The constant struggle of the Lighting Device

[James Russell]

Hey all,

I know I'm always delving into the parts of the Lighting Device which seem completely irrelevant to the running of Vectorworks, but today I'm just wondering about simple errors that are making me frustrated.

Mainly it's the fact that the fields for Wattage and Weight are text fields. It mightn't seems like a big thing but when I want to know the total Wattage on my dimmer I can't. When I want to know the total Weight on a bar, I can't.

I've changed this field to a number field and things calculate fine, the issue: Imported items no longer seem to carry their data from the Light Info Record into the Lighting Device, presumably something to do with the script and a type mismatch.

The wattage field on the symbol contained inside the manufacturer's folder is written as '575W', hard coded as text, not as a number with a trailer of 'W' like it should be, for example.

Surely someone thought about this at some point in time. I would normally work around this and attempt to write an if statement that detects if a 'W' is present at the end of the 'lighting device'.'wattage' field and then take away the 'W' and use value() to make it a number but I can't due to the lack of functions available in worksheets. Things like LEN, SUBSTITUTE, LEFT, RIGHT, FIND, all of which have been around for at least a decade in Excel and years in Numbers.

And now I'm not sure if this leads to a question or just belongs in the wishlist.

Grrr and sorry if you read this far,

J

[michaelk]

James

I share your frustration w/ worksheets. I keep thinking every year that this will be the year of the worksheet reboot. (Making a cell aligned center takes six mouse clicks!)

There has been a trend w/ 2011 of making more fields that are values (like area or volume) be non-integer and non-real fields in default schedules. It's pretty to show the units, but it sure would be nice to also be able to add the values.

If you want to start a new worksheet wish list I'll happily join in.

Until then, could you change the values of the weight and wattage fields for the instruments you use, since you've already changed the field type in the record format... ?

Are you just trying to calculate the dimmer load on each dimmer or the load per phase? 'Cause that would be cool.

mk

[James Russell]

Michael,

I had a feeling you would, .

I have changed all the values for our commercial template to numbers where appropriate and it works amazingly, and has for the last 6 months or so. We now have auto calculations to provide data about the wattages of individual channels on any dimmer or relay throughout the venue/gallery, even to a track/position level.

It's only now that I've started to remake our theatrical template that I've found out about the incorrect translation of fixtures when importing them from the existing libraries to the document, in relation to Weight, Wattage and Frame Size.

For now in the theatrical I've made the fields in the lighting device as numbers and let the data get deleted. I'd much prefer to have the ability to calculate the dimmer loading and bar weights and have to input some values manually than just have some static text.

I'll let you know how the theatrical dimmer loading table/script works out this time.

And I'll start a wishlist next week, I have a list going here so I'll probably just post that.

J

[JBenghiat]

James,

This is one of those "not a real solution, but..." answers, but I think it's worth stating.

All of what you want to do in terms of calculating loads and weights can be done quite easily with Lightwright. I think NNA is more likely to put effort into improving LW data exchange than to improving VW's own database and reporting functions. Considering that load calculations depend on a lot of factors that typically aren't in a drawing (for example, power legs and dimmer phase layout), I think that's for the better.

Currently, data exchange into Lightwright is good about normalizing wattages and weights. Also, because 100% of LW's function is to serve lighting design, John McKernon can often fulfill calculation-related user requests much faster than NNA.

As a side note, you may want to look at the Instrument Maintenance menu plug-in that's part of my Savvy Symbol Key. You can easily update the wattage and weight attached to your Light Info records (with the option of updating existing Lighting Devices) as well as "push" the data of an imported Light Info record out to your Lighting Devices.

Maybe not the answers you were looking for, but they may help you achieve your goals a bit faster.

-Josh

[James Russell]

Josh,

A few weeks ago I played with a demo version of Lightwright, and I agree entirely that it is a tool which would not only be useful but also efficient for the lighting requests above.

Also the Instrument Maintenance plug-in has been useful and will be for making mass changes when required.

At the time of writing the previous posts I was more inquisitive as to why the library would be set up this way, having text where clearly the contents were a quantity.

Thankyou though, alternatives are better than unsolvable.

Cheers,

J