LOR II Feature Request

[Guest guest]

Dan,

I have a feature request for the animation window that I'm not sure you can fit in but I'll toss it out anyway. I'd really like to see the ability to lay a background graphic file behind the animator window. That way I could take a pic of my house and do sone layouts on it so I can better visualize my show.

As always, thanks for a great product and even better customer support.

Scott Hardin
Columbus, IN

[Guest guest]

I would agree this would be a GREAT feature. I know from past experience with another companys product(hmmm I wonder who) that they had that option avail 3 years ago. You could dim the pic, and everything. Would be great to have in my new fav toys. lol

[Guest guest]

This idea I kinda forgot about. I had something like this on the program I had for the Commodore 64 a long while back.

To add to the image for a background.

After you create the animation the way you want, make the screen active so you can click on each light to determine it state, on, dim... Have a frame advance button to move back and forth to the next and previous timing sequence. Also have an input to change the timing of that sequence.



Joe

[Guest guest]

This sounds like a great idea. The first thing I did with the software was to build a "model" of my house and front yard and "placed" my lights on the screen. Anything that helps placement would be wonderful.

As a related request, what about the ability to add "widgets". In other words, prebuilt icons shaped like, for example, mini trees, multi channel mega trees, snowmen, stars, candy canes, rows of lights, nativity scenes etc. Add a widget, set the channel and controler ID, modify the color and get a much more realistic animation of your show.

Just a thought.

[Guest guest]

dougwills wrote:

This sounds like a great idea. The first thing I did with the software was to build a "model" of my house and front yard and "placed" my lights on the screen. Anything that helps placement would be wonderful.

As a related request, what about the ability to add "widgets". In other words, prebuilt icons shaped like, for example, mini trees, multi channel mega trees, snowmen, stars, candy canes, rows of lights, nativity scenes etc. Add a widget, set the channel and controler ID, modify the color and get a much more realistic animation of your show.

Just a thought.

That would be cool. The problem is our display is so spread out that it's impossible to capture it in one picture. This is why the display doesn't photograph well (at least as far as an "all encompassing" picture either -- you'll see what I mean if you visit our website.

Sometimes I envy people like Carson and Ron that can set up a tripod across the street and capture the entire display, but then I'm glad I have a lot of space to play with.

-Tim

[Guest guest]

Tim, I am in the same boat as you. My display is not just in the front yard, but also in the side yards and the back yard. With such a wide front yard and the lights going all over the property, we can never get one picture to capture the entire display. But I definately love the idea of a better visualization tool with built in items.

Will Sanders

[Guest guest]

Maybe have more than one animation screen. Something that would allow us to add as many as needed and customize each one by title, controller etc.. "Add display Window" - "Set window as - Front (side, back, left, right, inside etc)", spread them over your dual monitor pc and hit PLAY.

I play with 3d animation software and it has this option. Really works great to get an overall view of things.

[Guest guest]

If you have ever used Microsoft Visio it would be really cool if you could use something link that, then import the image. It has lots of drag and drop objects that you could customize. Having premade would be great.. Really nice if they could be scaled to size. And even a bit larger grid. 100X100 is a bit small.



I have the same problem with the shape of the yard and having a 2 story house. I just laid everything out in 2 dimensions rather than try to scale it.

Light groups might be fun. Group a bunch of lights and apply patterns to them.



Does anyone else have a problem with the slider bar not sliding with the scroll wheel? Or is it just my mouse driver?



Joe

[Guest guest]

dougwills wrote:

Maybe have more than one animation screen. Something that would allow us to add as many as needed and customize each one by title, controller etc..

I like that idea.

Right now I just do every thing 'abstract'. Mega tree is a row of colored stripes. Mini trees are red and green blotches down the bottom of the screen. The 4 channels of icicle lights are represented by 4 white blotches at the top. etc. etc. Those who took my LOR 101 class at PLUS 2005 got to see how 'abstract' it reallly is :laughing:. But I've used it to verify ALL my sequencing and have made very few changes after seeing it with the 'real' lights (mainly for fade levels, which are hard to estimate until you see them with the real lights and get used to them).

