You added a lot of channels - now your stuck reprogramming - NOT

[sjmiller]

My bottom line was that I bought 48 channels of LOR during the Feb. sale and sequenced 8 songs over the next few months using 43 channels. Then I bought another controller, and built a DIO project - song number 9 was now 114 channels.

I asked and received a lot of answers (including tech support) on how to retrofit my first 8 songs, I tried them all - an none of them really worked (without hours of repetitious work per song).

I stumbled onto the solution tonight, it's not perfect - but it even works with songs that have multiple tracks.

1) I had exported my controller from my 114 ch sequence.

2) Create a new musical sequence read in the same media file - imported the sequence (.lcc) - don't specify controllers.

3) All of my sequences are set to .05 sec timing for track 1 - set that timing for the new sequence Track 1.

4) Now open the original song sequence, put you cursor in the top left cell and click - now scroll to the bottom right cell and shift-click, then control-c. Now go to Window -> new Sequence, select it. Place the cursor in the top left cell and press control-v.

You have now copied all of your previous programming into the new sequence - all you now have to do is cut-and-paste the channels to the correct new channels.

You will have lost your track programming, but not the timing or light control. Tonight it only took an hour to convert one of my sequences from 43 channels to 114 - earlier this week it took almost 8 hour to do one song.

The price is that I have lost my track programming on the song - but not the timing.

Two things 1) I'd like it if someone else could verify my shortcut, and 2) I think LOR or someone in the animated lighting community needs to help us newbies from shooting ourselves in the foot. I had NO IDEA that adding channels and reassigning channels would be so time consuming.

Steve

[Steven]

I took one of my sequences from last year.

I added the new channels to the bottom of the 1st track, named and colored them, and assigned the hardware settings.

Then I exported the channel configuration to "Christmas 2009.lcc".

I them simply imported this new channel configuration to my other sequences. Then I started the work of actually using the new channels, mostly by copy and paste from other segments.

[LENNY RUEL]

Steve:
Don't know IF you are aware of it but you can also import downloaded sequences the same way even though you use a fixed 20 cell per second grid and the downloaded sequence is not. Just make sure you have any skew work if it needs to be done taken care of ahead of time since you can't skew a fixed timing grid. Just copy and past the sequence to your grid by timing. It will look different as you'll see channels come on and go off in the middle of a cell, but you can still move channels around and everything. I'm doing Believe in Holiday Magic right now and had a 16 from last year that I wanted to use the timings and some of the channels that had the lyrics.

Lenny

[sjmiller]

Thanks for the feed back Steve & Lenny. To be honest when I went from 48 ch of LOR to 64 ch of LOR plus 98 ch of DIO - I re-worked my entire display. And when I say re-worked I mean re-worked, every ch description changed, every channel assignment changed.

So when I copied my .lms file to a new name then imported the new .lcc - it CLOBBERED everything - all of the channel descriptions were changed to "New Channel", color assignments were set to the default blue, physical channels were unpredictable, and the animation needed a total re-work - hence 8 hours to fix the mess, for one song.

Looking forward - I figure on one or two new LOR controllers for 2010, and using more of my DIO channels. There has to be a tried and true way of setting things up so the impact is not so devastating.



Steve

[rwertz]

If you are just trying to add the new channels to the bottom of the first track, Steven's idea is a very quick (and effective) way to do theat.

Importing the new channel config into each sequence will add the new channels onto the bottom of each sequence. All the channel info and animation settings will copy from the new channel config. All the lighting effects from the existing channels will remain intact.

We may have gotten ahead of ourselves in the other thread. We thought you were trying to insert the new channels in between the other channels (reordering the channel list). That's were it gets difficult.

[Randy]

Here's something else that I do as well...

I like to have my channels grouped together by location, as it helps me to visualize things better and program interplay better between those channels.

After doing some painful translations / upgrades several months ago for the 2009 display to add some more channels, I hit upon an idea. I added a large amount of spare unassigned channels in the file for each group or location. So maybe added 48 channels to the side yard, 64 channels to the driveway, etc. All over the place.

If you're going to have to do translations at least once adding more spare channels is not that much extra work. Now I think I'm set for a few more years without having to do the same painful process each year. If I wanted to add some channels next year, I'll just assign the spares in that region and keep going with no reconfiguration required.

I've probably added 200 or 300 spares total to the file, but I think I'm pretty future proof for a while. There's no penalty in having the extra channels except for some scrolling during programming.....Sometimes I even use the spare channels as a scratch pad to copy chase patterns, etc. and delete them later after copying them to the correct channels....

Randy

[rwertz]

Randy wrote:

Sometimes I even use the spare channels as a scratch pad to copy chase patterns, etc. and delete them later after copying them to the correct channels

I have three channels (Tmg1-3) at the top of Track1 that I use to mark the timing of the musical notes. Then I add the lighting effects "to taste". I keep the timing info in case I ever want to redo all or part of the sequence later.