Okay, I got a chance to test this out today and was successful in recording and playing back the lighting cues. The good news, is that it works. The bad news, is that because of Elation’s midi formatting on this particular model (Show Designer 2), It’s not quite as easy and seamless as I had hoped. However, it will still work for what we want it to.
For those interested, the MIDI commands are, in fact, continuous control messages. The CC channel seems to map to the page number of the scene being played or recalled (minus 1 decimal), and the value of the CC message is the specific scene number (minus 1 decimal). However, there is apparantly more formatting in the MIDI messages than that simplified explanation because when I try to draw a new midi event on the timeline and adjust the relevant CC channel and value, it doesn’t do anything on the lighting console. The only messages that the lighting console seems to recognize are ones that I “played” from the console and recorded into Cubase. The upside though, is that once the CC message is recorded in cubase, I can manually change the value and it plays back correctly. This means I can record a MIDI message from each page on the lighting console, and then copy and paste them on the timeline and adjust the specific value as necessary to recall the specific scenes. In other words, I don’t have to record a MIDI command for each of the possible 4752 scenes on the lighting controller - only one for each of the 99 pages.
Additionally, playing back scenes on different CC channels (pages on the lighting console) works fine until Cubase playback is stopped. Then, for some reason, Cubase seems to send CC comands again causing the lighting console to revert to the last scene called on the highest CC channel (page number). I’m assuming there is probably a setting in Cubase to turn off the rebroadcast of CC information when stopping playback, but I found another workaround in Cubase by using automation to mute the MIDI channel after the last lighting cue has been called. With the mute engaged, the lighting console stays on the last scene called, regardless of what page it is on.
I should also note that I carried out my proof of concept testing by using Cebase LE4 and not Cubase 5. I’ll need to load up C5 and dig through it’s extra MIDI settings to see if it would be able to handle things more smoothly.
So, it is nice that this works, but there are some frustrations to it. It still beats trying to manually hit scene changes at exact times during songs.
Thanks again to everyone for the advice and guidance.
Jeff