-Tim

[Guest guest]

After you create the animation the way you want, make the screen active so you can click on each light to determine it state, on, dim... Have a frame advance button to move back and forth to the next and previous timing sequence. Also have an input to change the timing of that sequence.

Excellent ideas. I'd like to add more:

1. The ability to easily see which channel # each animation object is assigned to. Visualizing animation ideas is easy; I just look at the animation diagram and think, "OK, I'll flash this tree while I fade these, etc." Applying that to the editor is difficult because there's no easy way to see which blobs in the animation window correspond to which channel.

Yes, I know I can flip to "edit" mode and move through the channels to highlight them, and I've arranged my channels in a logical order, but I still can't quickly find out which channels trees x, y and z are assigned to. There should be an easier way. A checkbox that overlays the channel number on the proper animation "blob", for example. Or display the channel # when the mouse hovers over a blob. Or, better yet, when the cursor in the editor is on a particular channel, highlight that channel's animation "blobs" in the animation window. So as I move the cursor around I can quickly see which physical object I am editing.

I've only got 40 channels I'm planning on running for next year; I can only imagine how difficult setting up animations for hundreds of channels must be. I think this would be a huge step forward in keeping track of it all.

2. We need the ability to "step through" the animation and play/pause/resume from any location in the song. I design animations in pieces, 10 seconds here, 15 seconds there. I then run through the animation to visualize what it will look like, go back and tweak it, run through it again, and repeat until I like it. Then I move on to the next part of the song.

This is extremely difficult because, unless I am missing something, I can only replay from the beginning. Now that I'm near the middle of my song, this process is taking extreme amounts of time. I suggest the following:

2a: A "slider" bar at the top that will move the "current position" of the song.
2b: The "play" button resumes playback from the point of this slider; OR, provide a "play from cursor" option that starts playing wherever the cursor happens to be.
2c: Provide a hotkey for play/pause. The space bar would be a good choice.
2d: When dragging the "current position slider" back and forth, show the animations in the animation window. That way small sections can be quickly visualized by dragging the slider over them. If possible, play the music here, too. Yes, this results in music & animations being played "not in real time" - they play at whatever speed you happen to be dragging the slider.

If you've ever designed Flash animations for the web using Macromedia's Flash editor, it's the same concept. Making changes is rapid because you can visualize right in the editor and playback from any point in the animation at any time.

3. Along the same lines above, allow me to start the tapper wizard from any point in the song. I'm tapping out portions of the song at a time, editing them to create the animation, then moving on and tapping out the next portion. This makes it easy to animate, but is time consuming because I've got to wait for playback to get to the point I want to tap to.

4. More intuitive use of hotkeys. Or, allow me to reassign hotkeys. For example, when I hit "delete", I'd expect the cell to flip to "off", but it doesn't. I'd like the various options (toggle, twinkle, shimmer, fade in, fade out, etc) more aligned on the keyboard (assigned to zxcvbn, for example).

I hope these requests do not come off as arrogance from a new person who has no idea what he's doing. I certainly did not intend them that way, but rather as constructive advice to make an already excellent product even better. I will be a paying customer in '06 to the tune of 40 channels, and that's just to get started. I plan to expand on a yearly basis thereafter if everything goes well. I've spent about 6 hours now playing with the editor, setting up a song for next year, and these are a few of the limitations I've run into, so I just wanted to share.

Thank you for your time.

[Guest guest]

G'day Dan,

A couple of suggestions from a newbie for LOR II.

When using the sequence editor I would find it useful to be able to select (single or multiple) channels and move them up or down the list, eg: drag and drop. Although I have created a master template with all the channel definitions, at times it would be easier to move groupings of channels near each other to see various effects.

