What’s everyone’s protocol for storing scenes on the dLive? I’m using a CTi1500 and a FOH person saved scenes but didn’t realise they also then had to save the Show file afterward, so their scenes didn’t get saved (or at least that’s what we think happened).
Is it best practice to save to the USB stick every time you save a scene?
If you were doing FOH or monitors for a touring act, how often would you be expecting to save a scene and then store it to the USB drive?
When would you overwrite vs store a new show/scene?
Thanks in advance, I’ve learned so much from these forums and I’m so grateful!
As soon as I store or overwrite a scene, I automatically go and overwrite my show on the console as well. Then, maybe once a week (depending on how busy we have been) I will back the show up to my USB drive, and then also transfer that to my PC when I get home.
From my perspective, of course, it all depends very much on how you use scenes.
In a theater, there might be 100 scenes in a show, while your touring act might only have one scene, or one per song, or maybe five per song.
When multiple people are working on a project, the handling of scenes must of course be precisely defined.
Personally, I avoid overwriting scenes and shows, especially during the creation process, and prefer to store one too many, but this always gives me the option to go back to an earlier point in time.
In any case, it’s important to name or/and describe the scenes clearly.
And once everything is finalized, you practically have final versions and can delete anything unnecessary.
During a performance, however, where you use the created scenes and only refine things, you can of course overwrite scenes from time to time.
You still have the old scene as a backup in an earlier version of the show.
And always: Better one backup too many than too few.
So, as already mentioned, save everything additional on your PC, which is also backed up regularly.
In my venue I have only three normal scenes - one for each main recurring event . (Special events may get there own scene for a time).
I periodically backup each of these three scenes - adding a date prefix to the original scene name. Example, if the main scene is XXX I will save it as 20250905 XXX.
Then I save the show a couple of times a month. (They don’t change a lot during a month). And once a month I save the show to USB.
For me it depends on how important the event is, and how complicated the show file is. A lot of my events could limp along on some manual changes to a standard show file and in those cases I don’t save specific versions for one-off events.
If I think there is a remote chance I or someone else could load another show file before I am finished with the show, then I store the show file to internal scene memory. Usually I overwrite any earlier version of the show file.
If a show is complicated enough that losing the show file would be disastrous, then after saving to internal surface memory I also copy to external USB. If the show already exists there, there will be a dialog asking if I want to replace or make a new copy. I choose to make a new copy. I then have every intermediate version of the show I have saved in the event that surface failure or user error causes the show file to be lost.
I really should also back up the USB drive in case it fails simultaneously with the loss of a file from internal surface storage, but I am not usually that paranoid.
Indeed. And I would add that occasionally or frequently if a particualy show/scene is critical and represents a lot of work to recreate, you should test the round-trip. There is nothing worse than discovering that there was a problem with the thumb-drive resulting in the show file being corrupt, but still looking to the OS as a valid file. So you go about your due diligence and backup to your PC, and to offline storage like an external drive, and then to the cloud. Then when you desperately need it, you discover than every one of your backups backed-up a corrupt show file.
So to make sure this does not bite you in the ***, before its needed, download the cloud version (for example) and load it into the mixer. If its corrupt you know well in advance you have some work to do…
Don’t ask me how I know this.
Yes, it is important to remember that you need to save/overwrite your Show file if/when you make changes to your scenes. This took a little while to “train” myself to do, but now I am pretty good about saving a new Show file at the end of every event before shutting the system down. This way I know I have the most up to date version saved.
Many times I have a Surface and a Director instance running (or two instances of Director when I’m not using a Surface). So I simply try to remember to save a Show on both devices. Unlike scenes which are stored on the Mixrack, Shows are saved on Surface (or the device running Director) so doing this gives me a secondary backup. Personally I find this easier than trying to use USB drives, but that is only because I already have both devices up and running.
We save scenes in the moment and archive shows weekly. We date them by year-month-date to easily pull old archives. Getting burned just a time or two will make anyone an obsessive archiver. For our venue, it also protects us from issues stemming from multiple users at varying skill levels… without the headache of user-specific permissions.
Scenes are not made to store a full setting of the desk. So if you have a guest engineer coming with a band I’d always store a new show. Mixer config and i/o channel mono/stereo are not stored in a scene for example and if you change that manually, a lot of stuff happens with that. Also you have to basically disable all global saves if you want to do that with scenes.
Scenes are for changing stuff within a project/band not to change from one band to another imho.
That depends on how you handle it.
We (a club I sometimes work) do it all the time with the support acts we have around.
We are setting up the main act, do the sound check and save that to a scene. Now we don’t change any configurations anymore to ensure we can use the scenes to restore all following changes.
I see it similarly.
And it also depends, above all, on the type of event.
High-profile events, in particular, are supposed to run seamlessly, so a presenter, for example, bridges every break in set-up by introducing the next act.
And I assume that, unlike SQ, loading a new show also on dLive takes significantly longer, inevitably would creating an unnecessary gap.
A high profile event with multiple high profile acts (often comes with visiting engineers as well) would have a seperate mixing solution for talk anyway. Same goes for festivals. If not…then you are just asking for trouble. Even if its just a small analog Mackie mixer, its still better than doing talk on the main house desk.
Preferences seem to vary considerably.
And I was still referring to using one console with the option of using shows or scenes.
So, if at all possible, I would really prefer to use the main console also for presentators, talk, and the like, rather than having to lock it just so I can use shows instead of scenes.
So, you would really sending your dLive to the sound system via this small analog mixer?
I forget to do this embarrassingly often, enough to want a softkey/action to save the current show, like on certain other desks built with macros in mind.
Absolutely not. I would have both connected to the system processor whatever that might be. It could even be additional inputs on the amps if you aren’t using any DSP/matrix…which you of course should if you are working in these types of scenarios. There are a million was to handle that of course.
