Thoughts on S5

[PhilMassey]

I have been re-visiting S5 for the first time since the beta period last year and must say that the experience is enormously improved. I have successfully upgraded all of my 50 odd sequences and find them playing back on actual lights normally in the sequencer and the  show player and by the way, using MIIP. I have also found that the S5 show player seems to handle raw S4 sequence files so even if the upgrade didn’t go well, the original S4 files will play fine, which keeps some options open. Once the RGB breakout editing is restored, I think the sequencer will behave very much as it does in S4, but significantly faster in both loading and responsiveness during sequencing.

If you are upgrading from an S4 Visualizer file, it is important that the Vis and the S4 sequence config match exactly. All of my tracks and groups came over intact although a few channel names needed editing.

I do have a few comments\suggestions as to the layout of some of the menu items, specifically the right click context menu from the sequencing grid.

In S5, the timing commands have been placed in a sub menu, Timing Mark, which means an extra mouse click every time you need a timing command.

I use (and maybe I am in the minority) Insert Timing, Multiple Timing, Resize Timing, Copy Timing and Delete Timing very frequently, all of which now require an extra mouse click. It would be helpful if they could move back into the first level menu.

One other thing, Resize Timing used to accept, for example, .05 as an entry, now it requires 0.05, which for me adds a lot of keystrokes.

Overall my comfort level with S5 is improving rapidly and I am looking forward to the next release.

Thanks to all on the development team for your hard work.

[Dennis Cherry]

Glad your experience is better this time.

 

[MattBrown]

Phil,

Thanks for your thoughtful feedback - it is much appreciated.

We design the dialogs and menus so that they are displayed correctly on a standard laptop screen (1366x768 pixels). If you right-click on the sequence grid in the S4 Sequence Editor, the menu overflows the screen on such a laptop. That is why the timing commands were moved down a level in S5.  We will look at ways to perhaps make that configurable in a future version.

Matt