The Hog allows you to tailor your highlight settings, and I like to customize mine based what my needs are when I’m using highlight to make position palettes.

Hog 4 Software version 2.6.0 (b963)

The Hog allows you to tailor your highlight settings, and I like to customize mine based what my needs are when I’m using highlight to make position palettes.

The normal highlight mode is to take the selected lights to full, no color, no gobo, all that… and that’s great, but I also like to add a tight zoom so that I can really nail those focuses.
So, I’m going to set up the values I want to be accessed by highlight in my programmer.  I’ve got my lights selected, and I’m going to bring them to full, open color, open beam and then bring in that tight zoom. Then, I’ll record all of that as a palette in my Intensity Directory. Don’t forget to use masking to bring in all the values you want.   I don’t use the Intensity Directory much, so for me, its the perfect place to store these palettes- but you can store yours in any directory you like.  After you’ve saved it, right click the palette and select the HIGHLIGHT mode.

Now, I’ll clear out and test this by grabbing those lights and hitting highlight.

Next, I want to make a lowlight palette.  Again, I’m thinking about what my needs might be for when I’m making my position palettes.  Lets say, that I’d like to see the fixtures that are in my programmer, but not currently selected, go to a different color- like blue.  OK, I’ll set up that look in my Programmer and record it to the Intensity directory, using masking again, then I’ll right click on it, and this time select LOWLIGHT.

Now, I’ll grab a group of lights, bring them to full and hit highlight. The difference now is that as I hit NEXT to cycle through this selection, I’ll automatically have the fixture I’m currently working with highlighted, and all the others will go to blue.  This is nice because I can clearly see the fixture I’m moving, and I can also still make out the picture as a whole.

Keep in mind that with Lowlight, this palette is only applied to the fixtures in your programmer that aren’t currently selected. That’s why I brought the lights to full before NEXT-ing thru.  I needed to have at least one hard value on all of the fixtures, because if I didn’t, then the console would have automatically knocked the remaining units out of the programmer as soon as I hit next.

Here’s a side by side comparison of one focus using my highlight/lowlight palettes and another one using only the highlight defaults. You can probably guess which one I prefer.