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Sequencing Tips, Tricks and Secrets


George Simmons

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DonFL wrote:

I'll volunteer to put it together in a powerpoint or word doc, but I'd need to lean on the contributors to provide their "hint" in either of those formats...probably word is best..thinking a doc would work better than a ppt.

If I can get everyone to do that...screenshots, etc..I'll do the compiling and work with george (need his expert eyes and experience as a proof reader)...just need to be patient with the processing time..:)

Can I suggest maybe posting it as a pdf file.

Some people may not have word but most people have pdf readers or can download it for free. There are also free drivers that will allow you to print to a pdf file from within word ... may be stating the already known.

Dave
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OK, so I just discovered this one, so thought I'd add it for those that aren't already in the know...

For any given timing grid that you're working on, you can open the tapper wizard and tell it a section of a song (by time) you want to update. Select the timing grid you want to update, run the wizard to add the timing "taps", click "apply and exit" and you'll have updated the selected timing grid. Your old timing marks will remain intact and your new ones will show up along with the old.

Before I tried this, I thought that any new tapper-created grid just overwrote the selected timing grid, but it's acutally additive.

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RaceMedic wrote:

DonFL wrote:
I'll volunteer to put it together in a powerpoint or word doc, but I'd need to lean on the contributors to provide their "hint" in either of those formats...probably word is best..thinking a doc would work better than a ppt.

If I can get everyone to do that...screenshots, etc..I'll do the compiling and work with george (need his expert eyes and experience as a proof reader)...just need to be patient with the processing time..:)

Can I suggest maybe posting it as a pdf file.

Some people may not have word but most people have pdf readers or can download it for free. There are also free drivers that will allow you to print to a pdf file from within word ... may be stating the already known.

Dave

Easily done; can convert word to pdf easily..as soon as I have something (from anyone) to work with...:)
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I know a Beat Wizard tutorial (and probably more than one) has been done before but I don’t remember by whom. So until someone posts a link to that which I can’t recall, I’ll share what I know and how I personally use the Beat Wizard. YMMV. I am a music moron who knows how to use a software feature, and pretend to be nothing more than that. So if you’re gonna bust my chops for whatever terms I might misuse in this dissertation, that’s fine. Just be sure to accompany your criticism with your own tutorial so I can learn something. Opinions expressed are my own, if you find an error I regret including it, and if my methods don’t work for you then try something else.

First of all, from my perspective, the basic purpose of the Beat Wizard (hereinafter BW) is to create a beat-based timing grid that’s more accurate than anything I can do manually. The BW isn’t perfect, as some are quick to point out. But it’s about a hundred times better than I am. Most of the people who see my display think that the synchronization is pretty much dead-on. If you agree, then score it point, set, and match for the BW.

The BW works best with songs that have a strong, steady beat. Occasionally, especially with songs that change tempo after the first couple of verses (or stanzas or whatever the hell they are), the timing marks that the BW places during the first half-minute or so of the song might need to be moved slightly to line up better with the waveform. In freeform timing grids, which I think are the only ones you can make with the BW, you can move timing marks whenever you want to. (Go to: EDIT > TIMINGS > LOCK TIMINGS and either check or uncheck this option. If it was initially locked, be sure to relock it after you’re finished so you don’t wind up dragging timing marks to places where you don’t want them.)

Let’s go down the BW dialog box from top to bottom.

Time range is pretty self-explanatory. It defaults to the entire song. [usually, this is what I use.] With a song that changes tempo often, like A Mad Russian’s Christmas for instance, that’s when you’ll want to do just a part of the song at a time for maximum accuracy. Use the wave form to help find the exact time to begin and/or end each or whatever part of the song that you want the BW to evaluate. [With this type of song I create a separate track with just one channel and this is where I run the BW initially. This is my master timing channel and I never touch this again except to use it to copy into other tracks.]

Tempo is where you decide how frequently you want the BW to place timing marks. The default is to use the detected tempo. You can also choose to use faster and/or slower tempos than the detected beat. I’ll cover more about using faster tempos a bit later, but I don’t have any ideas what to do with slower tempos or offsets.

Preview is pretty much as advertised. Push “start” to begin and “stop” to end. It's cool to play with but after a while you'll get so you ignore this.

What To Do With Beats Here’s where you tell the BW what you want it to do with the beats that it’s identified. If you’re using multiple tracks, select the one in which track you want the timing grid applied. (Since you can use different grids this really doesn’t matter so just set it for wherever you’re going to work next.) I really don’t know what the next box is for because I’ve never used it. The Fixed Grid button is here I think only because they couldn’t come up with any other place to put it. A fixed grid has nothing to do with beats, so don’t bother pushing this button unless you have nothing better to do. Freeform grids are what you create with the BW. If you want to give your grid a name, push the Freeform button.

