How to accomplish my twinkling Christmas tree in SS

[k6ccc]

This is one of those queries that would be really easy if you implement layer priority (or whatever it might get called).  However that does not exist and I'm trying to come up with a work around until then.  This is what I have done and the issue with it.  For overnight I have my pixel tree as a green Christmas tree with random pixels twinkling with various colors.  I originally created this in 2012 with SuperStar, and then fixed it manually in Sequence Editor.  Essentially the entire tree is 40% green, and every two tenths of a second, a semi-random selection of six pixels come on full bright with one of seven colors (R, G, B, C, Y, M, & W) for one second.  Each of the seven colors is a scene.  The problem is that when exported, the 40% green stays on when the pixels are some other color, which results in the colors not being what I wanted.  When I created this in 2012, after export I went into SE and manually "cleaned up" every twinkle to get rid of the green if it was not supposed to be there.  That was a very time consuming task.  I am doing my best to move all of my sequences to intensity files.  Since I can't clean up the colors in SE with an intensity file, I have to find a way to create it correctly in SuperStar.  I can't find any way to make this work right.  I even thought about creating a random dots font and using a text mask, but I discovered that you can't create a huge font (yes, I was manually editing a custom font file).  It has been said that a a longer duration scene will sort of take priority over a shorter duration on (or the other way around), but neither of those changes the output.  I have tried the green scene as a single scene for five minutes, and at the other extreme, the green as a new scene every tenth of a second.  In both cases, the green still exports under the twinkling pixels.

Is there any way to accomplish what I'm trying to do?  The first 24 seconds of the video below will show what I did in 2012 (yes, the colors are really crappy in the video, but that's the video).

 

 

[BrianBruderer]

I have dealt with the same issue. There are 3 approaches I can think of:

1) Do what you are doing. You can twinkle different colors but all of them will have 40% green in them.

2) Create a tree that has "holes" in it and only twinkle in those holes. It is a pain of course to make sure you only twinkle in the holes, but I have seen it done, because I have seen sequences where the twinkle goes to black and I'm pretty sure they using this approach because sometimes the twinkles went black

3) Make the tree be a series of short 40% green scenes that are shorter than your twinkle length. It sounds like you may have already tried that. If so, I'm not sure why it didn't work. I just tried it and it worked. I made a series of 40% green scenes, each was .2 seconds long. Then I put twinkles that were .3 seconds long and they took priority.

[k6ccc]

I just tried #3 again - and it does not work correctly.  Here was the step by step I used starting with a blank sequence:

Add a scene with all 600 pixels of tree at 40% from 0:00.0 to 0:00.1

Copy and past the above scene repeatedly so there are 0.1 second scenes of 40% green from 0:00.0 to 0:05.0 (50 scenes - all on layer 1).

Add a scene with six random pixels on the tree from 0:00.1 to 0:01.1 at 100% red only.

Add a scene with six random pixels on the tree from 0:00.2 to 0:01.2 at 100% red and blue.

Add a scene with six random pixels on the tree from 0:00.3 to 0:01.3 at 100%  blue only.

Export to Sequence Editor in legacy format.

Open file in SE and look at the sequence.  As expected, the majority of the tree is 17% green.  Where the 18 created pixels are located, the red and blue come up to 100%, but the green remains at 17%

I am using version 4.3.18 Pro using a visualization for the layout.

I can send you the related files if desired...

 

[BrianBruderer]

I understand better now. I was just testing with green, and I put a 100% green twinkle on top of the 40% green and it did take the 100% green.

I didn't think it through and did not test the other colors. But there is a solution. In your twinkles that don't have green in them, add 10% green to them and that will take priority over the 40% green. You will still have a tint of green in them but it will only be 10% and it will be less noticeable. I have done that before and on the actual lights I am not able to notice the 10% green.

[k6ccc]

I had thought about the 10% green option before.  I just tried that, but went one step further.  Instead of 10%, I entered 1% green in the scene setup box, and exported that.  The result was 0% green in the exported .las file.  Perfect!

 

 

[khawes]

@k6ccc  I wanted to something similar with my CCB eves:   I start with all 20% Red, then one random pixel fades up to 100% white for half a second then fades for a half second down to 20% green.  Repeat until all pixels are green.  Repeat from Green to White then White back to red.   I ended up writing a program that would output a Sequence Editor clipboard file that I could paste into my sequence.    

If you open to using the Sequence Editor & a clipboard file to accomplish this.  It fairly straightforward to modify the program to do this for 12 50 pixel strands instead of the 4 it does now.  The modify it to start with green and end with green after the flash of one of the 7 colors, making sure to hit every pixel once

If you are interested let me know and I'll share the clipboard file, once I modify the program.

 

edit: How many simultaneous twinkles, and how far apart and how long are each twinkle? 

Edited December 14, 2016 by khawes

[k6ccc]

The objective of not simply using my several year old sequence is to have everything run as intensity files, and SE won't create an intensity file.

 

[khawes]

18 minutes ago, k6ccc said:

The objective of not simply using my several year old sequence is to have everything run as intensity files, and SE won't create an intensity file.

 

Will the Pixel editor import a portion of a  Sequence Editor file and let you export it to an intensity file?  I thought I read that somewhere. 

[k6ccc]

Yea, something like that.  I have never been able to get PE to do anything useful at all - although I have not played with it since it was in beta (and there was essentially no documentation).

The solution a few posts above will work fine for me.