A whole bunch of wish list items

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dvgmacdonald Posted: 05-28-2008 10:32 AM

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Hi all,

I spent most of the last two weeks on site getting phase 1 of a big pharos project open (roughly 700 LED fixtures & 64 movers spread over about a football field sized area).  The experience pointed out a few more wish list items, which I hope can be folded in to future releases:

• Better fade-outs:  I've noticed that with many group effects (fixed color & rainbow come to mind directly) when the effect releases to no event that the saturation number fades out with the intensity number.  The effect is that my saturated red fades to pink then to dim white before going out.  The solution has been to put in a fixed color event with a saturation of 255 and an intensity of 1 at the correct hue value immediately following the event that I'm trying to fade out, but this extra step is rather time consuming in a complex show file with many effects releasing simultaneously.
• Separate intensity from color data for LED's:  I'm sure there is a reason that this is hard to do, but if one could have a transparent intensity command it would make life much easier.  Now intensity commands are always treated as 0 saturation.  It would be great if they were simply transparent to whatever else was running on the timeline.  For instance, I could run an intensity command to master media data.  I have an effect where I'm running a video of pink flowers against green leaves blowing in the wind.  The effect actually looks like an aurora borealis, but it's too bright against the other portions of the effect.  If I could master the intensity the problem would be solved.  As it is I have to find other video that will work.  In another instance I'm running a group of LED moving lights in a constant flow outward while they run in a rainbow.  If I could master the intensity over the rainbow I could just run one rainbow command with intensity commands to turn the individual groups of fixtures on & off.  As it is I have to start & stop the rainbow at the correct point for each on/off cycle of the rainbow. 
• Copy & Paste multiple effects:  When I get the timing right on a group of effects that run together (intensities, colors & positions for a group of moving lights, for instance) it would be great to be able to shift or control select a group of events in a timeline & copy & paste them together with their spacing.  As it is I have to copy each one separately & edit the time data independently.  Much more time consuming.
• Release all for individual groups:  As a trigger, it would be nice to be able to release all timelines running on an individual group of fixtures.  I've got 7 groups of fixtures that I would like to be able to handle individually, but to do so I have to know exactly which timelines I'm releasing.  This works fine when I'm scheduling everything independently, but when I want to be able to run things live it is problematic.  For instance, Areas 4-7 are all supposed to keep doing what they're doing, but areas 1-3 are supposed to be able to call a particular group of timelines, run them for as long as the user wants, then release them to a new event.  I would rather not have to release every timeline that might be running on areas 1-3 individually, but simply say release all timelines for area (Group) 1-3.
• An Organize tab:  To go with the last item, it would be great to be able to drop items like presets or media clips into folders for the areas that I want to use them in.  I might be working on various sets of moving lights and building presets for them as I get access to the areas that they are in.  Now those presets are automatically sorted in the order in which they are created.  If I could drag & drop them into folders for the groups that I want to use them in (and sort them in those folders) it would be great.  It would also be nice to be able to create them as focus, color & beam presets & call them up as group 1 focus 1, or even group 1 preset 1 focus only. 
• Hide Rows:  It would be really useful to be able to hide rows when I'm not using them.  My file probably contains 2 screens worth of groups, media groups & mover rows.  Some of my mover groups are quite high on the list, so I'm constantly scrolling up & down in order to build a timeline for those groups.  If I could hide all of my media groups while doing this it would be much more ergonomic.
• Independents:  In output live it would be great to have an independent mode where I could park certain lights on.  As I was programming certain areas I had people wanting lights on in other areas (construction was ongoing).  This meant that I had to temp those areas into my new timeline & remember to delete them later.  If I could have parked them on at a level (or color) it would have made this easier.
• Better control of spread & chase effects.  When building a mover effect for a group I don't currently have control of how the fixtures buddy when I choose spread.  If I could choose how many buddied together or, better yet, which fixtures buddied together (possibly by simply being able to create the same mover group in different orders, 1-8, and 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6, 8) it would really help.  Likewise, I don't know that there's an easy way to choose the chase order. 
• A copy button in the Mover tab.  I occaisionally need to build an identical preset for 4 different sets of movers, or add a group of movers to an existing preset with the same settings.  It would be great to be able to select a fixture, choose "copy attributes", and then apply those attributes to another fixture.  Even better would be a selective "copy attributes" where I could choose only position and intensity, for instance.
• Scale timing: In timeline editing (program) it would be great to be able to scale the timing.  I might spend 10 minutes building a complex mover chase, then have the designer say, now slow that down 50%.  I can do it with rate, but it gets messy and I have to remember the rate when I go to build my triggers later (On this job that was as much as 4 days later with 16 hour shifts on a busy & disorganized construction site & little sleep, lost details were going to be a reality).  If I could simply hit a button & say scale timing, and enter a percentage it would make for cleaner triggering down the line.
• Custom rainbow effects:  This could sort of be done with the color chase effect, but it would be nice to just be able to draw a line or select points on the color picker & thereby create the path that the rainbow effect travelled.  Some version of this exists in CK's LSM, and my designer asked for it numerous times while we were working.

I think that's it for now.  I want to say, though, that on the whole I'm very happy with how the programming went.  I occaisionally had to tell the designer to go away for 10-15 minutes while I figured something out, but it was very intuitive and I generally was able to create what he wanted.

Thanks,

Doug

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dvgmacdonald replied on 05-30-2008 1:52 PM

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Hi,

One more item occurred to me today.  A query function would be great.  For instance, I'd love to know which timelines I'm actually calling with a trigger, and which I've abandoned.  Likewise, which media clips am I actually using?  What Mover Presets are being used?

When programming a large project it's easy to build a lot of timelines, presets, etc. then abandon them later.  This junk makes it harder to navigate the file, and can't help things run cleaner & faster either.

Thanks,

Doug