Set Intensity

[mryan23]

When I have the intensity set at 50% or below I have trouble seeing it in the visualizer, I can see its there but it looks more like its 10% on than 50. Being a newbie I have no idea how this will look with real lights. Can anyone with experience tell me how well you are able to see lights when they are less than 100% on? Have you found a threshold where you believe it is too dim to be seen clearly?

[Guest guest]

With actual lights it is a completely different ball game! The visualizer is rather dim for 50%, I can agree there, but depending on wether you are using LED's or Incandescents, that 50% makes a big difference.

50% LED is sometimes or looks close to 100% depending on the LED itself. I have some Pastel Purple LED strings that at 50% are just as bright as they are at 100%, with these I actually had to drop their intensity to 20%-25% to get a good purple look to them and not be "blinding" purple!

Some Orange LED strings I can use at 50% intensity and look good, and they can still be seen at 10% intensity, but are very faint.

Incadescents are a world of their own, C7 bulbs I can dim to 25-30% and look nice, although some strings of incandescents I can't take below 35%-40% or they just aren't on. Most incandescents if I use a set intensity is usually at 50%-75%, although most of the time, the incandescents are kept at 95%-100%. Unless fading up/down from/to 0%.

All just depends on the make up of the light string and/or bulb, wether LED or Incandescent.

Hope this helps a little.

[Don]

Just for the sake of correctness ...

Animation View = Current S2 animation viewer.

Visualizer = Part of the S3 software suite.

[Guest guest]

Don, I just used the term they used, although it may be an "animation view" in S2, I've always called it a "visualizer" myself, mainly because to me, it allows you to somewhat visualize what your lights will look like as they do whatever you have them do in the sequencer.

But still not as good as having actual lights plugged into a controller to see what they REALLY look like and do!

[Don]

Wasn't trying to single out any particular person.

Just trying to make sure everyone is talking about the same aspect of the software. When S3 is released there will be both a visualizer and animation view in use. A user could have a question about the animation view, but since they asked about the visualizer, the answers wouldn't be geared toward the actual product.

[Jim Saul]

do you have anything out that you could plug in and test with? that would be the best way. Generally incandescents will be very accurate in that 50 is 1/2, but that is not always the case with LEDs

[JBullard]

You are correct Don.

Similar to the different license levels and # controller questions.

Takes a lot more detail from the poster to help focus on the correct problem.

[Steven]

mryan23 wrote:

When I have the intensity set at 50% or below I have trouble seeing it in the visualizer,...

Back to the original question: Yes, that is a limitation of the animation window and there is nothing you can do about it. It's even worse for Rainbow Floods and similar 12v LEDs because they are still visible at 1%, even though that's black, as far as the sequence editor will show you.

[Max-Paul]

This is how I work with it. Either I leave everything at 100% while I am programming and then once I am done I will go back and change to a fade with the proper high and low setting. This is determined in part with experience or by running a test on my display and figure out what parameters to use. As a few others have said, it is just something that you learn to work around. No fix for it.

[cenote]

mryan23, as everybody else says, best way is to crack open the controller, plug it in, put some of your different lights on it, and test. Inc., not to bad, LED's- are very difficult to get the color and fade you are looking for with out hooking them up to the Hardware app, and use the test console to run threw the settings.

Good luck, hope we have helped

Chuck