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Jingle Bell Rock Sequence is on youtube

BrianBruderer

By BrianBruderer
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BrianBruderer Member

BrianBruderer

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Jingle Bell Rock Sequence is on youtube at:



I use a grid of 12 Cosmic Color Ribbons laid out horizontally to make a matrix of 50x12 RGB pixels. This is a fun sequence that has some good effects, animation and lots of text!

-Brian Bruderer
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jem5136 Member

jem5136

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Thats really cool, makes me want to go out and buy 12 CCRs, but I don't have enough money for that:( someday when I get rich, I will have 10 of those:D

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BrianBruderer Member

BrianBruderer

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KenL_MCSE wrote:

VERY NICE!

How long did it take you to sequence it?






Well, if I were a typical salesman I would say it took 3 hours because my software is so awesome. But it actually took 3 days. Realize though, that I tried many effects before settling on the ones in the sequence. It is like being the director of a movie where you shoot many scenes but only use the ones that worked the best. I experimented with many effects and some I thought would work out but when you actually see them you realize something else would look better. Also, there are some effects that are only a few seconds long that I spent a long time on, and others that only took a few minutes. For example, the "Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Rock" that is repeated several times. I came up with that fairly quickly and it is very easy to do in the software. I probably spent 10 minutes on the first one and was able to copy paste it in several places. I shy away from simply copy pasting stuff because you want each effect to be new throughout the sequence, but it is also good to keep some things consistent and familiar and I chose that to be one of the things that would stay consistent.

One of the more time consuming effects was the "Dancin" and "Prancin". To get the letters to move independantly I had to enter each letter as separate text and animate them separately. The first "Dancin" and "Prancin" looked cool and I could have just copy pasted it for the second time it is used at 1:29 into the sequence but I wanted to see if I could do something different, so I tried rotating the letters 360 degrees in alternating opposite directions. But it turned out that there just isn't enough time to rotate the letters 360 degrees and have it look good visually. But I had to actually do it to find that out. So after seeing that that wasn't going to work I ended up rotating each letter 90 degrees and then rotating it back. At first I did it in alternating opposite directions but it happens so fast it just looked jumbled so I do them all in the same direction, and even that happens quite fast, but I decided it looked cool so I kept it. I probably spent a good hour on the rotating letters.

Then on the second "Prancin" I have each letter come down separately. That went fast because I already had start and end coordinated for the first "Prancin" where they go opposite directions, I just had to tweek the coordinates a bit to get them to come down in sequence. In the software you specify start and end points and the text is moved for you.

Another part that went real fast was where it says "Bright, time, right, time", that was just a matter of typing in the text, and applying a color to either the foreground or background of the text. Those four words probably took 5 or 10 minutes.

The animations can be time consuming. It was a challenge to get something that looked like a horse in something that is 12 pixels high. I wasn't sure it would work, but I think it turned out pretty good. There are three frames of horse with his legs in different positions and the animation cycles through those same three frames. The sleigh is an image, and you just tell it a start point and an end point and the software moves it for you. I got a chuckle out of the tapping shoes. Again it was a challenge to get a high heeled shoe in something that is limited to 12 pixels high. Again, by playing around with it for a while you can actually do it.

A part I spent a couple of hours on was at a 1:40 into the video where it shows a clock, and then the text "Time, to, Rock, Night, Away." I originally had four clocks that appeared sequencially accros the ribbons, and the text would appear on different sides of the clocks. It was a challenge to get the text and clocks to look balanced and not run into each other and I finally did it. But after playing it with the rest of the sequence I decided that I was overusing the clock thing. So I just show the clock once. (admittedly the clocks are probably still overused) But then I ran into another problem with the word "Away" that bounces up and down. Originally the word "Away" traveled a farther distance and went the full length of the ribbons. It looked good on the computer screen, but on the ribbons it moved too fast to to be readable so I had to reduce the distance it traveled so it wouldn't move so fast.

