Martin - I very often use back-to-back FM animations & I leave the key in as I use the shotbox to hot-cut between FM timelines & run them. I have never personally seen a flash...but then I always start the FM animations with a frame of black & finish them iwith a frame of black (which helps a lot to eliminate any flashes). But the recall has always been instantaneous for me. I'm running version 6.10. In fact, as I write this I'm in front of the switcher - I am checking this & it works fine. I am using shotboxes to recall the conditions, with the AUTO RUN turned on. It works great. Maybe the issue that you describe has something to do with using macros to recall the shotbox? That's something that I personally don't usually do to acomplish the hot-cuts between transitional effects.

Bob, It's interesting to see how you would approach the problem - thats the glory of this forum! But when you write that the effect comes instantly when you push your shotbox I do not agree with you. I've programmed many different wipes from .tga-sequences to the Frame Memory, and recalled them via shotbox, or more correctly - recalling a macro that recalls a shotbox. But I always see that there is a delay from recalling the shotbox, until the FM sequence starts. If I key the FM on directly and starts the shotbox I see that the first frame in the FM sequence starts and stops for ca 120 ms, before the sequence rolls again. This may be my version of the software, or because the fact that i recall the shotbox via macro. This I do because this give me the opportunity to attach the macro above the source I want to wipe out. I will try and see what happends if I recall the shotbox directly. On the other hand, when I get the wipe sequence from an external inscriber and starts the sequence via GPI - the effect does start instantly. My experience is therefore that the external device system starts faster than the internal FM. If you are able to look if your FM sequence starts instantly without delay, please come back to me - I'm very interested in getting the delay down - it's very annoying when you mix fast sportsgame for example :-) JNewberry, send me an email and I will try to help you! /Martin

[quote="AJR"]Bob, Just out of curiosity, can you control the autorun feature on a snapshot by snapshot basis or is it like the 4k where it's either on for everything or off for everything? -Allan[/quote] Yes - the shotbox can program Auto Runs on a register-by-register basis. And Joe - To erase a macro, you can either use the DELETE button in the Macro Menu, or use the flexi-pad & hold down the STORE STATS button as you press the macro button that you want to get rid of. If you want to build into a specific register from the OFF LINE EDIT menu, 1st go into the MACRO Menu/REGISTER. Select the macro that you want to use or build into by scrolling to it or pressing it in the window on the left side of the menu. This will be the active macro when you press the OFF LINE EDIT menu button.

Bob, I don't beleive storing as keyframes is going to work for us; we want to begin using a lot of wipes in this manner and we would fill the frame buffer quickly (440 capacity I beleive). Martin, This is the direction I wanted to go, but I'm just having trouble. Sadly I'm not as technically savy as I'd like to be, so any further help you could give would be greatly appreciated. I've been working with it and want to hammer it out but just can't get it going. I made a macro earlier that routes black into our DDR (thanks Bob BTW), and now whenever I attempt to create a new macro, it is just building on the old one, even when the macro is saved to a new number. I don't know how to clear the old macro out. I know this is asking a lot, but if you could give me some explicit instructions on creating this effect it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to all for the timely responses, I'll work this out one way or another. -Joe

Bob, Just out of curiosity, can you control the autorun feature on a snapshot by snapshot basis or is it like the 4k where it's either on for everything or off for everything? -Allan

I would approach this in a slightly different way than doing a macro, and that's because I tend to run all of my M/E Flexi-Pads in Shot Box mode for most of my shows: I would start by transferring the DDR Video Key Pair into 2 channels of the Frame Memory - that way, you'll never have to worry about DDR cue-up times. Record the DVR V/K as an animation & then use the CREATE KEY FRAME feature to build a timeline for the FM channels - store this in an effect number. Next, build a simple timeline on whichever M/E you wanted to do this transition; (1) Key the FMs over the A/B bus backgrounds (2) Set up your wipe between the A & B buses (3) Set the Transition Rate Store this at KF 1 (4) Do the transition Store this at KF 2 (5) Modify all KF paths to use XPT HOLDS on the A/B buses. Now build a shotbox effect that calls up this M/E effect & also calls up the FM timeline. As you store this shotbox effect, make sure that AUTO RUN is on. Now all you have to do is press this shotbox button & the effect will run just like if it was fired via a macro, the animations will cue & roll instantly, and you can stay in the Shotbox portion of the Flexi-Pad.

Hello, maybe I missunderstand you, but to me this sound like a very simple operation with a macro. Create a macro in the offline edit menu, and make the following events: 1. "MEXpt" -> choose keyrow and choose source no # [to assign the sequence to the right key] 2. Recall "WipeSnapshot" no # (as you have already made and stored the wipe in a wipe snapshot) 3. make the cue-up, "Cue", set the tc/or "DiscFileLoad" if the sequence has a name in in the DVR 4. Roll the sequence, "Play" 5. "MEAutoTransition", choose ME and transition rate if you want to. Store the macro and Voil?! The tricky part is probably between step 4 and 5, because of the delay between the play event and the actual start, you will probably need to input a paus and adjust it here to make it all go at the same time. Good Luck! Martin