S4 to S5 non traditional displays

[MSB]

I'm just starting to work on converting our s4 show to s5 and looking for the best practice since our show is so unique. We basically have 11 different visualizations musical sequences plus many animation sequences that loop for our show as people drive through the park plus a 48 channel 360 degree megatree. With S4 We would update our channel config for the things we add each year and we used tracks to separate the display areas and program all excluding the megatree. We would program the megatree separately and then export that sequence and copy and past into the master sequence. That has worked out pretty well for the last 8 years. But now we are adding many more smart rgb  displays to the traditional displays so we are in the process of converting. We currently have 10 4-channel controllers, 57 16-channel controllers, and 91 RGB floods in several locations throughout the show. Some are on an animation loop and some are sequenced to music.

Looking at the tutorials, we would have the following choreographed displays to one song over a 1 mile circularish  path

Festive Trees (16 channels)

Whoville Whos' (8 16-channel controllers and Spiral Tree (4 16 channel controllers)

Elf Choir (3 16 channel controllers)

Stars (2 16-channel Controllers

Church (3 16-Channel Controllers)

Northern Lights (62 RGB Floods all channel 1 on 2 networks)

Candy Land (4 16 Channel Controllers)

Dancing Forrest (5 16 channel controllers)

Polar Bears (2 16 channel controllers)

Glistening Grove (16 RGB Floods individually addressed)

Racing Arches (4 16 Channel Controllers)

Megatree (48 Channels 3 Picicon controllers) Normally programmed separately in superstar and then imported into the main sequence.

This does not include the animation sequences that we program and run concurrently in the background during the show. Since there is not one visualization for all these displays in the main sequence, I get a ton of archived props. In S4, I can open the specific visualization in a separate window when programming that individual display which doesn't seem to work in S5. Putting all the displays into one visualizer doesn't make sense since they are in physically different areas in the park and cannot be seen concurrently. Looking for suggestions for the best practice to convert from S4 to S5 and any ideas the geniuses may have on this forum.

Greg

Making Spirits Bright

[Mr. P]

Honestly, this is something that you should have started earlier, like last March. I would highly recommend that you stay with what you have and what works until after this season. You are not giving yourself a lot of time to work out the kinks.

[MSB]

That's what I'm thinking, but now is still a good time to start even for next year. We still have over 2 months but we need to start somewhere and looking for some direction. We only need to upgrade 15 songs

Edited September 3, 2020 by MSB
changed scope

[PhilMassey]

I concur with Mr P. It's a steep learning curve for this year. From your description I think I would create multiple previews for the various sections or several sections and import using those. That way they will match what is in the sequences and avoid the mismatch archiving of channels.

Since your channel counts are relatively low for each section (compared to pixels) it should be fairly straightforward to create the previews.

There are several video tutorials on the LOR YouTube channel that might help..

There is also a website called Luminous Harmony, which has just posted some How To's although I haven't seen them yet. And of course there's the S5 help file.

[MSB]

I have imported one of the sequences. I then went and imported the visualizer files that I did use for S4. I see in the sequencer the tracks came over with archived props. Now it's a matter of matching the archived props to the new  previews I've imported.  So I have a stage called Church Bells as a preview. When I open up that preview I see all the props. I then went to Sequence and manage archived props, selected the 16 channels and then chose add to preview. It does not allow me to select the preview that these props belong to,. I selected add to preview (Not sure what preview this is using) and then save.

I really would have several previews for one sequence since there are several "stages" for the sequenced displays. It makes no sense in our situation to have one preview for all displays because we will not be applying any motion channels across the entire route as they will not be visible to our guests at the same time. is this even possible with S5? Screenshot

[MattBrown]

5 hours ago, MSB said:

It makes no sense in our situation to have one preview for all displays because we will not be applying any motion channels across the entire route as they will not be visible to our guests at the same time. is this even possible with S5? 

This is a feature that has been requested, but is not currently supported. For now, all of your stages will need to be in the one preview - while not ideal, zooming into your preview can help.

Think of your preview as defining the master list of channels that will be controlled by the Show Player.

Matt

[MSB]

Wow, trying to cram a over a mile of props into one screen is going to be tough especially since we already have a 48 channel (double stacked 24 column mega tree) and adding 8 more rgb pixel trees. some of our stages are well over 600 feet long each and wouldn't make any sense as this is a circular route and the perspective of the displays are constantly changing and will be extremely confusing to program. In S4 I used tracks to separate the display areas and they all were imported into the new preview tree. I'm working on updating our visualizer files and cleaning things up. The new preview editor is quite nice!

