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Changing intensity setting


welder_man12

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welder_man12 wrote:

How Do I Change the intensity for the shimmer and twinkle. Right now it is set at 50 I want to go down to around 30.


This question also applies to the SuperStar Sequencer. In the SuperStar Sequencer you can set the intensity on a scene, and you can also set it to shimmer or twinkle. However, it turns out that when you export the file and play it in the Sequence Editor the intensity setting is ignored if you have shimmer or twinkle set. I only discovered this after writing the Silent Night sequence. So it is a bug in a sense, I should force the intensity to be 100% whenever shimmer or twinkle is set because that is what you will see when it is exported.
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BrianBruderer wrote:

welder_man12 wrote:
How Do I Change the intensity for the shimmer and twinkle. Right now it is set at 50 I want to go down to around 30.


This question also applies to the SuperStar Sequencer. In the SuperStar Sequencer you can set the intensity on a scene, and you can also set it to shimmer or twinkle. However, it turns out that when you export the file and play it in the Sequence Editor the intensity setting is ignored if you have shimmer or twinkle set. I only discovered this after writing the Silent Night sequence. So it is a bug in a sense, I should force the intensity to be 100% whenever shimmer or twinkle is set because that is what you will see when it is exported.

I might be misunderstanding, but the Sequence Editor doesn't ignore intensities for shimmer or twinkle. If you tell it to shimmer at 37%, it should shimmer at 37%. So, instead of intentionally artificially limiting them to 100% when they're created via SuperStar, maybe we should figure out why the files exported from SuperStar are being interpreted as 100%.
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bob wrote:

BrianBruderer wrote:
welder_man12 wrote:
How Do I Change the intensity for the shimmer and twinkle. Right now it is set at 50 I want to go down to around 30.


This question also applies to the SuperStar Sequencer. In the SuperStar Sequencer you can set the intensity on a scene, and you can also set it to shimmer or twinkle. However, it turns out that when you export the file and play it in the Sequence Editor the intensity setting is ignored if you have shimmer or twinkle set. I only discovered this after writing the Silent Night sequence. So it is a bug in a sense, I should force the intensity to be 100% whenever shimmer or twinkle is set because that is what you will see when it is exported.

I might be misunderstanding, but the Sequence Editor doesn't ignore intensities for shimmer or twinkle.  If you tell it to shimmer at 37%, it should shimmer at 37%.  So, instead of intentionally artificially limiting them to 100% when they're created via SuperStar, maybe we should figure out why the files exported from SuperStar are being interpreted as 100%.


I did the following
1) I created a sequence in SuperStar that does shimmer at 5 different levels on some LED strings and some Incandescent strings that are hooked up to standard 16 channel controllers.

2) I exported the sequence and opened it in the Sequence Editor. The shimmers did show on the Sequence Editor to be at 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, and 20% so the Sequence Editor does see the different intensities on a shimmer and does display them.

3) I played the sequence to the Visualizer, and the shimmers did display at different intensities

4) I played the sequence to the actual lights, and the shimmers on the lights were all at the same level. In other words, the shimmer at 20% was the same intensity as the shimmer at 100%

So in conclusion, the Sequence Editor does observe the intensity levels on a shimmer and a twinkle but it appears that the controllers do not.

A follow up question to this, the SuperStar program allows different intensities on shimmer and twinkle, but in the Sequence Editor I could not figure out how to apply shimmer and twinkle at anything other than 100%. Do you know how to set shimmer and twinkle to less than 100% in the Sequence Editor? (I think that was the original question the fellow was asking on this thread)
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Hi Brian,

First, twinkling or shimmering at non-100% was a new feature for LOR 2 that was not supported in LOR 1, and in fact it wasn't even supported in the hardware. So, some very old controllers would need firmware updates to support it. If they didn't have the updated firmware, they would interpret any shimmer/twinkle as a 100% shimmer/twinkle. Is it possible that you have such a controller? It's working fine for me, by the way.

Second, regarding the question of how to set shimmer or twinkle at non-100% in the Sequence Editor: Use the Custom tool (which is the one that looks like a star). Selecting that tool will enable the five buttons to its right, which in turn will allow you to select any of the six possible combinations of "shimmer or twinkle" with "set intensity or fade up or fade down". If you want, you can also use the "Intensity Tool Options" and "Fade Tool Options" buttons (the ones that look like Set Intensity or Fade Up but with a question mark superimposed) to get different intensity values for them.

Third, I just tried out the export myself, and it looks to me like a 30% intensity set in SuperStar comes out in the exported sequence as 10%, and 37% comes out as 15%. Did I do something wrong, or is this a mistake in SuperStar, or is it an intentional change due to lighting curve normalization, or something else? Thanks.

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Yes, I do have controllers that are a few years old and I have not upgraded the firmware.

As for the exported intensity level being different when exporting, yes, the SuperStar software assumes a dimming curve for LED lights so the exported value is lower.

For next year I should have a way to specify if a light is LED or incandescant or it could be a setting in the Visualizer.

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BrianBruderer wrote:

Yes, I do have controllers that are a few years old and I have not upgraded the firmware.

That might be the issue, then. I would suggest asking Dan what version of firmware is necessary to support non-100% shimmers and twinkles for the particular kind of controller that you have (I have no idea what the answer to this question is myself).
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