Power Distribution

When you are planning out power distribution for your setups, there are a few things that you are figuring out simultaneously. And it's a really good idea to do this ahead of time so you don't run into problems on set. So you need to figure out what equipment you need and where it goes. And you need to do that based on how much power you need in any given place on the set. And so for the scenario power distribution feature, we've created a way to do all of those simultaneously. So the best place to start is in your diagram details. So to open your diagram details, just open details without anything selected here. And you're going to make sure that you have the right region stuff selected. Your power system is just uh where in the world you're doing this. So, are you going to work off the American, North American 60 Hz, 120 volt standard or the global 50 Hz, 230 volt standard? The frequency doesn't actually matter that much. We don't use it anywhere, but the base voltage is important. Um, and then the length units. Now, these are both based on the visibility sidebar setting here, but these two settings are still separate. When you create the diagram, if you have feet selected, the imperial measurement, uh it's going to automatically select 60 Hz, uh 120 volts, and feet for the length units. And if you have meters selected, it's going to select the metric units. Um, but you can change these for any diagram if you're working in different places. And you can still change this at any time without changing uh the diagram settings. This is going to show um the lengths on the diagram. This is going to calculate power and then also decide how to divide up your equipment. More on that in a little bit. So after you have set up your region settings here, we can go ahead and start adding items. So we have two new categories here. Uh three uh four. One is uh we have electric, which includes all of the stuff that we've added. But right now we want a power source because that's the first thing we want. Let's go ahead and add a generator trailer. Um just as a as a way to start. We can change that later and we'll see how in a minute. And at that point you can switch over to let's say we want to switch over to DRO. Um so because I have the America region selected this is what I see. If I had the global region selected, then I would see different equipment here. I would see more C4 boxes, that type of thing. Um, and same with cables. So, uh, you'll see what you need to use in the region that you've selected. Let's start with a 600 amp DRO box. And here we have it. So, you see in our DRO box, uh, we have our line side cable and our load side cable. And then we can we can rotate it. Uh the line side cable will always come out here and then load side. Uh if there's a pass through cable, it'll come out the opposite side from line side and the other cables will come out the sides. U but they adjust themselves. So you don't really need to worry about where that happens. And then all you need to do to connect connect them is make sure that snap is on and drag to connect. Now we have a cable and no matter where I move this, the cable's going to follow. Now, we can see that this trailer here, this generator, if I go to its details, it's autodetecting size. Uh, I'm going to turn that off for now. Uh, and then it also has three-phase distribution. We can switch it to single phase if we want. We're going to leave it in three-phase for now because that determines the phases of everything that gets plugged into it. Now, with this, we want to start plugging in some heads. Now, the 600 amp box, as you know, has some base cables. So, we can go in and plug in a 10K. Um, fixtures don't automatically have cables plugged into them. But now, if you rightclick and plug in, we make a cable for you. And then that works the same way. Connected to the box. You can see that my amps updated here, and they updated here. And if you were to look at this cable, you would also see that they have updated here. If you want to show calculations for any given item, go ahead and just show the name label and it's going to show you what's on there. Now, for cables, you can see that we also calculate line loss. Not a very long cable. Um, and this is right now is five number two. So, not a ton of line loss. Uh, but if we made the cable run long enough, then you'd start to see it. So if you drag this out, you can see that that uh that line loss is coming up a little bit. And if we make it very long, let's say if we moved it way out here, then we'd most certainly end up with some line loss. Now we're getting there. So it can go a while. A cool thing about cables is that you can choose how uh which lengths of cable you want to use. So by default for uh the American uh for the med the imperial standard we have 15 25 ft selected. But you can say well I actually have 100 foot cables. I want to include those. And what's going to happen is um the cable is going to divide itself up based on what you have available, which is really useful. Um and you can use little jumpers if you want as well. And what that does is it determines how we add up your gear list. Uh we'll do more on that in a little bit. But one thing you can see here is that um we have uh number two five wire 50footers and 25 footers and it's showing me how many I've used here. Now this is list. So this is an auto update list. So it's just going to update with whatever I put on here. Um if you switch it to manual update, then you can work off of a set list. it will still compare the two because it'll be calculating what length of cable that you have used. Okay, so let's move this back here so we can see what we're doing patching things in. If for any of these items you turn off the name label, it'll just show you the phases on the item so you can always keep track of what's what. We'll go ahead and keep it on for that so we can see line loss. And let's