Feature Requests: Tim's Top 10

[Ed]

Has someone done a sequence that we can look at?

Ed

[JFCIII]

something that does this



http://www.nopotatos.com/LORVis/

This allows you to use the controller like a color organ.

The abillity to apply something like this in the sequence editor would be awsome.



Trey

[Push Eject]

That plug in is an interesting idea to whip a quick sequence out, but I don't think it would look very good over much time.

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TRACKS in LOR allow you complete freedom in where to put your timing.

Here's a screenshot of three different tracks in one sequence:

[JFCIII]

if it was integrated in to the sequence editor and keyframable( where you tell it where to start and where to end) like any other tool in LOR it would allow for some quick music syncing on the fly. If you think of it like a cruise control for the setup that can be overridden at any moment and then manually controlled with the tap, vu or manually fx inserted.

[chuckd]

One feature I really want is when I insert one or more timings, I want any existing events to span what I've inserted, NOT simply fill the first newly created event (I always have to go back and lengthen the events back to their original size). I do this sometimes to add faster detail to parts of songs, only for a few of the display features.

Also, and speaking from a programming background here.... please make the sequence files XML format. You'd be amazed at how many times a simple text edit to a file can be a life saver. PLUS, you have both forward and backward version compatibility (as well as all of the other XML advantages that the programmers probably already know about).

[TFancher]

Tim, your top ten is right on the mark - especially #1...Cant tell you how many times I actually go and look for the option to resume play from the selection in LOR1.

I also have a small wish that im not sure if it has or will be addressed....

I want to point at a cell and have it tell me what percentage the intensity is set at. several times i wanted to apply intensity settings to a range of cells to match other cell intensities. - or maybe right click on a cell and change its intensity right there.

ive only looked over LORII a couple times from work, so if these features are already incorporated, Excellent!

Also - It was mentioned last year the the new LORII will have controller librays available to programmers to make their own applications using the LOR. Is this still a possibility, if so when can we get the whitepaper facts on these librarys and how to use them?



Thanks for a great product!

Tim Fancher

[Duke]

I've got a new one.

While playing back a sequence, clicking on the grid will immediately STOP playback with the event that you clicked on to remain highlighted.

I think this would help when your trying to pick out details in the audio that do not have visible waveform peaks when there are lots of other sounds going on.

[Tim Fischer]

TFancher wrote:

I want to point at a cell and have it tell me what percentage the intensity is set at. several times i wanted to apply intensity settings to a range of cells to match other cell intensities. - or maybe right click on a cell and change its intensity right there.



Also - It was mentioned last year the the new LORII will have controller librays available to programmers to make their own applications using the LOR. Is this still a possibility, if so when can we get the whitepaper facts on these librarys and how to use them?

Great minds think alike -- those two were actually in my 4 "honorable mentions" below my top ten

-Tim

[Push Eject]

Duke wrote:

I've got a new one.

While playing back a sequence, clicking on the grid will immediately STOP playback with the event that you clicked on to remain highlighted.

If the spacebar play/pause is implemented I envision it doing what you are asking for.

Just hit spacebar and you'll see where the "playhead" stopped.

Then again, if we want to get really cool, hitting the down arrow while playing should start a selection and hitting the up arrow while playing should end one. Make sense?

Cheers,
Charlie

[FBW4]

Maybe there is a way to do it but I would like to be able to sort the channels on the fly by either color, device, unit number, etc. Sya for instance when I want EVERYTHING in the yard RED at this time, I sort on color, go to the reds and have all of them right there.

I would like to be able to FREEZE channels so that they cannot be changed or selected. A little button next them to freeze or un freeze them. I tend to like to program by elements.

The same way with a Hide or unhide tool that lets me select the channels to be displayed in my curent view.

A tool that turned on sequential channels at timing intervals I set- Like I drag the cursor over 12 channels (one color on my mega tree) over a set time, select the tool, and tell it that I want a one step channel and a one step timing sequence and that I want a particular pattern (that I could draw or select from a list of available) spread across the time. it could compress it or stretch it or loop it as selcted.

Anyway....

[taybrynn]

Is there a way to "play along" and basically record "lights on" from the keyboard while watching an existing sequence? The most primative implementation of this would be to select a channel, and then go into some kind of "play along" mode where every time you want a certain light to go on, you could press the spacebar ... and than it stays on till you depress it. I see that as a fun way to add fluff in a sort of adhoc way. Does this (or similar) capability already exist in LOR II ?

[Tim Fischer]

taybrynn wrote:

Is there a way to "play along" and basically record "lights on" from the keyboard while watching an existing sequence? The most primative implementation of this would be to select a channel, and then go into some kind of "play along" mode where every time you want a certain light to go on, you could press the spacebar ... and than it stays on till you depress it. I see that as a fun way to add fluff in a sort of adhoc way. Does this (or similar) capability already exist in LOR II ?

