do. The dilemma here, of course, is that if you don t know, you won t miss. And to explain what s missing requires a descent into a certain level of console nerdery that MA would argue is exactly the kind of user dot2 is deliberately not aimed at. But it s worth looking at a few examples so that, if you re used to bigger consoles, you know what might not be there, and if you re not used to them, you might see ways bigger consoles let you work more efficiently. Or you could just skip over the next five paragraphs and merrily store things without worrying about what s going on beneath the surface; MA think you ll generally get the right result. Storing colour is one case. Set a colour on one VL3500, store it into a colour palette, and that colour is only then available for that one light (in MA2-speak, palettes are not global). To have that colour available for all your VL3500s you have to set it on all the lights or copy it from one to the others before storing, or edit the palette after storing. But copying live copies everything - there is no filtering available to say copy just colour unless you figure out a quirky, non-obvious command (fixture 2 thru 5 @ fixture 1 IF colour). 10 10 11 12 12 Store Options Store-Unblock Protected Cues 11 The new store-all command presents another: watching the command line history as you invoke it reveals that as well as storing, it also then unblocks the entire cuelist. You can never end up with stray - or, in fact, any - blocked channels, i.e. no redundant level change instructions, where a parameter is being told to go to a value it s already at (see Fig. 11). That means you can t deliberately leave channels blocked, perhaps to guarantee the blackout at the end of an act. MA has LSIONLINE.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2016 163
engineered a couple of things to help with this. There is the ability to protect cues, which also puts a nice, clear line above the cue in the cuelist (see Fig. 12). But that blocks everything, not just intensities, which may not be desirable. There s also a function called tracking-shield, a clever attempt to keep the advantages of tracking, such as the ability to quickly make changes through long runs of cues, while removing some of the risks, particularly for people who don t really understand or want to think about what tracking actually means. In a tracking console, you could have a light pointing to down centre in blue on in cue 5. Later, in cue 10, it could be pointing to up centre in blue. That both are in blue is coincidence, but because that blue is tracking (i.e. it doesn t change colour between the two sets of cues, particularly on dot2 where you can t manually block the blue, setting an extra be blue instruction) the danger is that if you change cue 5 to red you ll also accidentally change cue 10 to red, because there s nothing after cue 5 to tell the light to stop being red. Tracking-shield protects you from this, realising that if the light s gone out then come on again, the whole second look of the light should be considered distinct from the past - particularly for people new to tracking, almost always the right thing to do. Interestingly this, too, has now migrated back into MA2, though there it s a store option rather than always enforced. 13 13 14 Cuesheet Timing Fader (top) and Playback options 14 16 4 SEPTEMBER 2016 LSIONLINE.CO.UK
That the simple to understand vs powerful balance is hard to find and open to debate is nowhere better seen than in the update command. On most consoles now, if you re in a cue with 10 lights in 10 different position palettes, you can move them all, change all their levels, then press update ; the console automatically updates the new values into all 10 palettes and the new intensities into the cue with that one command - quick, efficient, powerful and magical, removing from the user the drudgery of having to figure out and manually re-store everything separately. On dot2, update stores the level and the new pan/tilt values into the cue, losing the link to the palettes. If multiple cuelists are involved, it ll either update the master cuelist or, if that s not active, do nothing unless you specify which sequence to update. No other options are presented. This is designed to be easier to comprehend - but it s not magical, and doesn t really feel more useful or, actually, any different from just using the store command. As I said, it may be that you don t care. But if you do care, or come to care, just be aware that dot2 often gives you no options to do things differently from the way it wants you to do things. Once stored, cues can be assigned times, or can be assigned separate fade and delay times per parameter family (see Fig. 13). Here there s another variation on simplification-makescomplication: if you want to write one cue that wipes the lights on from left to right, there s no obvious way of doing it (no part cues, no time per parameter or per fixture) other than writing lots of separate cues. Then, a sneaky glimpse of the power of MA2 lurking beneath the surface of dot2 appears: if you know the MA2 command line to set individual times ( fixture 1 thru 5 delay 0 thru 5 ) you can achieve this - though currently there s nowhere to see these times on screen. For getting lights ready in the right place, Move In Black will automatically pre-position them for you; this happens in a fixed, pre-defined time (two seconds) which may cause speeds-v-noise