The formerly Jands Vista series of lighting control systems has taken the church market by storm over the last 10 years. And this year, following the acquisition of the Vista line by Chroma-Q, a manufacturer of LED lighting fixtures, Vista has received a long-anticipated update through the release of version 3 of the software. Accompanying the software release are new playback and programming wings, with a new console to follow in the near future.
For those of you not familiar with it, Vista is a lighting control system that comes in both a physical console with a Wacom pen-controlled touchscreen interface as well as Mac and Windows software versions. All control features of the console are available in the PC/Mac software version, and both a playback wing (the Vista MV) and a programming/playback wing (the Vista EX) are available to give users a hybrid version of the console.
There’s not nearly enough space in one article to go into all the details of a lighting control system, but CPM will hit on the highlights here.
Vista provides a unique paradigm to lighting control with its timeline method of creating cues. If you’re familiar with video editing timelines, this paradigm will quickly feel natural to you and provides a sophisticated visual representation of what your lights are doing in each cue, and when they are doing it.
Patching
Patching is very straightforward, using either a dialog box-style method of patching multiple fixtures or a drag-and-drop method of patching. DMX universes can be assigned to physical outputs, either actual DMX output hardware for consoles and the Chroma-Q DMX-USB interface, or to Art-Net and sACN ethernet universes.
Fixture chooser
Patched fixtures show up on a fixture chooser window. This is where you’ll spend the bulk of your time programming cues. Fixtures are automatically added to the fixture chooser when patched; the user can arrange their icons in any way they desire to represent their rig visually. You can import an image into this window as well, such as a line drawing of your stage, which is used as a background image on which to place your fixture icons. For simpler stage plots, I like to place the fixture icons at the locations where that fixture illuminates. Others, especially for a complex rig, may want to position their fixtures where they are physically located in the room, with truss and lighting pipes drawn in the background image--or some combination of these strategies. Whatever works best for you and your volunteers. You can have multiple pages of fixture layouts as well, to make it easier to control complex rigs.
This visual method of representing the stage plot makes it fast and simple for users to select the fixtures they want to work with and program cues.
The fixture chooser starts with one tab at the top of the window, called the “Live” tab. This tab lets you work directly with the fixtures in a “live” mode, meaning that it’s not being stored into a cue. As you create cue lists, each cue list can be represented in the fixture chooser window as a new tab, showing the same layout as the live tab, but with a space at the top added showing the cues in the cue list laid out horizontally. When you click on a box representing a cue, you are working on the lighting settings within that cue. There are no separate steps to opening a cue for editing, or for saving the changes into that cue—once you make a change in the fixture chooser, it’s changed in the cue. At some point you’ll want to save the changes to the cue list, and save the show file itself, to make these changes permanent.
You can set cue timings as a whole (all events take place in x seconds); specific to attributes (fades are four seconds; color change is one second; position change is 10 seconds); or on a per-event basis using the Timeline window.
Timeline window
The Timeline windows lets you look at your cue list, much like a video editing application’s timeline, with fixtures listed vertically and cues running horizontally. In the timeline you can easily tweak the timing of any attribute of any fixture, individually, by dragging the bars that represent changes in that attribute. You can also easily find out where a fixture’s attribute was last set simply by scanning along the timeline, and also cut, copy and paste events in the timeline from one cue to another. This works very well, is intuitive to new lighting volunteers, and is very efficient.
The Timeline windows lets you look at your cue list, much like a video editing application’s timeline, with fixtures listed vertically and cues running horizontally.
Other features
Vista has all the traditional features that make working with moving lights and color changing fixtures easy: presets, groups, fanning, etc. So I’m not going to go into details on these. Instead, let’s take a look at what’s new in the latest release.
New features
Vista 3 has added the ability to merge information from a show file into your current show. Of particular interest, you could have a show file that has cue lists created for the songs you use, and then import just the song cue lists that you need for your upcoming service into your current show file. This lets you keep your weekend service show file small and tidy, and seems to work well. If you are importing a song into an empty show file, you do need to tell it to import fixtures as well, so you get the patch.
Vista 3 has added the ability to merge information from a show file into your current show.
The fixture chooser window has gotten a facelift, with the fixture icons being more representative of the style of the actual fixture. For example, if you have a linear LED fixture with six addressable LED elements in it, this fixture will look like a rectangle enclosing the six LED elements.
The color engine has been redesigned to work with LED fixtures that have more than the basic RGBW LED colors in them. For example, up to 11 colors of emitters are now supported in the color engine. This is great news for people who have fixtures like the ETC Lustr and Vivid-R with seven LED colors in them.
Effects can now be assigned to Effect Masters, which in turn can be assigned to hardware faders or encoders. This lets you do things like control the rate of a strobe, or the rate of a color-changing effect, from a fader on a virtual console window, physical console, or a wing.
The command line interface for Vista has also been expanded, enabling those who prefer a command line approach to programming cues to do so.
Other notable features
Another feature that’s seeing increased use in houses of worship is the ability to receive timecode and program cue lists based on timecode. For example, many churches make use of click tracks for each song that the band will play. One channel of the click track is a metronome; another has additional instrumentation to augment the band. Ableton Live is a common software package used for creating and playing back these click tracks. You can also add a timecode track to the song, which emits timecode via a MIDI channel. Vista can receive this MIDI timecode and assign cues in a cue list to be triggered based on the timecode coming from the click track system. Thus, a complicated series of lighting cues can be created that will run perfectly in sync with the band, every time. This is the first time I’ve used this feature in Vista, and it worked very well.
Hardware wings
Chroma-Q introduced two new hardware wings, as well. The MV is the replacement for the M1 and provides comparable functionality; the EX is positioned between the former S1 and S3, providing more controls than the S1 but a much lower price than the S3. It also adds some new controls such as rotary knobs, useful for controlling the intensity of your house lights or the rate of an effect.
One thing that went away is the LCD displays on the wings—they were replaced with a Virtual Console Display that appears at the bottom of the main window on the computer monitor and provides the labeling functionality that used to be on the wing itself. It lines up well with the wing if the wing is placed directly in front of the monitor. I did like having the LCD displays on the pre-Vista 3 hardware wings, but it was quick to get used to seeing the labeling on the bottom of the computer monitor instead.
Assessment
I found Vista 3 to be very stable, and had no problems at all with the software. The UI changes were nice, making Vista a little easier to view and use. And the UI is more configurable than it used to be, with more flexible docking windows, making dual monitors on your lighting computer a nice plus to have. However, these new UI changes don’t make it difficult for existing users to use--it will still feel familiar to them.
Probably my main complaint with Vista is that the text size in the UI is still very small, and not adjustable. A large monitor would be highly recommended for running Vista. Actually, a large all-in-one touchscreen computer is perfect for Vista, making the UI easier to read and giving you the option of manipulating controls directly with your finger.
Like previous versions, the Vista software is freely available, and current dongles work with the new software. So there is no cost in upgrading your current system to Vista 3. And, like the old versions, you can try out Vista without a dongle--Vista will just do a complete blackout every few minutes. So you can play with it all you want before you decide to buy.
Company: Chroma-Q (distributed by A.C. Lighting Inc.)
Product: Vista 3 Lighting Controller
Ph: 416.255.9494
