Advanced Channel Settings

[halfmoonhr]

Can someone explain what "other" does under advanced channel settings - priority. I've messed with setting to see what it does. Just trying understand what it might be useful for.

[bob]

In earlier versions of Light-O-Rama, if a sequence had two (or more) channels that both had events starting at exactly the same time - for example if both have events starting at time 1:03.07 - then the order in which those two events would be sent to the lights during play was not defined.  It would be more or less random - sometimes the event from the first channel would be delivered to the lights before the event from the second channel was, and sometimes the event from the second channel would be delivered to the lights before the event from the first channel was.

 

For much of the history of LOR, this didn't matter at all.  It didn't matter which event was delivered to the lights first - the other would be delivered a moment later, and it would look the same to human eyes either way.

 

However, with the advent of "macro channels" (such as on Cosmic Color Devices), it now might matter which is delivered first: The lights might behave one way if an event on a macro channel were delivered before an event from a "normal" channel, but they might behave an entirely different way if that same event from the normal channel were delivered before that same event from the macro channel.

 

In order to work around the cases where this mattered, we used to tell people to make sure the two events are at different times, and that the macro channel's event is at the earlier time, so that it is delivered first.  So, for example, instead of having them both at time 1:00.00, you would have the macro at 1:00.00 and the normal at 1:00.01.

 

As of version 3.11.0, though, we instead have this concept of "priority" for a channel.  If two events on two different channels are at the same time, the event from the channel with the higher priority will be delivered to the lights first.  So instead of worrying so specifically about the timings whenever you have events on the channels, you just set the macro channels to have higher priority.  And in fact if you set your channels up as a Cosmic Color Device in the sequence (using "Add Device"), the macro channels will automatically be set up with higher priority for you, so you don't even have to worry about doing that.

 

Information on this can be found in the help file here.

[halfmoonhr]

Thanks for the info.