Jump to content
Light-O-Rama Forums

S5 Suggestions


dgrant

Recommended Posts

Yesterday, I was sequencing using S5, latest available this moment. I saw that when trying to grab a location and continue to the end of the song or anywhere between, if you pass the edge of the area, it stops. In S4, if you pass the edge, it allowed you to speed up that sliding. Now we seem to be stuck in the slow mode.

On another note, trying to add a motion display to an existing RGB prop, seems difficult to get there. Seems we have to jump through hoops as such to create a place for a prop to allow us to create a motion effect. Should be easier than this but I do understand software and what appears easy, isn't always easy. For configuration, these are sequences that I did in S4 and importing one at a time into S5 as I edit them.

Selecting a color for an RGB prop, was easy in S4 but I think its actually easier in S5 once you understand how to use the selector.

There needs to be more detail on the use of "Movie" motion effects. Seems an AVI file is needed but when I tried that, using a 16 rail pixel tree, the channel assignments do not line up with the actual movie information, therefore a mess. Yes, I know that's going to be a complex area for the programmers. People have different channel setups due to different controller types. I have two different pixel trees and both have different controllers. One used packed pixels with zigzag and the other uses 16 individual outputs therefore no packing.

Nice to have would be the ability to select a group of cells and drag them to another location...hint, hint. Easy to ask for but I know not so easy to implement.

Edited by dgrant
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, dgrant said:

Yesterday, I was sequencing using S5, latest available this moment. I saw that when trying to grab a location and continue to the end of the song or anywhere between, if you pass the edge of the area, it stops. In S4, if you pass the edge, it allowed you to speed up that sliding. Now we seem to be stuck in the slow mode.

Totally agree. It used to be possible to drag an entire sequence of many minutes length, in seconds. It's almost real time now.

An alternate method, is to select a start point, scroll to the end point, and shift click there to complete the selection.

Not sure it's as quick or flows as well as click, fast drag 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the feedback. Scroll speed acceleration (like SE's) will be part of the next release.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yesterday, I found something while editing in S5, not all of the channels in the S4 visualizer file, import properly into S5 when it updates the sequence. Had to do with a single channel, that's used in the S4 visualizer for several locations...window frames with a single string and all connected electrically. I ended up having to delete the S5 props and re-create them in S5, then assign them to the single channel. After that, it was fine.

 

Another nice thing to have would be a motion effect for singing faces. A subroutine that would create the basic face movements for singing trees/pumpkins, based on audio and sound type. I'm spending numerous hours trying to sequence them for just one song and I've got a lot of songs to do.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Obviously, I'm doing a lot of editing right now which is primarily converting from S4 to S5. At this instant, I'm using S5, 5.2.4 Pro for FYI. Just discovered there are now playback files needed to be created too. That should be a "Preference" function to auto-create when saving the file and/or a function to create all playback files, in-mass, once all the editing is done. Individual playback file creation is probably better so that when our shows are running and we see a mistake or improvement needed, we can edit and re-save the sequence on the fly as such.

Something else I noticed that I don't like, seeing the channel assignments for pixel based items, not auto-sorted by channel number. The option to sort is nice and useful but not keeping it as original is something that can be easily forgotten when creating a chase.

Edited by dgrant
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, dgrant said:

Obviously, I'm doing a lot of editing right now which is primarily converting from S4 to S5. At this instant, I'm using S5, 5.2.4 Pro for FYI. Just discovered there are now playback files needed to be created too. That should be a "Preference" function to auto-create when saving the file

Lord no.  Why would you want to take the time to have the computer produce a playback file several times an hour?  Then at some point having to go back and delete the hundreds of extra playback files that will never be used (assuming you save with a new filename every time you save (highly recommended), each playback file will also have a separate filename).  That would be the same situation we had a few years ago when the software was creating compressed files and verifying files every time you saved.  That was changed to an option after lots of complaints about having to wait for several minutes every time you saved.  Just as you didn't need the compressed files until you are ready to run your show, you don't need the playback files until you are ready to run your show.  Making it an option could be done, but there is really no rational reason to ever turn on the feature.

 

2 hours ago, dgrant said:

a function to create all playback files, in-mass

That could be useful.  Likely something similar to the Show Verify option when you can select one sequence vs all sequences in a particular show vs the entire schedule.  I would think that the all sequences in a show would be the most useful.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Now working on my Halloween show and ran into huge problems with my 24x50 matrix. I may have discovered a formal bug but thought it best this time to run it across others before I bother the people at LOR. It seems my Matrix from S4 which worked fine, is not anything remotely close in S5, plus it doesn't work at all. To be safe, I deleted and recreated the Matrix in the Preview area and assigned all the correct Universes and Channels. As stated, I'm using a 24 rail horizontal Matrix, 50 nodes each, starting at the lower left corner. Each Universe has 2 zig-zags or "folds". Thus, 150 nodes per Universe. My first Universe number is 50 and ending on 57, max channel count in each Universe is 450. First Universe for example is 50, channels 1-150 on first rail, 151-300 on 2nd rail and 301-450 on 3rd rail. Starts all over with the next Universe.

Now when I set up this in the Preview, I see that in order to get a horizontal matrix on the display, I must select a vertical matrix type...??? Prop Definition Window looks correct but the Preview itself is just wrong. I can manually slew it around so that its horizontal but still doesn't respond to the sequencer.

I might be doing something stupidly wrong on something easy but I've tried numerous options with no luck. Does anyone else see what I'm seeing?

