White Not Working

[dougd]

I was trying to create an instant sequence for my mega tree last night. To go along with the rest of the sequence it needed to be all white. When ever I would use white in any of the TCM's nothing would display on my tree. I switched from visualazion mode to CCR mode and white works perfectly. As soon as I would load my visualizer file of the tree again, no more white. Oddly the white channels show information in the grid. I thought, let me export it out and see what I get. The export shows nothing on the white TCM's either. If you are unable to duplicate this, I can do a webex session. I was able to duplicate the problem both at work and at home. I hope I am not doing something stupid.

[BrianBruderer]

If there is white in your mega tree then Instant Sequence should create white effects for your tree whenever the color cycles through white. Are there white bundles in your mega tree? If so, make sure they have channels assigned to them. Also, if you set the color of the TCM to be white all the time, does it still not work?

[dougd]

I should have been more specific. This is an RGB pixel tree.

[dougd]

Gets even stranger. If I pick the TCM as meteor full length and the color of white. When I hit play all, the "head" shows white but thats all I get white.

[BrianBruderer]

Now it makes sense. The current code knows to use white with CCRs and strings of lights that are white, but it doesn't know to do white on RGB lights that are not CCRs. I will fix that for the next release.

[dougd]

Thanks Brian.

[BrianBruderer]

I worked on this for a while and as often happens, the issue is not as simple as it seems. The challenge with sequencing a visualization is that some of the lights may be RGB and some may not. If the whole row is RGB lights, or the whole row is non-RGB lights it is easier to handle. The problem is that all effects can have Red, Green, Blue and White. But White only gets applied to strings of lights that are white, it does nothing to RGB lights. Red, Green, and Blue combine to make white on an RGB light, but Red, Green, and Blue on a fixture that has a string of Red, and a string of Green and a string of Blue lights up as red, green, and blue.

Currently when Instant sequence adds a "white" effect, it adds "White" if it is not a CCR. It adds Red, Green, and Blue if it is a CCR. But if the row contains RGB lights and non-RGB lights, then if I add Red, Green and Blue to make the RGB lights white, the fixtures that have red, green, blue and white strings of lights will light up the red, green, and blue strings instead of lighting up the white string.

All of that was hard to follow, don't worry about trying to understand everything I just wrote. The real question I have is: in your visualization do you have RGB lights on the same row with non-RGB lights? I'm curious as to what the typical setup has. Better yet, if you could email your visualization file to brian@superstarlights.com I could see exactly what you have. The visualization file ends with .lee and is at:

c:\<Your lightorama directory> \ Visualizations \ Editor

[BrianBruderer]

Got your visualization file. In your case you have RGB lights in the entire row. This was the case for another visualization file that was sent to me. I will fix it so that if an entire row is RGB lights then Instant Sequence will treat it like a CCR and the colors will cycle through white the way you would expect.

Thanks for pointing this out.