The Future of ETC WholeHog

Edit: I see some folks at ETC have been taking a peek here. Feel free to comment, folks, or if you want to be pseudoanonymous, it's easy to find my email. Disclaimer, as always: these thoughts are?just like, my opinion man, not science chiseled into The Granite Tablets of Truth. Though, that'd be pretty cool.

A choice of console is a personal thing, as I’ve?recently argued. For a while there, it seemed that there was only one game in town if you wanted to do big cool shows, that that game was the WholeHog*.?The II was and remains beloved for its innovative features and stability, serviceability, and longevity, though I imagine finding parts for the thing is going to be difficult these days.

My very first tour was on a Hog. Well, sort of – it was a Jands Eschelon, but the hardware was built by them, the software was FPS. I cut my teeth on that Effects Engine, learned how to write split timings and use curves, and ran several tours on a WholeHog II. The II and later III, were the jam in their day. That aluminum chassis was sexy. There was the dedicated jog wheel that slowed a cue down, or sped it up. That was innovative, and as far as I know unique. In fact, the hardware of the WholeHog III remains one of my two favorite. The machined parts were all very solid-feeling, the buttons were?perfectly?clicky, just the right amount of travel and feedback. The WholeHog software, though, has lagged.

I’m not talking about Hog III’s rocky start, which is well-documented and made a bunch of people upset enough to say some very mean things about Flying Pig. I’m talking about the failure, over the years, and in particular with the Hog 4 system, to keep up with grandMA, and how they’ve fallen further and further behind.

Other console manufacturers, especially but not exclusively MA, have continued to come up with every innovation that we use as programmers all the time. (The semi-abandoned Jands Vista gets a shout-out here, too, which never really caught on, but to whom credit goes for some innovations that have since found their way into other desks.) Being able to do simple things, like make your palette buttons small enough and setting custom window sizes so that your screen real estate makes sense, lead to an overall better programming experience. (In fairness, they did eventually fix this issue, but it took a while.) MA Lighting has also pushed the bounds of what you get when you buy into a console system: an integrated, and really excellent visualizer (grandMA 3D), a powerful effects system that continues to get better with each new software release, user profiles, worlds, and networking capabilities that make multi-programmer scenarios much easier to deal with. It’s also impossible, in any discussion of how grandMA has changed how we view lighting control, to not mention the macro system that has helped propel grandMA to the prominence it enjoys now. The macro system can duplicate, as a script, virtually?any?function of the desk, with very few exceptions. This makes the macro system?extraordinarily?powerful, able to do everything from automating layout views, to a series of complex keystrokes, to just about anything else you want to do. WholeHog has a system that they refer to as macros, but it’s nothing like the grandMA system. The Hog “macros” can automate a few simple tasks, like releasing a cuelist or asserting another, but it’s fundamentally more limited than the grandMA system. Some of this might be due to internals: the grandMA GUI is mostly just that, a graphical interface over a core system that, at a fundamental level, is interpreting commands and keystrokes input from the hardware, and the macro system simply offers an easy editing interface to what is essentially a cool shell script. Hog – and this is speculation – might work somewhat differently, with no real “human-readable” command line existing somewhere underneath the software. That’s fine, as that wasn’t really a way that we thought about lighting during the years that Hog II and III were making inroads. It also must be said here: I fully appreciate and understand that a skilled programmer with a given lighting rig on a WholeHog 4, against an equally skilled programmer on a grandMA2, could make practically identical shows.

It’s worth noting here too, that macros in grandMA aren’t merely scripts. The user has two layers of variables can be set, show-wide and user-specific. Macros can pause to ask for user input, they can manipulate variables, and with a free Lua plug-in, can do groovy math within variables as well, which makes this already-powerful system even more capable.

Hog tried, to a certain extent - and this is me speculating again - to be the Apple of the lighting world: slick hardware, but limited ability to get into the internals. Their personality files for fixtures, for instance, are made by?them,?not you, and while the WholeHog console does include a confusing and rudimentary fixture builder, I never got it to work reliably when I was more regularly a Hog programmer, and I even had HES support people tell me “You really shouldn’t even try to use it.” Part of this difficulty might stem from the fact that Hog’s fixture abstraction scheme aims to be unified and “just work”. They aim to have a single button for each function - one to lamp on your fixture, one to reset it, and aim to avoid having messy personality files thrown together by people who don’t quite understand what they’re doing. That is a laudable goal and a really nice feature**, as anyone who's ever patched Notch blocks or a D3 / Disguise on an MA can tell you. But I believe that this way of thinking has really limited Flying Pig and later High End Systems (and now ETC, though I do not know to what extent ETC and HES have combined dev teams) ability to advance with the times. And therein lies my chief complaint with WholeHog as a control system: it has failed to take into account the innovations of MA (and others, to a greater or lesser extent) and implement them in way that would attract a new generation of Hog programmers, and to embrace the customizability and command-line power of other desks.

