Tell me again how Foreground Fade works

[Phill.Simpson]

I'm confused about how the "Foreground Fade" works. I understand how the example in the help file works and I can duplicate that, but the way I program my Mega Tree spin involves a small fade on each channel as it spins. So now I want to fade the tree out while it's spinning. The result shown in the attached before and after screen shot is the result. The Foregrond Fade function appears to take any cell that is turned on to any degree and substitue the fade value from the Forground Fade function.

What I expected to happen was that the values I set would be multiplied by the percent from the Foreground Fade and give me a smooth fade out of whatever complex waveform I had before the Foreground Fade. Am I expecting too much?


Attached files

[JonB256]

It looks like you "did it right" but I don't think that's what you (or I) expected the end result to be. I have done the Foreground Fade successfully, but they weren't "stairstepped" like your example.

I'll try something similar and see if I get the same effect.


edit -

Just tried several scenarios. It appears that Foreground "assumes" that everything in your selected area (the black line box in your second picture) has the same Starting "ON" point and Ending "OFF" point. Not a good assumption, since it does exactly what you describe.

Now, if everything does have the same ON and OFF point, it works perfectly!

[bob]

Phill.Simpson wrote:

What I expected to happen was that the values I set would be multiplied by the percent from the Foreground Fade and give me a smooth fade out of whatever complex waveform I had before the Foreground Fade.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by this. Could you please explain again?

Thanks.

[Phill.Simpson]

Here's a made up picture of the wavform I expected to see. In the original, each channel ramps to zero. In the foreground fade, channels have an abrupt cutoff and no longer ramp to zero except the last one. In my made up example, the new intensity value of the channel is determined by the old intensity value times the percent fade from the foreground fade, thus preserving the basic effect - just making it dimmer.

Attached files

[Robin]

If I may, the sequence editor does things left to right and I believe you want it to work from the top down. When you do the forground it will do groups of channels from left to right and all of them the same. It does not look at changing channels from top to bottom.

I have asked and hopefully will see the ability to move groups of channels to tracks and think what you are asking could be incorporated in about the same way.

For instance right click a group of channels then go up and click forground then go hit your fade and go back to the cells selected and click fade in the right click menu. It would then fade just the cells highlighted and thus get the effect you desire.

I just want to be able to right click the channels in channel bar and then move them as a group to new track. Or right click one channel and move it up the bar to where I want it. Right now you can only move it to the top and then scroll down and then move it again and keep repeating until you get it where you want it.

Not too bad for a few moves but if you want to move it up 200 channels it is a pain.
Also, if you want to put your mega tree on a new track of it's own then you have to do each channel 16 times or however many channels your mega tree has.