Support for quick "rock'n'roll" shows/busking with
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 8:35 am
Hi Claude,
It has been a while, and I have followed the various improvements that have come through - great stuff as always.
The following request goes towards greater speed/convenience/updatability when it comes to working with movers and EFX in "busking" situations, i.e. minimal plot/setup time, again potentially touring and thus important that specifically the movers can be quickly re-adjusted to the new environment.
Dynamic Defined Values/Pallettes? Or just expanding the dynamic group recording?
Premise
While it is fine to work with Defined Values, the downfall is that when you use them, they are "hard-coded" as subchannel DMX values into individual cues, which becomes tedious if you want to re-use these and then change them later with the goal to track this change through the entire show. Not necessarily a biggy with colour perhaps, but really likely to happen when working with positional values, where you want to be able to easily record, update and use what some boards call Focus Points (others Position Pallettes).
In the past, you have implemented the use of dynamic groups using "G" in cues, which is already quite good. Remind me, was there any way of when recording a group to already give it a recording Mask? Scenario would be -
1. I set my 6 movers to full
2. I grab each one individually (sidenote - is there a "next/all" button that cycles to the current channel selection one by one while remembering the whole group, so that with the "all" you could then select all six again?), and pan/tilt/zoom/focus until I am happy
3. I select those 6 movers again and then press what I believe might not be in existence yet - i.e. "r(ecord) g(roup) 1 p(osition)b(eam)" or even "n(on-intensity subchannels)", only including what is on my "whitelist" of subchannels for this group? Kind of like the window you have in groups to unmark channels. At the moment, safe from setting the relevant intensities at zero AND unmarking the channels, it is a clunky process as you then have to go into the groups to delete the intensities out of it...
Functional movement&effect patterns
Particularly for movers It would be great to define effects not just as step based but as formulas (to achieve something like sawtooth, circles, randomness in movement), i.e.:
MiB / Move in Black
It would be great to have a more intuitive/less chatty/more dynamic control of how/when non-intensity values fade... i.e.
1. I have a cue 0.5 which is just a blackout
2. In cue 1, I have the movers in a mixture of red and blue, and pointed at my dynamic focus point (maybe from a G_roup that is included).
3. What would be great would be having a way to "mark" cue 1 to require "Move in Black". If this happens, in its simplest form it would mean that dynamically (without programming these into cue 0.5), all non-intensity sub-channels get set in cue 0.5, just after cue 0.5's own fade is complete, and only intensities get faded in cue 1.
4. Obviously, this does not take into account if i.e. some or all of the fixtures are actually with an intensity greater than 0 in cue 0.5 - thus making the move visible again. But as a start, what is described in 3. should help enormously in simplifying the bid to avoid "live moves" where possible without employing more tedious/deliberate features like part cues and the likes. Fully acknowledging of course that if somebody should jump from another cue other than having executed 0.5 prior will still see live changes.
I hope these features make sense and don't seem like mere indulgence. I believe that this combined packet would go a long way of making LXConsole (in its otherwise undisputed greatness) a preferred choice for me when it comes to more complex shows with movers etc, as it would speed up the efficiency of programming greatly.
What do you think?
It has been a while, and I have followed the various improvements that have come through - great stuff as always.
The following request goes towards greater speed/convenience/updatability when it comes to working with movers and EFX in "busking" situations, i.e. minimal plot/setup time, again potentially touring and thus important that specifically the movers can be quickly re-adjusted to the new environment.
Dynamic Defined Values/Pallettes? Or just expanding the dynamic group recording?
Premise
While it is fine to work with Defined Values, the downfall is that when you use them, they are "hard-coded" as subchannel DMX values into individual cues, which becomes tedious if you want to re-use these and then change them later with the goal to track this change through the entire show. Not necessarily a biggy with colour perhaps, but really likely to happen when working with positional values, where you want to be able to easily record, update and use what some boards call Focus Points (others Position Pallettes).
In the past, you have implemented the use of dynamic groups using "G" in cues, which is already quite good. Remind me, was there any way of when recording a group to already give it a recording Mask? Scenario would be -
1. I set my 6 movers to full
2. I grab each one individually (sidenote - is there a "next/all" button that cycles to the current channel selection one by one while remembering the whole group, so that with the "all" you could then select all six again?), and pan/tilt/zoom/focus until I am happy
3. I select those 6 movers again and then press what I believe might not be in existence yet - i.e. "r(ecord) g(roup) 1 p(osition)b(eam)" or even "n(on-intensity subchannels)", only including what is on my "whitelist" of subchannels for this group? Kind of like the window you have in groups to unmark channels. At the moment, safe from setting the relevant intensities at zero AND unmarking the channels, it is a clunky process as you then have to go into the groups to delete the intensities out of it...
Functional movement&effect patterns
Particularly for movers It would be great to define effects not just as step based but as formulas (to achieve something like sawtooth, circles, randomness in movement), i.e.:
It would be interesting to think how one could come up with a good way of (re-)using base/focuspoints that were discussed above - i.e. using positional values from a dynamic group would be great, if they exist for a fixture?x = time, scalable with EFXRate
pan = base_pan + sin(x)*size_pan (sizes being new parameters, ideally controllable in the way that EFXRate is)
tilt = base_tilt + cos(x)*size_tilt
MiB / Move in Black
It would be great to have a more intuitive/less chatty/more dynamic control of how/when non-intensity values fade... i.e.
1. I have a cue 0.5 which is just a blackout
2. In cue 1, I have the movers in a mixture of red and blue, and pointed at my dynamic focus point (maybe from a G_roup that is included).
3. What would be great would be having a way to "mark" cue 1 to require "Move in Black". If this happens, in its simplest form it would mean that dynamically (without programming these into cue 0.5), all non-intensity sub-channels get set in cue 0.5, just after cue 0.5's own fade is complete, and only intensities get faded in cue 1.
4. Obviously, this does not take into account if i.e. some or all of the fixtures are actually with an intensity greater than 0 in cue 0.5 - thus making the move visible again. But as a start, what is described in 3. should help enormously in simplifying the bid to avoid "live moves" where possible without employing more tedious/deliberate features like part cues and the likes. Fully acknowledging of course that if somebody should jump from another cue other than having executed 0.5 prior will still see live changes.
I hope these features make sense and don't seem like mere indulgence. I believe that this combined packet would go a long way of making LXConsole (in its otherwise undisputed greatness) a preferred choice for me when it comes to more complex shows with movers etc, as it would speed up the efficiency of programming greatly.
What do you think?