Edited by dgrant
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, dgrant said:

Now working on my Halloween show and ran into huge problems with my 24x50 matrix. I may have discovered a formal bug but thought it best this time to run it across others before I bother the people at LOR. It seems my Matrix from S4 which worked fine, is not anything remotely close in S5, plus it doesn't work at all. To be safe, I deleted and recreated the Matrix in the Preview area and assigned all the correct Universes and Channels. As stated, I'm using a 24 rail horizontal Matrix, 50 nodes each, starting at the lower left corner. Each Universe has 2 zig-zags or "folds". Thus, 150 nodes per Universe. My first Universe number is 50 and ending on 57, max channel count in each Universe is 450. First Universe for example is 50, channels 1-150 on first rail, 151-300 on 2nd rail and 301-450 on 3rd rail. Starts all over with the next Universe.

Now when I set up this in the Preview, I see that in order to get a horizontal matrix on the display, I must select a vertical matrix type...??? Prop Definition Window looks correct but the Preview itself is just wrong. I can manually slew it around so that its horizontal but still doesn't respond to the sequencer.

I might be doing something stupidly wrong on something easy but I've tried numerous options with no luck. Does anyone else see what I'm seeing?

Is this how you have it set up?

image.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually no, I specified 24 strings which is a mistake considering they are folded two times. I’ll fix it in the morning and try again. Thank you Matt. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok, I fixed the problem of the configuration so its now correct but it still would not show up on the design preview...the matrix. I did fix that when I deleted the new sequence and recreated it from the S4 file again, this time with the proper S5 Matrix configuration. Now it works. I'm assuming that importing with the wrong configuration on the preview, can really mess things up and even though its configured back to normal, it still had problems within. Started over, life is good. Thank You Matt for pointing out my obvious mistake.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So I decided to get creative...lol, I know, that's dangerous. I was thinking that I could use the new "Movie" function in the Motion Effect Generator. It allows only AVI files at this time but the help file shows it will accept Mp4 files too. But, I'm guessing its not ready yet. So I tried to import an AVI file. Got a message stating it "Unable to read frames from this file". I tried different file sizes and I can certainly see them when played on the computer but S5 has issues. I didn't see a size limit posted which is why I tried smaller files first. AVI's are larger than Mp4 but I'm not writing the code.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, dgrant said:

So I decided to get creative...lol, I know, that's dangerous. I was thinking that I could use the new "Movie" function in the Motion Effect Generator. It allows only AVI files at this time but the help file shows it will accept Mp4 files too. But, I'm guessing its not ready yet. So I tried to import an AVI file. Got a message stating it "Unable to read frames from this file". I tried different file sizes and I can certainly see them when played on the computer but S5 has issues. I didn't see a size limit posted which is why I tried smaller files first. AVI's are larger than Mp4 but I'm not writing the code.

There are 2 versions of AVI files - type 1 (older) and type 2 (newer). At this time, the Sequencer can only read type 1 AVI files. Also, the movie effect can accept WMV files, but not MP4.

Matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was looking through the tutorials but didn't see anything that tells me what the file size limit is nor how to be sure I've got an AVI type 1 or 2? I also gave a shot at using xLights to create the video on the matrix, but it too is having issues. I can see it just fine but its refusing to allow conversion due to it insisting on a CSV format as a file save. I know this isn't an xLights forum so not asking how to fix that. I did get an output though through their render and export, into an LCB file for LOR. But of course, it refuses to full import and fails with errors. LOL, its just one of those days...lol

I'm seriously hoping that some of these things become easier in the days and weeks to come, not just for me, but for all of us.

Edited by dgrant
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I gave it a try but no joy. I'll play with it some more today...maybe I'll get lucky. What I want, I can see it working in xLights but so far, cannot see it or even come close in LOR.

Edited by dgrant
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Success!!! I was making the file sizes too small and yes, using WMV worked. Takes forever now to calculate intensities but its working.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hate messing with video codecs and bit rates. Converters and video editors seem so flakey, even on high power machines. There are so many codec and sub-codec variations, you can always find one more thing to change that MIGHT work. And that is if they don't cause a hardware crash.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My efforts with this topic were to show some of the usual problems when the casual users, attempt to do something within and while learning S5. Hopefully Matt is taking notice and will look into the aspects of making things more user friendly.

Even though I finally won the battle with Phil's help and Matt's, seems like too many limitations to make it work easily. As for the S5 learning curve, of course I've not used every possible programming item in there at this time so, much more learning ahead for me. I know there will be more updates coming so it'll be interesting to see what capabilities come with them. Thanks again to both of you and Jim too!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
On 6/17/2019 at 7:00 AM, dgrant said:

My efforts with this topic were to show some of the usual problems when the casual users, attempt to do something within and while learning S5. Hopefully Matt is taking notice and will look into the aspects of making things more user friendly.

Even though I finally won the battle with Phil's help and Matt's, seems like too many limitations to make it work easily. As for the S5 learning curve, of course I've not used every possible programming item in there at this time so, much more learning ahead for me. I know there will be more updates coming so it'll be interesting to see what capabilities come with them. Thanks again to both of you and Jim too!

I know this is an old question but I see you are still floating around here.

How did you fix the avi problem?

This is my first attempt at adding the video in ME.

The first attempt I selected the AVI file. I received the "unable to read frames error".

I then searched and found a link to Onlineconvert.com

Converted from avi  to WMA

While it appeared to load the video after rendering it showed the row in the ME row but upon playback the matrix screen played no effects.

I then tried the box "video is same length as sequence", same result. ME row appears to populate but no effects show on playback.

TIA

JR

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...