Fade an existing sequence (channel) from 0% to some preset %

[George Cotton]

I have spent several hours sequencing a "main theme" part of a song because all of the musical elements were easier to hear and program.

Now, I would like to re-use this sequence a couple of times at several, but different, intensities without anything in the programmed intensities changing in the process - just overall intensity change. In the song, the music bed repeats, but the level is lower.

Also, take an existing part of a sequence, copy and paste it to the beginning of a sequence and fade up to 100% and at the end, down to 0%.

[Jay Czerwinski]

George,

I understand your situation and made a similar post some time ago. See
http://forums.lightorama.com/forum72/23758.html

You will see that I only got a response to submit the request to LOR via this email address: wishlist@lightorama.com

I continued to look and there is a solution you can try that looks to be somewhat challenging and not a totally easy manual process of editing the file manually in notepad. See http://forums.lightorama.com/forum72/24082.html

I ended up shying away and doing the manual adjustments as you feared you might have to do...

Sorry I can't offer better, but if there has been some recent developments to a better method, I am sure we will see someone post it here soon!

Jay

[Steven]

I made the same feature request in this post.

[Jay Czerwinski]

Steven wrote:

I made the same feature request in this post.

Wow, that would be really intense! I hope you also made the request directly to LOR.

Although the method you show would be awsome, I still would be happy with a simple upper end or lower end adjustment that was linear for a selected track. This would not only help in variation with candles and the like, but it would help people who have sequences on incandescent bulbs who have upgraded to LEDs. I hear that 85% and up on an LED is the same as 100% on regular bulbs --- meaning a smooth fade up on a regular bulb would look like it toped out and stayed flat on an LED light.... And the something similar happens when fading to zero, where an LED goes dark before a traditional bulb would.

[ace_master]

I believe there IS a way you can do what you are talking about, George... I had a similar problem when I sequenced everything and then found out that the intensities of everything I made didn't work with the LEDs I was using... so I had to use a text editor to change all my 75% intensities to 50%, and all my 50% to 25%... and so on...

The problem with using text editors is that if you screw up just one line, the entire file is useless in LOR... so if you do go about doing this... MAKE SURE you have a copy (or two) of your original sequence somewhere as backup.


You can change any intensity number to another using this method.

Your FIND and REPLACE lines must match exactly, except for the number you are changing... even an unseen space at the end of one of these lines will render your sequence unreadable in LOR.
[line]Using Notepad++

Open a copy of your LOR sequence and navigate to: Search/Replace

To change all your start intensities from 0 to 25 you would type in (quotes included)...

Find what: startIntensity="0"
Replace with: startIntensity="25"

Now click Replace All. (it will tell you how many instances it found and replaced).
[line] To change all your end intensities from 100 to 75 you would type in (quotes included)...

Find what: endIntensity="100"
Replace with: endIntensity="75"

Now click Replace All. (it will tell you how many instances it found and replaced).
[line]

Now that you've changed your numbers to whatever you wanted them to... Open the newly modifies sequence in LOR your intensities should all be dimmer than they were. Now open your original sequence... Select an entire line on the modified sequence and copy and paste it into the your original one wherever you'd like them to start.


I recommend that you do keep a copy of your original sequence somewhere, untouched untill you are done this method... It doesn't take much to accidently overwrite or open and change the wrong file;)



I hope this helps accomplish what you're out to do.

Curious... what song are you sequencing?

[George Cotton]

OK, I finally got around to checking out your suggestion. Apparently the newer versions of S2 (v2.9.4) Advanced formats each Centisecond with a start and end intensity independent of the timing marks on either side.

For example, the first Centisecond has the following line of code for a 100% intensity:


The 2nd Centisecond for a 40% intensity:


The 3rd Centisecond for a 35% intensity:


The 50th Centisecond for a 48%


The 98th Centisecond for a 25% intensity:


And so on to the 99th Centisecond which is again a 100% intensity:


As you can see, each startIntensity is appropiate for THAT Centisecond alone and is incremented by "1" for the endIntensity.

There is no global startIntensensity and endIntensity for a channel or controller as each channel's time division has it's own start and end. So for 16 channels with 1 second divided into Centiseconds, there would be 1,600 different lines of code with each one it's own startIntensity and endIntensity totally dependent on the intensity of that slice of time.

It's back to the drawing board unless v3 comes out soon. It looks like it will do what I want, if I understand it correctly.

[rwertz]

George, that doesn't look like the type of effects the LOR program would typically create (unless you actually created a one Centisecond timing grid and created all those effects). Maybe the sequence was exported from, or modified by, some external program?


Here's what I typically see. The effects below start at 2 seconds, do a 4 second fade up to 100%, stay "On" for 15 seconds, and then do a 4 second fade down.






But you are correct, there is no global startIntensity and endIntensity for a channel. You can set a Min / Max intensity limit from the hardware utility. But the result is slightly different and will apply to any sequence ran on that controller.

[George Cotton]

After thinking about this after I posted it, I now know what is going on.

