I have been using the Carbonite for about 2 years now, and just this past week had to program something I had never done before.First let me say programing macros or custom controls, on this switcher is really easy. For those of you that are going “what is a macro?” a macro is a routine that you can programing the switcher to run through to automate repetitive tasks. These can be as simple as 2 step for example:

Transition key 1 on air

End

I have some macros in the switcher that have as many as 20 steps, for really complicated transitions that change outputs on both ME’s and several Aux simultaneously. However in 2 years I have never had to make a looping macro. In the 2 step example you see the macro has the last step of END, well that isn’t your only option, you can also insert, pause, hold, cancel, and loop into a macro.  For our current sermon series the communications team wanted to put a hashtag in the upper right corner during the message. However, they don’t want it up the entire time. Boy are they demanding! So I came up with the idea of building a macro that had 2 pauses and a loop, so that volunteers don’t have to manually engage the hashtag because manually=forgotten.

Here is how I did this; I loaded a PNG of the hashtag into the Carbonite, in the internal memory M2. This way I am not tying up a whole computer just to generate the image. I then assigned M2 to key1, then I built the macro with these steps:

Transition key 1 on air

pause 180 seconds

Transition key 1 off air

pause 180 seconds

Loop

End

Now I don’t think I needed to the END as the last step because the switcher never gets to it, but it added it by default so I didn’t mess with it.  The loop starts the whole macro over again so once you use this macro the hashtag will fade up stay on 3 min fade off and stay off for 3 min loop back to on.

I then had to create a macro to end this macro, so I also have one that is

Cancel cc316 (bank 3 cc 16 ie the looping macro)

End

All this one does is stop the earlier macro.

Problem I ran into;

We have macros we use all the time to do things during the message and most of them have the first 8 steps as Transition M1 KEY 1-4 and M2 KEY 1-4 to off air. The reason I do this is to make sure when we go to that macro we are totally cleared out, the only thing live is 1 cam and the lighting computer going to their respective outputs. So when in doubt, or all else fails, hit that macro because it gets you back to home. The problem arouse, in that it cleared the key that has the timer on it, which doesn’t break it keeps it working but takes it off air.

Solution, either change the home macro to not include that key or change other macros so they don’t effect that key but accomplish all I need, not difficult just time consuming. Also requires a lot of brain sweat trying to figure out how all the other macros we have effect this new one and vice-versa.

I really like automating stuff like this, it just makes the entire job easier. I always look at programing macros like a puzzle, that has to be solved just the right way or you get odd results. I’m sure there are some high capacity users out there programing 200 step macros with pauses holds and loops but honestly I am having trouble figuring out what you would do with them.