What's the Smallest Timing Grid You Can Use?

[dboyer]

or, in other words...how fast can lights (particularly LED's) turn on and off?

I apologize in advance if this has been answered before. I searched using every term I could think of but didn't come across the answer.

I'm starting to sequence a song for this year and need very fast changes- smaller than the 1/10th of a second grid that I started out using. As I whittled down the timing grid the question arose- will the lights even switch on and off this fast?

Yes- I could have tested myself, and eventually will, but my existing lights are up in the attic and this year's first purchase from CDI has not arrived yet.

Thanks for your assistance.

[lightzilla]

dboyer wrote:

or, in other words...how fast can lights (particularly LED's) turn on and off?

I apologize in advance if this has been answered before. I searched using every term I could think of but didn't come across the answer.

I'm starting to sequence a song for this year and need very fast changes- smaller than the 1/10th of a second grid that I started out using. As I whittled down the timing grid the question arose- will the lights even switch on and off this fast?

A number of folks use 0.05 rather than the basic 0.10. I just finish the timing marks on a song & I used 0.04.

My Snow Miser song was sub-divided in a few places to half of 0.05 for good speed, of was it even faster. You can down load it from http://www.lorsequences.com to see what I am talking about.

[George Simmons]

I believe the Sequence Editor allows timings down to a centisecond (1/100th of a second), although most lights and/or human eyes can't keep up with an on/off cycle at that speed.

[Dale W]

I haven't seen where musicians can play much faster than one note every 0.05 seconds. I use that for my grid.

[LightORamaDan]

There is a 1/100th second resolution for the timing but that is not going to be reliable for a number of reasons. First, if it is run on a Windows PC, the PC's timer does not have a 1/100th second resolution as Windows is not a realtime operating system. If it is run on a MP3-Director, it is realtime and can handle 1/100th second resolution.

But then there is the issue of the light controller. The controller switches the lights on/off every 1/120th second in the US and 1/100th second in 50Hz countries. Because of minor timming issues in communication, etc a 1/100th second blip may not actually happen because the on and off commands could get to the controller within the 1/120th second so they on is cancelled out before there is a chance to turn it on...

Now 1/20 sec or even 1/40 sec is pretty reliable.

BUT with the Chase Tool you can get around the issue of timing grid in many cases. The chase tool starts and stops on a timing mark BUT the commands that make up the chase do not necessarly fall on a timing mark. So you can have 16 channels chase a 1/10 second on/off over a 2/10 second time frame.

Dan

[dboyer]

Very interesting. Thanks for all the great information!