First off:
I created a new, blank 1 second sequence as a Centisecond grid.

Then:
In channel 1, I created a 100 Centisecond ( one second ) fade up from 0% to 100% to work from.

Finally:
I then "grabbed" a random Centisecond slice from Channel 1 and pasted it into a slice on channel 2. I did this for all 100 slices.

So here is the catch. Each slice is in reality, a "fade" up somewhere along the overall original fade up timeline. So, each slice will have a startCentisecond, endCentisecond and a startIntensity, endIntensity, with the "end" of each pair offset by +1.

This explains what I'm seeing, but still does not allow me to take this 1 second sequence and adjust it's fade (without changing the individual slices random nature relative to the original) to a 0% to 25% 1 second sequence, then a 25% to 50%, a 50% to 75% and finally a 75% to 100%. This would create 4 seconds that overall would fade from virtually 0% to 100% from start to finish and maintain the randomness of the original.

It looks like I will have to create the entire 4 seconds by hand and then copy n paste it as necessary, throughout the sequence. This would involve creating a 4 second fade up on a Centisecond grid in channel 1. Then using this 400 slice sequence, randomly copy n paste from each second to the same second in channel 2. Do this for all 4 seconds and I should have a 0% to 100% totally random fade.

It will be a lot of work, but the effect should be stunning.

PS: I have had a few people IM me asking what on earth I'm trying to do.

Well here is the plan for Halloween, I'm using the THX Robot to open my show. But when the "fuse" blows and the robot moves around a bit is where things get even more strange.

I'm going to have some errie footsteps walk to my first landscape yard light. Then the sound of a small metal door opens (which I have not found yet), and the Ole London Lamplighter will light the first street "lantern" on the lampost. The metal door will close and again steps go on to the next yard light. Of course the lantern is not at full brilliance for a few seconds, thus the randomness of my fades within some paramaters, but not always. I've watched a candle being lit many times for this idea.

The pattern repeats for all 16 yard lights. Near the end, the rest of my normal landscape lights will start to fade up so everything is at 100% after the last "lantern" is lit and at full light output. At this point, the THX robot will return and finish the opening musical sequence. If lighting all 16 is just too long, I can always do every other one and then add the rest near the end of the sequence as a simple fade up.

If anybody has a sound effect that would work for a small lantern door opening and closing, it would be appreciated. I may have one somewhere, but haven't gotten that far as the musical side will be the last, and easiest element to sequence.

The yard lights are 14vac (typical) automative amber lamps (194) which have been in use pretty much for over 10 years with very few replacements. The automative lamps are very durable as compared to the typical yard lights sold at home improvement stores. They draw just 4 watts and work great. The remaining lights are 10w. I'll add a 50Amp full wave bridge rectrifier on each transformer and feed the whole landscape lighting thing to a CMB-16D controller for Halloween.

[Steven]

George Cotton wrote:

I'll add a 50Amp full wave bridge rectrifier on each transformer and feed the whole landscape lighting thing to a CMB-16D controller for Halloween.

There is an alternative, and that is to use channels 1-8 of a CTB-16. Others on this forum have found that the CTB-16 AC controllers will control 12VAC, but the logic on those boards require 120V on the right side.

[George Cotton]

That is true, and I thought of that. But since the landscape lights are a pernament fixture, adding the rectifier (which I have a bunch of), and running the whole thing on DC was the obvious choice for me.

I also have a couple of the CMB-16's as well. Plus, it would take two of the CTB-16's (which I also have) to do the same as one DC version.

I may even leave a sequence in the controller year round to do something when the landscape lights are on every night. Nothing spectatular, just something.

I might even put some RGB LED's in them and really have some fun with the neighbors by having the landscape lights a different color each night. Who knows?

[George Cotton]

I finally decided to bite the bullet and created a new 1 second sequence of flickers from 0% to 10%. This was a "fade up" from 0% to 10%.

I then opened this sequence in Notepad++ and used a random number generator to create a block of numbers from 1-10. I entered these random numbers into the "startIntensity" for each time slice and +1 for the "endIntenstiy.

Then I did a copy and paste in Notepad++ for the next 10. I incremented the "startCentisecond" and "endCentisecond" appropiately and then did another random number generation from 11-20. And so on.

The entire process took MUCH less time than doing a cut and paste in the LOR Seq Ed software. I did check each bank of 10 in the SE to make sure there were no errors. And, there were a couple of typo's which were easy to find as I only had to check 10 lines of code.

Now, I can go back and put in some random flickers in the 100% intensity in SE as no candle will burn 100% all the time.

In hindsight, I probably could have saved about 25% of my time by just creating a fill intensity of 100% for the 100 centiSeconds and not had the extra +1 entries that were created by using an initial "fade up" sequence. But it's done now and on my test unit with 4w nightlights (8-2 packs from Wal-Mart), it looks pretty realistic.

I have been adding the rest of the effects for the remainder of the THX Robot open, but still deciding on which main display lights for what effects to use them on.