You may already be using group masters, but if you don’t know about tricks like “negative mode” or shortcuts to grabbing your masters without changing pages- you might find this video helpful.
Software Version used in video: 3.1.0.8
Video Transcript
Group masters are one of the special assignments you can set on an executor. They allow you to inhibit output over any selection of lights- sort of like mini-grandmasters. If you lower one of these group masters, it will override your group’s intensity output in the programmer and in playback, just like the grandmaster does.
Setting it up is easy- hit ASSIGN, touch the group you want to inhibit and then touch the executor fader where you’d like it to go. Now, if I pull this fader down, you’ll see my lights get dimmer. You can always tell if a selection of lights is being inhibited by a group master by looking in your fixture sheet- the inhibited lights will have this lighter background color.
You can assign as many group masters as you like. You can even have groups of overlapping fixtures, like I do here between my group of ALL AURAS and my Center Two Auras. If you do have overlap between groups, you’ll want to go into the ASSIGN menu for your masters and set it to MODE NEGATIVE- otherwise the masters will act as HTP and you might not be able to inhibit the way you’d expect.
And lets say that you’ve got inhibitive masters scattered around on different pages. You don’t have to page thru to try to find them all- if you just hold down the GROUP key for a moment, the GroupMaster View will show up. From this window, you can affect the fader level without going to the page. But, if you want to use this window to locate the page of your group master, you just have to touch the top part and the console will take you to that page. This window can also be stored as a view if you find that you’re using a lot of group masters in your show.