Moving multiple channels

[kevin]

I know how to move individule channels up and down via Channel Positioning.

But is there a way to move entire controllers up and down? I tried a Shift-Click, and I looked in the Channel Property Grid menu.. Am I missing something or can you only move channels one by one?


If not being able to do grouping on channels might be a great feature. With a Hide capability like Excel would be nice.

[bob]

No, there's currently no way to move more than a single channel at a time, but this is a good idea. Thanks!

[pHar]

Hi Bob,

This was a comment I was going to make about usability. The development team needs to consider all operations that someone may want to do in bulk. Selecting multiple channels to move them is a perfect example.

Another item is if you want to move or copy rows to another track it appears to be a one at a time thing. If you could select mutiple rows from the name column and then perfrom the action it would be very powerful for this and the original posted topic.

On the subject of moving rows around I noticed that it is not clear where a row will get inserted when you are doing a drag and drop. It seems to be hit or miss. Sometimes it is above the row I want others below. It take a bit of trial and error. A bolded line between rows to share where the rows will drop when you release the mouse button would be very helpful.

Overall the product is very good but I thought there is room for some usability considerations. In general I thnk you guys should study Excel and leverage some of its usability characteristics. I think most of you customers would be familiar with the interface characteristics of Excel and would adapt quickly to how the interface behaves.

Thanks for the great product and keep up the good work!

Frank

[Tim Fischer]

bob wrote:

No, there's currently no way to move more than a single channel at a time, but this is a good idea. Thanks!

If/when you do this, please don't do it by Controller (8 or 16 channels) but by any arbitrary channel group. I don't lay my sequences out by controller at all, but by display element. Sometimes a single controller controlls parts of different displays For example, our new lawn arches and our mini trees both stretch along the front of the display about 200', so the controllers that run them run a little bit of both. In the sequence editor, though, it makes much more sense to keep the arches and mini-trees in their own separate groups.

Thanks,
-Tim

[Robin]

Bob,
If you did this, would there be a way to left click and drag mouse over channels you want to move, then right click and click copy channels, then move to where you want the channels to go and right click and paste them in. It is time consuming when you have to move a channel one at a time up several screens.

Thanks

[richardh]

While we are talking about wish list for moving the channels, it would be nice to know where exactly the channel is going to end up. When moving a channel I am never sure if is going to be on top or below the channel you are dropping it on.

A suggestion would be as you are dragging the channel to move, a thick black line would show where it was going to be moved to while you are still holding the button. A lot of software, like photoshop, uses this method.

Also if you have a ton of channels, and you screen can't display all of them, it gets hard to move the channel exactly where you need to. You need to move it as far as you can, rescroll the screen and move it some more. Would be nice if it would "autoscroll" if you where dragging the channel to be moved to the top or bottom (again like how photoshop and other software works).

[Robin]

Actually Richard it is pretty simple
if your want to move channel 20 to be above channel 10 then put it on 9
below 10 put it on top of 11

[Jim Springfield]

I needed this as well. I am moving from 32 to 48 channels this year and needed to reallocate and move stuff around.

Anyways, now that the files are in XML there are a lot of quick/easy things you can do in a text editor. If you open up the .lms file in a text editor and search for you will see the channels listed underneath (i.e. . If you rearrange these, this will change the order they are displayed in LOR.

I am sure there will be plenty of warning coming about messing with these files, so I will leave it to someone else.

However, I would like to offer a humongous THANK YOU to those who decided to use XML as the file format. There have been a few other things that have already been very easy to accomplish through simple text editing.

--jim

[medman2000]

Jim Springfield wrote:

I needed this as well. I am moving from 32 to 48 channels this year and needed to reallocate and move stuff around.

Anyways, now that the files are in XML there are a lot of quick/easy things you can do in a text editor. If you open up the .lms file in a text editor and search for you will see the channels listed underneath (i.e. . If you rearrange these, this will change the order they are displayed in LOR.

I am sure there will be plenty of warning coming about messing with these files, so I will leave it to someone else.

However, I would like to offer a humongous THANK YOU to those who decided to use XML as the file format. There have been a few other things that have already been very easy to accomplish through simple text editing.

--jim

I agree with jim - all disclaimers must apply, you could really mess up your files by playing around with a text editor. Make sure to save copies, etc. With that said, it is helpful to discuss this topic.

jim - rearranging the channels with the text editor didn't work for me at work, but did at home. Weird. The order is determined in the track area.

copying channels to new tracks was only marginally time saving, as you have to locate the channels and copy, then paste to the track area, then remove all the tags other than savedindex number. A very careful use of the find/replace option makes it a little easier to remove the extra tags for the track.

What other kinds of things have you done with the text editing jim (or others?)?

[medman2000]

Ok slow day at work. Here are some observations:

It seems like text-editing technique for naming channels with similar names would/could be faster but not by much.

Example:

megatreegreen1....megatreegreen16

megatreered1...megatreered16

using find/replace pretty fast to rename channel1...channel16 to megatree names.

free-hand typing of new channel names didn't seem any faster to me than using the channel tool in the sequencer.

copy and paste channels to new tracks was much faster than individually moving channels in the sequencer.

sorting channels - editted from an earlier observation - channels within a track area in the text file can be moved around easily, and they show up in the new order in the sequencer. Only problem is when you get to the track area, you don't have channel names just index numbers. not sure if this will ultimately be faster or not?


Look forward to hearing other thoughts on the topic!