WholeHog improved in small increments with further iterations of the Hog III and 4 OS***. I feel that their Effects Engine stayed stuck stubbornly in the past, with the same waveforms and little of the effects customization that grandMA offers, particularly with regard to the Phaser system in MA3. In MA, I have blocks, groups, wings - in the effect itself, not just applied to a selection, putting scale and speed onto faders, and other things that Hog has been slow to implement. For instance, referring to palettes in effects is sort of possible, but doesn't update if you update a palette. (As of the time of this writing.) We only got flying faders on Hog 4, many years after grandMA 1 had them. And in effects, too, the advanced macro functionality can do very cool things on MA when Hog cannot.

All of the young programmers I know are more excited about grandMA than Hog, and I think there's a reason for that. grandMA is customizable and programming on it gives you a lot of feedback on the command line, if you want to know how something could be automated. Now, some of them want to learn MA not because they have any desire to be cool programmers, but because they want to make a bitchin' automated layout view like all the YouTubers have and do awesome color sweeps. I don’t really see that as a problem, though, because what they’re really doing is learning an (admittedly high-level) programming language, and they’re getting?really good at it.?This is, I think, what attracts young people to the grandMA system: it feels more like programming a computer than WholeHog does, and that’s something that more and more young people are comfortable doing at a younger and younger age. Hell, Lua scripts run natively on grandMA as of several versions ago, and there are some really cool ways to use that in your console. (The one I referenced earlier, called IntelliVARs, that allows you to do math with variables in the command line, and lets me do some really cool macros.) People who like (not just “are forced to use”, but?like) computers generally enjoy having customization options, and they like hacking and they like learning how to use their equipment better by way of doing silly things with it. I once killed time by teaching myself how to write a macro that would create sweeps across fixtures without using MATricks or Wings, by setting aligned dimmer values and using IfOutput. It was hacky and goofy, but it taught me things about how to make the console do things in interesting ways. grandMA 2 is well-designed, intentionally or not, to appeal to the hacker mindset. (There’s also things like low entry cost, despite what some might think, but I won’t touch on those here. I don’t see pricing as a huge deal to either side.)

The upshot of this is that I would like to see the WholeHog line developed further, and – frankly – to be a little more MA-like. Perhaps some of my criticisms are probably a bit outdated: it's been a while since I was a regular WholeHog programmer, but last time I used a 4, it certainly?felt?familiar. Except for the dark mode and the hardware surface, I could have been programming on a Hog III, and I would have had to look hard to spot the difference. (This is probably to HES's credit - making it easy to onboard legacy users is a good thing!) But there are things I’m pretty sure I can’t do, that would ease programming considerably. For instance, quick keys to set selection groups. (I always make align keys on MA on my little screen, because I use them?all the time.?On Hog, you have to click two buttons to get to the equivalent function.) I can’t have presets for grouping or blocking like in MATricks, a stupendously useful feature that speeds up programming.

And so I am forced to wonder: where does HES want to take WholeHog? The largest touring productions are pretty locked into grandMA at this point; nobody uses WholeHog on big shows, with a few notable exceptions. And I don't feel good about this! On the one hand, good for MA for making a console that everybody likes and everybody knows how to program. On the other hand, I don't think it's necessarily good for any one company to get a monopoly on any part of the market. Between a monopolistic stranglehold and a smorgasbord of middling junk, there is an innovative sweet spot. I think that the market could only be healthier if Hog worked really hard to provide some solid competition for MA.

I have no doubt that there are extremely talented and adroit programmers, UX / UI designers and all manner of engineers working hard at ETC to make the WholeHog be better. My pitch to them for Hog 5 would be: you're up against what has become, for better or worse, the globally-dominant console. Adopt some of their workflows and technology - especially the shell-scripting-on-steroids that is the macro system, refresh the now-outdated effects engine, give us something like worlds, fast ways to do groups / blocks / wings, let us adjust the screen tilt for the sake of some badly-needed ergonomic relief. Focus on the strengths of Hog - for instance, the fixture abstraction layer. I'm not sure what the current support for GDTF is on Hog, but I'd push that hard in marketing and training. It's already something Hog does better than MA, so play to that strength.

Ultimately, people are going to use whatever desk they want, and if you like WholeHog over MA, that's great. If you like ChamSys or Avolites, groovy. If you disagree with my points - for instance, some people complain about the "key-heavy" nature of grandMA vs Hog - that's a valid opinion, and I respect that. If your brain thinks in terms of WholeHog and you find grandMA to be cluttered and too open-ended, I get that. But I think there are some concrete ways WholeHog could make themselves more attractive to programmers in the long run, and I for one would love to see MA knocked down off their pedestal a bit, because the truth is that they're not the only company that can make a world-class lighting control desk.

* Sure, John Q. Freakington was?super?into Complites but those never caught on in the states. There were also some programmers skilled with Artisan and Virtuoso and later PRG V676, but those are?really?niche consoles for award shows, post-VL-not-being-in-the-control-business-anymore.

** This is a feature (sort of) that GDTF is currently trying to bring into its universal file format.

*** Hog actually did innovate in a few ways: their pixel-mapping engine was, for a while, the best in the industry.