At the moment when a sequence is played the buttons change from grey to the selected effect colour at the time of an event. This works well to see the effects. My suggestion would be when editing a sequence to have the channel button display in the colour of the effect, instead of the standard grey.

Apologies if these features already exist and I just haven't found them.

Cheers,

davidt
www.daves-portal.com

[Guest guest]

jjpicard wrote:

This is extremely difficult because, unless I am missing something, I can only replay from the beginning. Now that I'm near the middle of my song, this process is taking extreme amounts of time.

In the task bar, click Play--> Play Range. You can then choose "Full Sequence", "Selection", or "Visible Screen".

Full sequence plays, well, the full sequence.

Selection will play just what you select.

Visible Screen will just play the section of the sequence which you see on the screen at that point in time.

[Guest guest]

DanLW wrote:

Visible Screen will just play the section of the sequence which you see on the screen at that point in time.

Visible Screen is what I use 99% of the time. I've found "play selection" to be too cumbersome.

I'd really like a "play from selected cell" which would start at the selected cell (or the left edge of the screen if nothing selected) and play until I stop it or the end.

-Tim

[Guest guest]

Dan -- Thank you! That helps immensly.

Tim:

I'd really like a "play from selected cell" which would start at the selected cell (or the left edge of the screen if nothing selected) and play until I stop it or the end.

Agreed; that would be a nice addition.

[Guest guest]

OK, I wanted to add another request. This is a shameless ripoff of Peter Lent's post (here: http://planetchristmas.mywowbb.com/forum17/373.html ) so he gets the credit for this idea:

Display an audio level spectrograph on the timeline, at the top! If anyone is unsure what I'm talking about, download a demo copy of Sound Forge (or any other higher end audio editing application) and play with it.

This feature would make virtually every other method of creating sequences obsolete. Who needs the tapper wizard when you can clearly see the beats, and cut events into them at the exact spot they hit?

[Guest guest]

jjpicard wrote:

OK, I wanted to add another request. This is a shameless ripoff of Peter Lent's post (here: http://planetchristmas.mywowbb.com/forum17/373.html ) so he gets the credit for this idea:

Display an audio level spectrograph on the timeline, at the top! If anyone is unsure what I'm talking about, download a demo copy of Sound Forge (or any other higher end audio editing application) and play with it.

This feature would make virtually every other method of creating sequences obsolete. Who needs the tapper wizard when you can clearly see the beats, and cut events into them at the exact spot they hit?

I'm pretty sure Dan said this was coming in LOR II in his talk at PLUS 2005. :waycool:

-Tim

[Guest guest]

Hi Dan,

Another suggestion for LOR II, assuming it is not just operator error...

The Zoom Channels Out button does not appear to zoom out far enough to display all of the channels on my system. This makes it difficult to see all of the channels when stepping through a sequence. Could you please allow Zoom Channels Out to keep stepping out until all channels are displayed.

Thanks, davidt

http://www.daves-portal.com

[Guest guest]

jjpicard wrote:

Display an audio level spectrograph on the timeline, at the top! If anyone is unsure what I'm talking about, download a demo copy of Sound Forge (or any other higher end audio editing application) and play with it.

This feature would make virtually every other method of creating sequences obsolete. Who needs the tapper wizard when you can clearly see the beats, and cut events into them at the exact spot they hit?

This one feature would so reduce my stress levels when creating sequences!!!



I have 1 addition. When you insert multiple events in between two existing events, I would like to see and previous effects to remain unchanged and streched across the appropriate events as before the addition of events.

This is most annoying to me because I usually tap out a song's beats first. Then design all the basic animation. Then I go back and insert more events for tree runs and so forth so I have to re create all the basi animations again.

In any case, looking forward to the upgrade

[Guest guest]

to keep from adding another thread....

I'd like to be able to "UNDO" and added event or multiple events. I might try to break up a time slice into a zillion little pieces so i can do tree runs or something, but I end up putting it in the wrong spot, or dividing it up in too many/few pieces. I'd like ot "UNDO" my mistake & try it again.