I have run into a problem with one of the visualizers. It's for a stage called Racing Arches. It's a 256 foot tunnel of arches our guests drive through. It has 16 arches, 16' apart. Each arch has 4 segments of LED lights Blue-Yellow-Green-Red. There are 4 arches wired to a 16 channel controller and 4 controllers (L80, L81,L82, & L83) for this stage. This visualizer is quite messy and I wanted to update the preview using the arch shape. So I picked the arch shape, one channel per color, 4 sections, then played with Enter channel on first row, auto number the rest OR Enter a channel on every row. Max circuit I've tried 16 and it did number the channels correctly but only created one arch. I tried again using max channels of 4 but then it only created 4 channels and then used all 4 controllers.

I have 2 previews converted and this is the 3rd. It would be great if someone could take a look but I'm limited to 10.24 kb. 

[MattBrown]

9 minutes ago, MSB said:

I have run into a problem with one of the visualizers. It's for a stage called Racing Arches. It's a 256 foot tunnel of arches our guests drive through. It has 16 arches, 16' apart. Each arch has 4 segments of LED lights Blue-Yellow-Green-Red. There are 4 arches wired to a 16 channel controller and 4 controllers (L80, L81,L82, & L83) for this stage. This visualizer is quite messy and I wanted to update the preview using the arch shape. So I picked the arch shape, one channel per color, 4 sections, then played with Enter channel on first row, auto number the rest OR Enter a channel on every row. Max circuit I've tried 16 and it did number the channels correctly but only created one arch. I tried again using max channels of 4 but then it only created 4 channels and then used all 4 controllers.

You will need to create 16 props, each with the arch shape to create your tunnel.

The "sections" parameter for the arch is for leaping arches with traditional lights. In your tunnel, you probably want segments set to 1.

Matt

[MSB]

This may help show the scope of our show:  https://youtu.be/ID5tZgiPRL4 is a 360 degree tour of our show last year.  When you watch it, you can use your mouse and  pan around as you progress through the show. if you move forward to 10:44 you will see our "Racing Arches" The sequence that is playing at that time looks like one segment per arch but  there are other sequences have a surfer tunnel effect. We also have bounces in to out and out to in, etc. This is our 9th year and I'm quite comfortable with sequencing. Yes we have different things going on and some will be difficult to convert. Besides the Mega Tree we have a spiral tree in our whoville area. 16 wraps red CW, 16 wraps green CCW and 32 vertical multi-color strings. I never made a visualizer for that tree as there are no good tools in s4 to make one that way. I faked one by making 3 trees and overlaying all onto one tree. The vertical rows of multi-color lights is using 360 wedges

[MattBrown]

I've seen that video before - very impressive display!

OK, you have 2 choices for the tunnel arches:

1) use the arch shape with 4 segments. You will need to pick 1 color for preview purposes - the arch shape doesn't support different colors for each segment.

2) create your own arch using 4 line-connected props each with the appropriate color. Put the 4 props into a group - you can use the horizontal stack arrangement. Give the group a name like "Arch 01". Now select the group and use the copy command to make 16 copies. Arrange the groups into a tunnel - the Format menu is really helpful for this (e.g. make equal spacing). For this approach, make sure you are using version 5.5.2, as 5.5.0 had a bug when copying groups.

Also note that there is a spiral tree shape - so that may help in whoville.

Matt

[MSB]

Thanks for the input! So If I keep going down the rabbit hole and updating individual previews I will be able to pull all those previews into one master preview? I did choose one of my updated previews and imported an S4 sequence and those channels and props worked however it archived everything else. I haven't tried working with the archive menu yet to link archived props to the preview. I'be been working on this all day.

[MattBrown]

18 minutes ago, MSB said:

So If I keep going down the rabbit hole and updating individual previews I will be able to pull all those previews into one master preview? I

Yes you can. You can select all props and groups in a preview (Ctrl-A shortcut), then select Edit > Export. In your master preview, click Add Item, then select "Import an S5 prop file".

Matt

[Aubrey]

On 9/4/2020 at 5:29 PM, MattBrown said:

Yes you can. You can select all props and groups in a preview (Ctrl-A shortcut), then select Edit > Export. In your master preview, click Add Item, then select "Import an S5 prop file".

Matt

This is what I was going to suggest after reading just your initial post MSB - it's great that Matt watches the forums so closely. The multiple preview method is a great workaround if you really do need to sequence in separate views. Then you just put the entire preview into a group as Matt said, export, and then you have one giant preview that's meant to play your shows; you can just copy your sequencing into the respective props. 

[MSB]

OK, I have created 10 separate previews "or stages" in one Sequence I imported from last year, S4. They all have the correct channel configurations even though nearly all of the channels are archived in the sequence. I imported before creating all these individual stages. I've exported all of these previews to separate files. I just can't seem to figure out how to get all of them into a "master Preview". 

