Both of you guys bring up valid arguments, and great suggestions too.  

John, I like the idea you have about having ME3A as the control bus.  However, how does your clean feed follow your replay (assuming you're using ME2a for the RP and making the transition on PPA)?  Do you have a macro that takes me2 on me3 during your RP?  

As far as your 'challenge' box.... I worked my first Fox NFL this past weekend, and figured our an easy way of doing the challenge boxes.  I only used 3keys on me1.  And, with the way you use Aux11 as a re-entry, it would work.  Call me if you wanna hear about it.

As far as using an aux as a clean feed... 

On football games, I think using an aux would work just fine.  However, on the UFC... our clean and international feeds need to dissolve to replay instead of cut, therefore I must use PPB and PPD (international).   So, I guess that's why I'm used to using PPB.

Thanks to both of you!

JJ,

As Bob mentioned, there is no way to granularly program re-entry substitutions on Kalypso that follow throughout.  What I have come up with is a series of Aux re-entries to basically create my own matrix of substitutable links.  I lose a line on certain re-entries but, unfortunately, sometimes it comes down to Risk vs Benefit.

Essentially for my football show I have two AUXES re-entered to handle this kind of box dilemma; Aux 11 is controlled by M/E 1 Key 1 (always box Left), Aux 12 is controlled by M/E 1 Key 3 (Always the REF in a Challenge situation).  If you only re-enter M/E 1 for boxes/splits (presuming that's where your boxes live) on M/E 3, try this: when you Bus Link M/E 3A/B to M/E 3U1/U2, substitute the appropriate re-entered AUX input for that M/E.  For example, when taking a standard 2BOX (M/E 1 on M/E 3) the bus link will take that AUX and the clean feed will get (in my case) the image in the left box full.  (Why the LEFT box, you ask?  I'm left HANDED and tend to lean that way... :)  For CHALLENGES, our effect uses more keyers than I have on one M/E so I actually take M/E 2B via a replace-attached macro on the PGM re-entry button which, in my matrix, takes AUX 12 - giving me JUST the referee full.  Since I do 95% of my show on M/E 3 and never need to re-enter other M/Es, this works for me.  Your show may be different, but consider using your AUXES.  Understand the line loss, but - again, to achieve your desired level of cleanliness without changing the way you cut your show they give you some options.

John

When the Kalypso was designed, it was supposed to have another programmable split mode called Mix-Minus.  This mode, originally suggested by Mike Krim, was supposed to do exactly what you are looking for...it would have provided 2 completly separate paths through the switcher that allowed for multiple and sutomatic source-substitutions during the cascading of M/E's.  Sadly the GV engineers found it too difficult to implement, and it never happened.  Instead many people use the Split M/E mode with linking that you described.  As you mention, it has drawbacks in that when you cascade M/E's your completly clean feed becomes compromised.  There are a few ways of dealing with this on both the SONY & the Kalypso, but neither is very pretty.

One way is to attach a macro to the M/E re-entry button (eg M/E 2 on the M/E 3 crossbar) that overrides the preset source substitution and puts the correct M/E feed into the secondary side.  However, in order for this to work, you need to manually select M/E 2 on the M/E 3 bus AFTER taking M/E 3 on PGM...messy.

Another way would be to build a snapshot/EMem that when called up performs the correct source substitutions across both the Primary & Secondary M/E sides.  This becomes an extra step and you need to remember to put M/E 3 on line via the snapshot rather than a hot punch when you are going to cascade.

There are a few reasons for using an AUX to feed your clean feed rather than hard-patch an M/E's output.  One is that hard-patching an M/E output means that you cannot do breakaways...the secondary output of the M/E will always be the clean output and will always follow your punching - having an AUX as an output still lets the output follow your switching, but you can override this by turning off the bus linking and putting something else on that output (very handy for pre-show identifying of lines).

Another reason is because doing that macro override that I mentioned above is a lot easier when using an AUX bus.

Also, but having an AUX as the clean feed output, you can usually always see (if you have the AUX mapped to one of the AUX panel buttons) exactly what's going out to client #2 (and client 3 & 4).  If everything's automatic & you have no visual feedback, this can make for some difficult troubleshooting during your show in the event that somehow part of your source substitutions got messed up (that NEVER happens, right?).

You don't lose any flexibility by using an AUX instead of a blind hard-patch (and you still need to use up a switcher output either way) but having visual feedback of your source selection & the ability to override your source selection (like in the unlikely event your PGM bus fails) in my opinion makes a strong arguement for using AUX buses.