So, pardon my long answer. I guess I am trying to explain in an honest and up front way exactly what was involved and that while my software doesn't create shows like this in a few hours, it allows you to experiment with different effects and fine tune it to be the best it can be. For example, once the basic show is there, any and all of the effects can be easily shifted to start at a different time by simply selecting the effect and clicking on a "nudge" button on the toolbar.

-Brian Bruderer
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Philip Member

Philip

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Brian gave a full hands on in person demonstration of the software used to sequence the CCRs last month here in the Austin area and the software is amazing. It may seem like 3 days is a long time to sequence one song, but you simply couldn't have created these sort of effects using the LOR sequence editor in 3 days or even a week. Being able to create effects as images is the real key and anyone with more than two CCRs shouldn't be without Brian's stuff.

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NWSanta Member

NWSanta

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Wow, That is very impressive Brian. Well done and super smooth. Certainly a great application of the CCR's!

Someday when I have lots of money and time again, I'll look into those...
-Evan

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bajantechie Member

bajantechie

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Hey Brian,

You said "if I were a salesman" well you are my friend because I am sold. After just viewing your video I hurried over to your site and bought your software. My CCRs will dance this xmas wow!

Just couldn't resist. Great job

Ron.

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BrianBruderer Member

BrianBruderer

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bajantechie wrote:

Hey Brian,

You said "if I were a salesman" well you are my friend because I am sold. After just viewing your video I hurried over to your site and bought your software. My CCRs will dance this xmas wow!

Just couldn't resist. Great job

Ron.


Thank you. I might say that I plan on a 1.4.1 update release this week. The feedback from some of the users is the need to "shrink" the screen when used on screens of lower resolution. So that is the primary change that will be in 1.4.1. One advantage of the product is that everything is in one screen but this currently makes it so you need a 1680x1050 screen resolution to see everything without scrolling. The caveat with shrinking the screen of course is that it requires precise mouse movements because everything is smaller. But it sounds like that is preferable to scrolling.

Also, I have been focusing on the ease and speed of sequencing. The current product is faster than traditional sequencers if you have one or more CCRs, and there are many things it does that you just can't do in other sequencers. Nevertheless, development of a sequence is still slow. I will continue to tweek things to try to improve that. Group modify helps, and I have streamlined copy and paste in the 1.4.1 release also.

I have been doing some testing and found that with experience you can sequence about 15 seconds of a song in 1 hour. My goal is to improve that. And if you are doing animations the development can slow to 7 seconds per hour or less because it involves creating your own artwork. Also, admittedly, currently text masks are very powerful but using them can be challenging at first. Again, I promise to work to improve that.

-Brian Bruderer
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jimswinder Member

jimswinder

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BrianBruderer wrote:

Jingle Bell Rock Sequence is on youtube at:



I use a grid of 12 Cosmic Color Ribbons laid out horizontally to make a matrix of 50x12 RGB pixels. This is a fun sequence that has some good effects, animation and lots of text!

-Brian Bruderer

Great sequence...you must have had a "PONG" game when you were a kid!!! LOL
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BrianBruderer Member

BrianBruderer

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jimswinder wrote:

BrianBruderer wrote:
Jingle Bell Rock Sequence is on youtube at:



I use a grid of 12 Cosmic Color Ribbons laid out horizontally to make a matrix of 50x12 RGB pixels. This is a fun sequence that has some good effects, animation and lots of text!

-Brian Bruderer

Great sequence...you must have had a "PONG" game when you were a kid!!! LOL

Yes, my addiction to video games in my youth escapes into my sequences sometimes. The little ball bouncing around the letters reminds me of the game "Breakout"
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jimswinder Member

jimswinder

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BrianBruderer wrote:

Yes, my addiction to video games in my youth escapes into my sequences sometimes. The little ball bouncing around the letters reminds me of the game "Breakout"

Yeah..I think I saw some "Space Invaders" in your Christmas Eve Sarajevo sequence!! lol
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