You can do exactly that with the tapper wizard, using "toggle a channel..."

-Tim

[LightsByGreg]

Another request: When you hit the theoretical "pause" button the lights do not turn off, they stay in the same spot they were when you hit the button until you hit play again

[RickMosher]

MattCole wrote:

Push Eject wrote:

A “play from current selection” which goes to end of sequence.

This specific request could be handled like this:
- do away with the "Play range" menu item
- playback should always happen from your current spot in the time line
- we already have the "home" key to take us to the top of the sequence for playing from start
- use the space bar to start and stop playback
- if a range is selected playback should start at its beginning and stop at its end

So click somewhere in the time line and hit the space bar to start playing from there and hit the space bar again to stop.

Coming from a video editing background, I agree completly. The back and forth to the play selection/screen/whole sequence is driving me batty (not that I'm not already there).

Coming from a MIDI sequencing background, I too agree. Going crazy with the back and forth thing here too.

[taybrynn]

I likes Tim's list and also like the Freeze idea a lot. The potential to trash things is always there ... and yes, there is undo ... but the Freeze idea is a good one.

I also find myself wanting more usability options in the animator window, especially when the grid is very large and the cells are so small. I know its not a full fledged paint program and shouldn't be ... but my wish list of animation tools I would like are:

(1) Add a line tool, instead of just having the pencil only.
(2) A line tool draw between two points, but can have the following options:

(2a) leave every (n) cells removed, or every (n) cells filled

(2b) multi-color drawing options (animator only) when using line tool, can define the multi color sequence, similar to how christmas lights planner does it.

(2c) optionally, the ability to make a channel have different colored lines in it, so that a channel with half red and half green could actually be drawn that way.

(3) A zoom capability for drawing up close to get it right a lot easier

(4) It would be nice if you could have a "show" mode, where it would simply show you what was drawn for .

(5) Provide a toggle to only show the unmapped items in the drop down list, unless you toggle the "show all channels" checkbox or something. This would make adding things a lot easier and avoid using things already drawn onto the grid.

I suspect maybe none of this will happen if the long term goal is to control a 3rd party christmas light program instead -- but I think these simple enhancements would make the animator window much better. I'm talking LOR II/S2 here.

[Push Eject]

taybrynn wrote:

... none of this will happen if the long term goal is to control a 3rd party christmas light program instead

I, for one, certainly hope that is not the case. I like the stripped-down nature of the lor suite.

Charlie

[RickMosher]

Push Eject wrote:

taybrynn wrote:

... none of this will happen if the long term goal is to control a 3rd party christmas light program instead

I, for one, certainly hope that is not the case. I like the stripped-down nature of the lor suite.

I agree. I've played with Holiday Lights Designer and it's a pretty frustrating piece of software.

I, like tay, would just like the animator in LOR to be just a little more robust in it's features.

[taybrynn]

Push Eject wrote:

taybrynn wrote:

... none of this will happen if the long term goal is to control a 3rd party christmas light program instead

I, for one, certainly hope that is not the case. I like the stripped-down nature of the lor suite.

Charlie

I agree 100% -- it need not be fancy, just more functional.

[Tim Fischer]

Well the deal for us is that there's no way I can take a single picture and have it show all, or even most, of items we animate via LOR. We decorate along a 200' frontage and to some degree along a second 200' frontage (we live on a corner, although a tree-lined pond blocks most of the view from the second road).

While I love having a large canvas to decorate, it does get frustrating that I can't take a single picture to "show off" the display, and it makes video very difficult. Most of you can park a video camera across the street and essentially capture your entire display (think Carson). This year I videoed 3 of our songs from 3 fixed angles, and still didn't capture all of the display, and I still need to do some tricky "multi-camera" editing to piece it all together...

Anyway, what I'm saying in a rambling way is this makes having a picture of the display in the animator pretty much impossible to me. So I stick with the "abstract" method I've used since 2003: blobs for everything, not necessarily in any relationship to how the display is acually laid out (My animation window stems from my original 2003 40-channel display, so the vast majority of the screen is a huge representation of our Mega-Tree, which was 32 of our 40 channels back then... since then we've bumped up to 144 channels but the mega-tree still dominates the animation window by far )

-Tim

[taybrynn]

Tim,

Your point is well taken.

I think the only hope for someone (like you) with such a huge display is to someday have a multi-window animator, where you could break the animation into as many individual windows (just like the current one) as you like. Then you would pull up a roadside window(1) or a front house (east), or a front house (west), or a mega-tree only window ... and just view it like that. In a perfect world, you could shrink these down a display a quad of 4 at the same time or something.

But I think for a lot of us, yeah, we can almost make it realistic in LOR II, but we need better tools than just a pencil ... allthough it works and is significantly better, IMHO than LOR I !!