Edited September 7, 2020 by MSB

[MattBrown]

@Aubrey alluded to creating groups for each "stage". This will be helpful in keeping your master preview organized. So here are the steps for getting one stage into the master preview.

1. In the Previews pane (http://www1.lightorama.com/help/manage_previews.htm), double-click on a preview for one of the stages to open it in Preview Design.
2. Click the Add button, choose "Create a new Group"
3. In the Group Definition window, name the group "Stage xxx" where xxx is the name of the stage.
4. Click the "Select All" button.
5. Set Arrangement to "None"
6. Click "Save" to close Group Definition
7. On the Design tab, right-click on the name of the new group in the list on the left and select "Export Selected Items". In the Save Dialog, keep the default name and folder, then click Save.
8. Back in the Design tab, click Save to close the Preview Design.

Repeat steps 1-8 for the other stages.

a) Now open your master preview.

b) Click the Add button

c) Select "Import an S5 prop file"

d) Select one of the files you created above

e) With the "Stage xxx" group selected, you should be able to resize and move the group into position - so the various stages don't overlap

Repeat steps b - e for the other stages.

Matt

[MSB]

I do have groups for each stage as they were tracks in my original sequence. That's how I programmed them before. So show all items is the master channel configuration. The groups that were created from the tracks also show up in the tree on the left. There are more groups than stages since I used a couple of tracks to program a display in the past

[MattBrown]

5 minutes ago, MSB said:

I do have groups for each stage as they were tracks in my original sequence. That's how I programmed them before. So show all items is the master channel configuration. The groups that were created from the tracks also show up in the tree on the left. There are more groups than stages since I used a couple of tracks to program a display in the past

Some of the terminology has changed in S5 - tracks are more or less equivalent to a "Grid View" in S5. The "Show All Items" grid view is like "Track 1", except that it is automatically updated.

In S5, there are 2 kinds of groups:

1) preview groups - as the name implies, these are created in Preview Design and will appear in all sequences that get associated with the preview.

2) groups you create in the sequence (like in S4) - these groups do NOT get carried over into other sequences

Your stages should be preview groups, because 1) you will want to use them to arrange the master preview in Preview Design, 2) you will want them to apply to all sequences

I just want to make sure we are on the same page

Matt

[MSB]

I got it but having all the stages in one screen is really low res and will be very hard to sequence! I did a test with 4 stages imported. It is cool to see all of them working, but even zooming in to one  area of the preview window doesn't show me enough detail and I have a 27" wide screen monitor for my programming window and I have 6 more previews to add! It would be so much easier to use  a grid view for sequencing a stage and then link that grid view to a specific preview. All would be great!  Just a note, what name is assigned to the "Master Preview?"  I see all the stages I created in the previews pane (and a couple of test ones I was playing with earlier. Still working out a few kinks and I found an error that was missed last year since the error checking in the preview design is fantastic!

I also know we are adding another stage this year and replacing one channel of for a led tree with a 16 channel RGB Tree. I'm guessing I will need to import all the old sequences first before making the changes to the previews. Is that correct? Thanks for your help! Much to do!

Greg

 

[Aubrey]

4 minutes ago, MSB said:

I got it but having all the stages in one screen is really low res and will be very hard to sequence!

 

Clarification to my suggestion, I meant to sequence the shows in your 10 separate previews, then export the props as groups over to your master and copy the lines of sequencing into one master sequence once it's all done. You shouldn't need to tweak at that point, and if you did, you'd go back into your solo-section preview/sequence and make changes there before copying over.

[MSB]

OK, I have created 11 separate stages for our show (one to go for our MegaMega Tree). In each stage I made a "stage group" of all the props and exported them as you explained. I then created a 2020 Master Preview by importing all of these stage groups as s5 prop files and squeezed them on my screen. I then opened one of last year's musical sequences using the 2020 Master Preview and after a few error corrections I was able to convert the musical sequences from last year and all the channels are mapping correctly , (no archived props) and controlling the lights and did not lose any sequencing Here's a preview: S5 Conversion Master Preview 2020. 

Now my question is how can I assign a particular stage to a grid view to be able to program that stage and not worry about the remaining stages while keeping all the remaining props in the Master Grid active? As you can see from the screen video above  it can be quite confusing if one isn't 100% familiar with every stage. It's distracting for me and I created it. I can see errors happening creating a sequencing file for every stage for the same song. In our case we would need  to sequence 11 separate files and then merge them all into 1 master file for the show. I think we have about 17 songs already sequenced that we will be bringing over to S5.  I'm trying to create a workflow that will be able to share with the other two people that do the programming.