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Putting Shimmer off beat


Army Lights

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Hey Everyone,

I think I may know the answer to this, but I figured I'd ask in case there is an easier way to do it. Basically, I want to have two channels shimmer opposite of each other. Obviously, if you apply shimmer to both of them, they will be perfectly in sync. Is there a quick way to have them out of phase?

My initial thought is to change my timing scale. If I remember right, the shimmer effect is basically switched on/off everyone .01 seconds (can you confirm this for me in case I have to do it like I'm about to describe...). So, I guess if I split everything into smaller timing, I could offset them manually. That's fine--I can do that. I just get annoyed anytime I'm not using my fixed timing grids.

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I don't believe they are able as I think they are hardware synced at 1/20th of a second or something like that. That's a question you may want to ask one of the programmers.

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3 hours ago, Army Lights said:

Basically, I want to have two channels shimmer opposite of each other. Obviously, if you apply shimmer to both of them, they will be perfectly in sync. Is there a quick way to have them out of phase?

I've used shimmer a lot and I'm not entirely convinced that people would be able to discern the opposition.  And if they can, would they perceive it as anything but visual gibberish?  I think you'd just have to experiment with live lights and judge that for yourself.  Time-staggering is the only way I can think of.  I've never used a fixed grid for music, but you can drill down to 100th of a second, which is beyond most humans' ability to visually discern.

Edited by George Simmons
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  • 2 months later...

I could be wrong, but if the two channels are on different controllers, they may shimmer out of phase.

This is something I'm going to have to try when I have a chance.

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You can manually create a shimmer with a series of very short on / off commands or ramps,or whatever you want to do.  With that you could time shift it any way you want.  Note that if you are doing that with very many channels, it could create a lot of network traffic..  Also note that if you are sending the data via DMX (either via RS-485 or E1.31), there are only about 45 refreshes per second, so you may not see what you were expecting.  I've never done a manual shimmer, but I have done a manual twinkle, and although it was a bit of extra effort, it looked good when I was done.

 

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