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MagicQ Consoles can be used to point any moving head to a specific position. Combined with Kratos, it is possible to control the position of a moving head with a Kratos Target.

Calibrate your heads

Knowing the precise real life position of the fixtures you want to use to track people is crucial to perform good tracking. Using positions given by CAD files of the stage (like wysiwyg files) will not lead to good tracking as in real life the fixtures will always be installed in a not perfect way and have shifts in position and rotation.

That is why it is important to perform a calibration of the position of each fixture you want to use for tracking. To do so, you have to use the fixture auto-calibration feature of the MagicQ Console.

Requirements

To perform the calibration, you will need to physically mark the corners of a rectangle on your real stage. Please note the dimensions of the rectangle since you will need them later.

To calibrate a fixture, you have to make it point physically at the 4 corners of your rectangle and store the corresponding positions in the appropriate Position palette.

Setup the calibration

MagicQ has a feature to automatically setup and create the palettes for you. To do so, you have to follow these steps:

  • Travel To PATCH > VIEW VIS > Attach Object and click on "INIT CALIBRATE"
  • Confirm the dialog box that appears by clicking on "Yes"

INIT CALIBRATE

This creates an object of type "Cal Markers" that you can resize to match the ground rectangle you have marked on your stage.

Check the plot view

Once you've set up the Cal Markers, you should see the 4 markers on the Plot view (PLOT), as well as the dimensions of the rectangle you've set up. You can also see the names of each corner (USL, USR, DSL, DSR). (US = UpStage, DS = DownStage, L = Left, R = Right)

Please note that the center of the rectangle is the origin of the coordinate system.

You might want to offset the trackers so that the origin matches the origin of the K System.

The calibration markers appear on the plot MagicQ Axis

You may want to change the remap the PSN output to match the MagicQ coordinate system. (You can find the coordinate systems used by third-party software here.

Calibrate the fixtures

The console should also have created a new palette for each marker (USL, USR, DSL, DSR). You can now use these palettes to store the position of the fixture when it points at the corresponding marker.

New Position Palettes are created

It is recommended to use fine Pan/Tilt adjustments and to narrow the beam of the fixture to the minimum.

Once you have stored the positions, you can calibrate the fixtures by going to PATCH > VIEW VIS > Attach Object and clicking on CALIBRATE HEADS (it replaces the INIT CALIBRATE button you pressed earlier).

You can also only calibrate selected fixtures by selecting them before pressing the button.

Confirm the dialog box that appears by clicking on "Yes".

You can check that everything went well by looking at the VIS or PLOT view. The fixtures should have moved to their calculated position relative to the Calibration markers.

It can happen that the fixtures' position in the Visualiser and Plot seem good but the internal position used to compute the Pan and Tilt values don't. In that case, you have to restart the console.

Point a head at a tracker

Once the fixtures are calibrated, you can point them at a specific position using a Tracker Palette.

To create a Tracker Palette, you will need to first create a new position palette with the heads you want to use.

Select the created Palette, and click on "VIEW PALETTE" to open the Palette View.

Then, you can click on "Set Tracker" to transform it into a Tracker Palette. This will ask you to select a type of XYZ position input, select "Tracker", and input the ID of the tracker you want to point the heads at. The ID of the tracker can be found in the "View Trackers" view.

Set Tracker

Once you've done that, recalling the palette will make the heads point at the position of the tracker.

Offset the fixtures

The columns in the "View Palette" window allow you to offset the position of the heads relative to the XYZ input the Tracker Palette has.

  • In the "Pan" column, you can offset on the X axis
  • In the "Tilt" column, you can offset on the Z axis

Offset the fixtures

You can also offset the entire Tracker position in the VIEW TRACKERS view (MACRO > VIEW AUTOM > VIEW TRACKERS)