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Easy way to eliminate background twinkling?


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I most probably made an error 'el grande', but I'm going to ask the question in case someone might have a quicker way to go at this.

On the 40' tree, I put twinkling at 30% in as a background effect in the sequence  to 'fill' what looked to be 'emptiness' in the animation panel.  That was a major mistake.  Once I got the sequence up on the tree, it looks waaaay too 'busy'.

Is there any way to filter out just the twinkling to erase it (or set it to off)?  I can't just look for background because now the channels are filled with twinkling and are therefore foreground. 

The only way I can see is to manually go in and delete the twinkling one channel at a time....all 185 of them.

If anyone has a workaround, it would be wonderful to know what it was.  Otherwise I'll just chalk it up to newbie error".

A small postscript to this:

Being that these are regular XML files, could I possibly use a text editor (like Textpad) to do a search and replace for the 30% intensity and simply have it set to "0"? Or simply do a search for "twinkle" and have it just snip out the line.  I'm thinking in terms of the previous, only because they sequences run fine and if I ever do want to change it in the future, the search and replace could modify it back.

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There are a couple things you could do.  If you have saved your work WITH A NEW FILENAME before you made the error, it would be easy to go back to the pre-error version.  I have stressed this many times here on the forum.  Most of us remember to save regularly while sequencing, but that just keeps overwriting the same file.  LOR does automatically keep one save version backup (the filename.las.bak or filename.lms.bak), but that only goes back one save.  However there is a FAR better solution.  Every time you save, do a "Save As" instead, and enter a new filename.  For example, I normally use very explicit filenames that include the revision date and and a revision letter or time.  For example:  Joy to the World 2016-11-16a.lms or Joy to the World 2016-11-16_0928.lms.  The first is the first revision for that date, and the second specifies the time saved.  Most of the time I just use a revision letter since I don't generally expect to be at it long enough to get to revision z in a single day.  Normally at the end of the day, or maybe at the next sequencing session (AFTER I KNOW I HAVE NOT INTRODUCED AN ERROR), I will delete most of the intermediate versions, leaving only the last version of the day.

As for your postscript.  Yes, they are xml files and it is possible to manually edit them (I have done so many times).  A really big caution.  Take what I said in the last paragraph to the extreme.  Particularly if you do a global search and replace.  Make a manual change, save it with a new file name, and then open the file in SE, visualizer, or SSE (whichever is appropriate for the file being edited), and make sure that first it evens opens, second that it had the desired change, and third that it did not affect anything unexpected.  If you are familiar with manually editing xml (or similar) files, it's generally not all that hard to figure out how to edit the files, but the LOR software can be very picky in some cases (a wrong case can make the file not open, for example).

 

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Well, I did the save often, but not to individual filenames.  Yes, I can see a good deal of intelligence in what you're saying by doing it.  And I WILL be doing that from here on!

I did a solid backup of all my files before I made any changes at all, and then did a mass replace on one file and made sure it would open in SE.  Then being I'm an old DOS/Unix kinda guy, I sent the two files through a diff process to see exactly what was changed in the files.  Once I verified that those were the only changes, I felt fairly confident and ran it once more through SE with the animation going.  It looks like it took care of the error I put there in the first place.

I've found that I learn to move my finger away a lot quicker after I've already smacked it with the hammer...this lesson is learned!

 

Thanks for the insights!!

Edited by keyboards
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Sounds like you are enough of a computer geek to understand what you're doing.  glad you were able to fix it.

 

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