The next choice is: do you want a timing mark inserted for each beat? The default option is yes and I’ve never spent much time thinking of a reason not to do that because that’s specifically what I come to the BW for.

Next up is do you want the BW to turn on one or more channels every so many beats? If so, go ahead and play around with this for as long as it takes for you to get bored. For me, there’s nothing that I know it does that I can’t do faster manually, so I’m not going to get into it at all.

Last choice is: apply, exit, or apply and exit. You have to apply your choices in order to save the timing grid. When you choose to exit and get to work on the sequence is a personal decision only you can make.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

I work with a lot of elements that have different counts. Spinners with 6 spokes, pinwheels with 12, arches with 7 segments, poles with nine, Robin wheel with 8 spokes, beat trees with 4 segments, etc., etc... When I create new sequences I also create a number of new Freeform grids at faster tempos. In my case I do all of them from 2x up to 9x. Takes about 3 minutes and then I’ve got it covered. (For clients with fewer display elements I’ll do whatever fits.) Then I can easily have anything and everything I want to start and/or finish their sweeps or rotations at exactly the same moment.

In the Tempo section of the BW dialog box select use a faster tempo and then choose the speed. Then go down and press the New Freeform Grid button and enter a name. For instance, for 2 times faster, I enter “Beat x 2”. You need to make sure you press Apply each time. (Whatever track you have selected, the timing grid will appear and then disappear each time you create a new grid. Don’t worry – when you get all finished you can switch back and forth from one timing grid to another any time you want. And unless you’ve screwed around with the “snap effects to timings option” at the bottom of the BW dialog box (which I seriously hope you haven’t done) any and all effects you program in will be completely unchanged and unaffected by different timing grids. No matter where the timing lines fall, programmed events will still occur exactly when they were initially programmed to.

Hope it helps.

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For 2010, I found that I could use the VU wizard to create some very effective VU type display elements for my voice introduction. see



I used Audacity to record the voice and then later added some background music again using Audacity. To create the VU patterns, I created a new musical sequence with the voice track only and 8 dummy channels. I then ran the VU wizard several times. At each run, I told it to create new timing marks and turn on a channel, in my case channels 1 to 8.

I firstly experimented with the level settings (slider marker in peak threshold setting). For the highest threshold, I set this so that there were marks created only a few times during the recording. For the lowest threshold, I experimented so that the levels were on during most of the voice passage. I noted these settings and then divided the range into the number of VU levels I wanted to use. It was then just a matter of running the wizard the required number of times to ctrate the timing marks, each time changing the channel number to turn on.

Once this was completed, it was a simple matter to copy the timing grid from this sequence to the sequence with all my display channels; and then to copy the turned on channels to those required for the show. I used the VU voice patterns on my arches, and the poles and stars of my firework stars.

I then repeated this VU exercise (ie creating a new dummy sequence with timing grid and channel turn on) with the original music track that I used as a background, (ie before adding the music to the voice track). I applied the music track VU patterns to the mini-trees around the fenceline.

This whole process produced a very complicated looking timing grid, but was very quick and easy to do. If you wanted to, it would be easy to do a similar exercise on a soundtrack separating the left and right channels.

Hope others may find this useful

Regards Geoff
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Geoff Harvey wrote:

For 2010, I found that I could use the VU wizard to create some very effective VU type display elements for my voice introduction. see


I used Audacity to record the voice and then later added some background music again using Audacity. To create the VU patterns, I created a new musical sequence with the voice track only and 8 dummy channels. I then ran the VU wizard several times. At each run, I told it to create new timing marks and turn on a channel, in my case channels 1 to 8.

I firstly experimented with the level settings (slider marker in peak threshold setting). For the highest threshold, I set this so that there were marks created only a few times during the recording. For the lowest threshold, I experimented so that the levels were on during most of the voice passage. I noted these settings and then divided the range into the number of VU levels I wanted to use. It was then just a matter of running the wizard the required number of times to ctrate the timing marks, each time changing the channel number to turn on.

Once this was completed, it was a simple matter to copy the timing grid from this sequence to the sequence with all my display channels; and then to copy the turned on channels to those required for the show. I used the VU voice patterns on my arches, and the poles and stars of my firework stars.

I then repeated this VU exercise (ie creating a new dummy sequence with timing grid and channel turn on) with the original music track that I used as a background, (ie before adding the music to the voice track). I applied the music track VU patterns to the mini-trees around the fenceline.

This whole process produced a very complicated looking timing grid, but was very quick and easy to do. If you wanted to, it would be easy to do a similar exercise on a soundtrack separating the left and right channels.

Hope others may find this useful

Regards Geoff
Geoff,
I'm trying to make sense of what you are teaching us, but I don't think I get it. Maybe I just need more time sequencing to understand.
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CKSedg wrote:

Geoff,
I'm trying to make sense of what you are teaching us, but I don't think I get it. Maybe I just need more time sequencing to understand.


