I programmed an M2 recently for a customer and linked it with the grafik eye system I put in. I have the macros set up for the play, pause, and stop on the dvd players. For play I used 3 scenes to bring each zone down at different rates.

The problem I'm having is you press play and the lights go down...... pause and they go up to 20%. Then you hit play again and it starts off with the first scene with one zone going down and the others going to all on, and the whole cycle starts over.

How do I set a flag for the pause button so play will go to another scene, I will program into the grafik eye (all zones will go down), only if the pause flag is checked?

1) Create a flag names "lights-play" (or something for that lighting scenario).

2) In the macro for the play button, use a flag test to test for the status of the "lights-play" flag.

If the flag has been set, issue step "resume from pause scene" of lighting sequence.

If the flag is not set, issue steps "play" of lighting sequence.

3) As the last step in the play button macro, set the "lights-play" flag.

By lighting steps "play", and "resume from pause", I am meaning issuing what ever commands to your grafik eye that you need to.

This way, once the play button has been pressed, a subsequent press of the play button will not issue all of the "play" lighting commands. Of course I am assuming that you mean that you are sending 3 individual commands to the grafik eye system. And I am also assuming that you are using 1 scene to bring the lights to the "20%" level. Which will leave you 1 scene short on the grafik eye, as I believe they all only have 4 scenes, plus the off button. You may have to narrow it to 2 scenes for the play function, 1 for the pause function, and 1 for the resume from pause function.

That said, if you were to place your initial lighting scene commands in the "play DVD" macro, the lighting commands on the play and pause button would not need flagging at all.

Personally, I don't place lighting commands on the play and pause buttons. I'll place them in the initial macro, and give a page (on an M2 make it the the last page of any DVD commands you may have) to adjust lighting. If you've ever watched a movie with somebody who asks a lot of questions during said movie, you would find that you don't want your lights going up and down every time you pause to answer a question.

Thanks for the info, I am going to play with this tomorrow.
The grafik eyes have 16 scenes, four on the unit the rest you can get from a remote or by adding additionsl keypads

You're right. I was forgetting about that, just thinking about them only having the four buttons on the panel, and not the other commands available. Though I believe the simplest cheaper models only have four scenes. With the extra scenes, you could have the "play DVD" macro take the lighting to a certain level (maybe the pause level), then have the "select" button of the DVD commands take the lighting to the movie level once you select "play" in the menu.

I'm getting ready to do something similar in our office. One of the 4 buttons on the Grafik Eye is a "movie" scene that brings the lighting down in 3 seconds, but scene 5 is a "movie -slow fade" scene that drops the lights over 30 seconds. When you start the movie, it does a slow fade out. When you pause or change from another lighting scene it does the quick 3 second fade to the same lighting level.

My question is what key do you put the commands on to "start the movie"? I assume you would put it on the Play button, but personally I always use the OK/Enter button from the DVD menu (just out of habit) and there's no way to track what you're selecting OK for.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Jim,
i put it on the play button because if you use the select for other commands in the menu it will trigger the lights. I just explain to the customer that if they want the lights they need to use the play button

Makes sense. I'll probably put a lighting shortcut on the DVD page, too I suppose.

Thanks

Jim,
I put a lighting shortcut on the main page of the dvd, hd dvd, and sat. then I put a shortcut for each of those units on the lighting page so they didn't have to go back to the home page and wait for all of the macros to run again.

Why wouldn't you just put a "Back" button?

I guess I could just put a back button and create a few flags depending on what source they were using.

I think he meant just a back button that brings you to your previous page.

Coming from DVD, going back to DVD and so on...

No flags needed.

Right. I just didn't understand if there was some benefit to using flag tests and having separate buttons to do this.