issues for some shows. Sadly, there is not yet any equivalent for the clever colour fade path options found in the Eos range. As on MA2 you can work in blind either by switching the programmer to blind, or by previewing and then editing cues. Because the console constantly calculates its output state, a blind change that affects the live cue directly or via tracking will see the change immediately show up on stage; similarly, deleting the live cue will turn off all of the lights in live. Both things will surprise those who ve grown up on consoles where the output state is separate from the stored cue. Cues are not limited to a single cuelist, of course - you can have many, with the playback faders pageable; different from MA2 is that the master playback is always its own distinct sequence. Faders can also be set to be chasers (looped cuelists with speed control), group masters or special masters (see Fig. 14). Dynamic effects are also available. These are picked from a series of predefined dynamic shapes, presented by parameter type - so circles, figure 8s and ballyhoos for pan/tilt, rainbows for colour and so on (see Fig. 15); the effect together with speed, phasing and the like then stored into cues. MA2 s ability to crossfade elegantly from one effect to another is here, and the magic speed button makes grabbing and over-riding cue or effect speeds, including tap-tempo learning, easy. For more defined shows, both MIDI Show Control and timecode are available (see Fig. 16); for constructing more complex shows cues can trigger commands. There is a macro screen, but it presents LSIONLINE.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2016 165
a list of predefined useful commands rather than allowing you to create your own command shortcuts (see Fig. 17). Show storage can be either internally in the console - it has room for multiple shows - or to a USB key. It s a real shame there isn t an easily accessible USB connector on the front panel for backing up your show; on the other hand, a nice touch is that if a USB key is inserted, the console will save to both its internal storage and the key at the same time, rather than you having to do two separate save operations. There is no ability to selectively load bits from old showfiles. BEYOND THE CONSOLE It s worth noting that, as with MA2, you re not just buying a console, but buying into a system. For no cost you can get the dot2 onpc software, which you can use as an off-line editor, as a remote and tracking backup for a console or as a stand-alone system with one universe of DMX available via the network. You can also get MA s free dot2 3D visualiser (see Fig. 18). As on MA2, this shares the showfile with dot2; the information about where lights are actually positioned lives in the showfile, though unlike MA2 you have to edit it in the 3D software rather than in the console. It s a great tool that helps enormously with learning the console, with preprogramming shows or even when working live, particularly since it can be set to follow blind editing on the console. With all these dot2 tools and the wings, MA has taken a brave step into the future: they all work only with the new IPv6 protocol, so there is no more messing with 192.168.0.1-style addresses: connections should just work (see Fig. 19). Given how much other pre-vis solutions cost, having this for free is quite a bonus. SUMMARY Placing dot2 in isolation is an interesting exercise. I absolutely get all of the motivation behind it; in particular I get that lighting control has got hard and in many cases people don t want or need it to be that hard. Arguably what s really required is for someone to do a ground-up reinvention, figuring out how to make it easier, rather than just trying to simplify the existing paradigms. Dot2 is not that reinvention. Its route is to try to explain, and to simplify. It is really aimed at those who just want to get some lights going on a stage, or at a festival, or for a corporate event without worrying too much about the intricacies of the programming; it will do those jobs well. It is - and MA2 are completely happy with this - not a baby-ma2, even if the family look of the hardware might lead some to expect that. That s a very definite approach, quite different from that taken by ETC, where you can start on an Ion and your showfile and knowledge can move straight on to the bigger Eos. Learn on a dot2 and while you can now migrate your showfile up to an MA2 (in that direction only) you will have some extra learning to do. That seems a shame for someone who starts on dot2 then runs up against its limits, or does want to take more control, as people who are (or become) good programmers tend to want to do. Horses for courses, maybe? If you want to learn programming, perhaps opt for the Command Wing. 15 15 16 17 18 19 19 18 Dynamics Cue Trigger Options Macros Dot2 3D IPv6 If you just want to get the show lit, dot2 is solidly made, compact, reliable - a good tool for getting the job done. If it doesn t look hugely competitively priced, MA would, I m sure, argue that you re paying for build quality, for worldwide support - plus, of course, indirectly, for those free extras. The joy of those extras is, of course, that it s easy enough to try the dot2 world out for yourself before investing any money at all. If you do the kind of shows it s aimed at, then you absolutely should. I P 16 17 www.malighting.com 16 6 SEPTEMBER 2016 LSIONLINE.CO.UK