Maybe by attaching the first section of the dummy sequences as produced directly from the VU wizard, things may becone a little clearer. From these 2 sequences. all I did was merge the two audio files in Audacity and then copy the timebases from these 2 dummy sequences to my Intro sequence with all the correct light channels in place; and then copy each group of channels th the display channels I wanted to respond in the VU pattern.

Hope this makes it clearer - Geoff




Attached files 238849=13028-VU Dummy Sequence - Voice A
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Yes, thanks. I think I understand now. I've received so many tips on this forum---I appreciate all of you who are willing to share!

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LOR Bob just "turned me on" to this in another thread I had started...

Sub-sequences!!

I had never seen it mentioned in this forum before, but if it works like I hope it will
(I am going to try it out tonight), this could be what I was looking for as a "management tool" for my hundreds of channels (if not thousands with the new RGB CCB's).

More info on sub-sequences is located here:

http://www.lightorama.com/help/index.html?subsequences.htm

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jimswinder wrote:

LOR Bob just "turned me on" to this in another thread I had started...

Sub-sequences!!

I had never seen it mentioned in this forum before, but if it works like I hope it will
(I am going to try it out tonight), this could be what I was looking for as a "management tool" for my hundreds of channels (if not thousands with the new RGB CCB's).

More info on sub-sequences is located here:

http://www.lightorama.com/help/index.html?subsequences.htm

Did I miss something? Where's the tip, trick, or secret here to help newbies sequence? The whole point of this thread is for people to share the things they've learned and use.
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Guest Don Gillespie

Another trick I use is when I am copying and pasting I enlarge my sequence grid by spreading it out using the arrows at the top that way I can make sure when I paste it goes to the right cell, seems to work for me.

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great info keep it commin, i think the beat wizard is the way to go for me also, thanks George, and once i get the timming movements down and tracks figured out will be ready to go.

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  • 2 weeks later...

George had asked me to post this on drawing a spiral tree in the visualizer.
I am also attaching my 16 channel spiral sequence which I posted in another topic.

As for drawing your own what I did was take a picture of my spiral, strand by strand and then loaded each picture of a strand as the background image, drew the lights then loaded the next one, etc. (this will be time consuming but makes a world of difference in sequencing).
One suggestion I have if you do that is to use a different color each time you draw one of the strands (all the dots start to run together), once done you can then change them all to the same color.
If you have a video of a spiral tree you like you could download it's video and screen capture each strand and do the same thing I did above.
I hope this makes sense.

Here is a short video of the spiral in the visualizer


and here's a short video of the actual trees in the display




Attached files spiral sample 16 channels updated.las
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  • 1 month later...
Guest guest

George Simmons wrote:

The BW works best with songs that have a strong, steady beat. Occasionally, especially with songs that change tempo after the first couple of verses (or stanzas or whatever the hell they are), the timing marks that the BW places during the first half-minute or so of the song might need to be moved slightly to line up better with the waveform. In freeform timing grids, which I think are the only ones you can make with the BW, you can move timing marks whenever you want to. (Go to: EDIT > TIMINGS > LOCK TIMINGS and either check or uncheck this option. If it was initially locked, be sure to relock it after you’re finished so you don’t wind up dragging timing marks to places where you don’t want them.)




Well George, very nice tutorial, but not to bust your chops.:)

But to share some added info, you ARE NOT limited to a "freeform" timing grid when using the Beat Wizard (or any of the Wizards), YOU CAN use a FIXED TIMING GRID.

I use a Fixed TG of 0.15 on all my sequences, and I use the Beat, Tapper and VU Wizards with these same FIXED Timing Grids without any issues whatsoever.

They all work just fine with FIXED or FREEFORM Timing Grids.

At least in the LOR Suite 2.9.4 version they do!:cool:
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To use beat wizard you must have basic plus license or higher. If you use it with a lower grade license nothing you sequence will be saved. beat wizard is great if the song is consistant throughout. If the beat changes you will have to break the song up into segments as the changes happen. I personally use beat wizard, Tapper and waveform for different parts of every song. To start from scratch beat wizard helps to get the basic timing. I use it for eve's, Icicles and commom things. Tapper for vocals and waveform for fills.
Also highlight a timeframe and insert multible timings for fast stuff like arches and chases to begin and end on the beat.
Thats the great thing about all of this..The exact same layout and song is personal to your taste as long as it is fun most people won't notice!!!!!
Have FUN and welcome to the maddness!!!!

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Thanks for the save, Orville - you are correct. And before interchangeable timing grids were invented I believe that would have been the only way to achieve a fixed timing grid after the sequence had been created.

The Beat Wizard follows the music and a fixed timing grid follows the clock. They're two separate things. I'm not sure I understand why a person would be going to the Beat Wizard in the first place if what they wanted to do was to use a fixed timing grid.

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