move that up here so it's easy to see what's what. Now we have our 10K plugged in here. One thing you'll also be able to see is if you dim the intensity, it will take the amperage down. That's not obviously always a onetoone relationship. We've built it as one to one for now and in the future maybe we will update that, but it'll help you to uh to adjust things if you know you're going to work off of everything dimmed down. So, let's plug in a 5k to our uh 600 amp box here. And those of you who know will know that a 5k typically uses a 60 amps cable. So, I'm going to plug it in. And you see it's yellow to connect a box. This plug is not compatible because 600 boxes usually have 100 amps cable and not a 60 amp baits port. So, what we can do here, we can plug it in directly. if that's good enough, uh, if you just are trying to illustrate this. But if you want to be really exact, what you can do is you can add a splitter. Um, and so what I'm going to do here now is also show you that for every electrical item, if you rightclick, uh, you'll see that you will be able to add everything that is actually compatible with the ports available on this item. So we know that we need 162er. Just put that right there. Then we know that we can plug that baits cable into that. And now that's also on our list. So you can get really really detailed about what we're doing here. Another thing to notice is that this twofer when I plugged it in automatically selected the uh the Bphase because that had uh less amperage on it than A. So whenever you plug something in, it's going to select the the phase with the lowest amperage. And as you add other things, it's just going to continue selecting them. You see that? Added it to red. And this one should also add to red. But now, okay. So, so that's showing that the amps are over limit for the auto detected uh the autodetected cable. So, if you want to turn off auto detect, then you can you can do that. And uh it'll allow you to actually select um select which cable you want this to be. So maybe we want this to be an L630. Now the plugs aren't compatible there, but uh you get the idea. Uh you could use um you could use a box where that has L630 outputs, a stage box. Okay. So now that we have done all this, we can get into more of the actual branching logic. So let's see if we want to add a box. Let's say 100 launch box. That's pretty common. So we can add it there. We can add boxes directly from another box and it will add the cable in between them automatically. Check this out. Can choose to patch this over here. And you can see that we can just really quickly move stuff around. If I want to duplicate this, I can do that. The cables will always react to where you're where you're moving things around. We have our singlephase box here, so it's only showing one phase. And another cool thing that you can do with cables is that you can run them really precisely. You know, a direct pointto-oint cable run is super rare. Uh, and so what you can do is add control points just like you do with uh with our arrows. And so, you know, presumably if you're running there and this cable, you want it to go here. And then probably want another point over here to make it nice. And you know what? You can actually change the point type. It's curved by default, but if you switch it to these little points, you can get some some like nice tight corners. And that way you can keep it going exactly where it wants to go. And as you can see, it is always calculating where those uh where those lengths go based on what you have selected here. One other thing you can do with cables here is integrated wiring. So this is kind of a very specific thing that you would do. Um, and let's illustrate this actually with another type of item you can add, which is a power load. So power load isn't anything specific. It is actually just a an adjustable amperage. It's going to give you 10 amps by default. That's fine. But if you want to account for and you don't know exactly what it's going to be, but you want to leave space for it in your DRO, you can just add a power load. And this will plug in there, that's fine. And then with the load itself, you can adjust the amperage. Let's say 18. Why not? The amps are near the limit on this, but not over. And then with this cable, we can turn on integrated wiring. Now you see this has become dotted. What this is effectively for is when you have wiring that isn't necessarily going to be um you know a single extension or a bait cable or a cam lock or something along those lines. It's going to be hardwired or something. This is also great for uh if you really want to map out a uh like a location wiring and the different circuits that are built into the walls, you can use this because what happens is when you deselect this, it disappears, but it's still connected. So, you can see that the when I select this, you'll be able to see it. You'll be able to um to make changes to it. But when I change this, our amperage here still changes, but we're not cluttering up the diagram with a bunch of cables that in reality you wouldn't really even be able to see. So that is a nice quick way to do that. There's a lot of flexibility here. And what we're looking to do is make it so that you can thoroughly plan out everything you need to do. But the last thing that we know is that some people don't need to see this. If you're a DP or director, even a gaffer, sometimes you don't really need to see where all the power is going to be. And so in a visibility table at any time, you can just go and turn off power distribution. Just hide it. All that goes away. But only for you. anybody else who's actually working on that um can see it and can look at it, but you can focus on the things you need to focus on and it's always there if you need to take a look. So that is power distribution. It's extremely powerful, so to speak. Um and it's going to help uh save a lot of time on set.