Macro channel preview.

[ItsMeBobO]

This year my show was my personal best.    Two props needed mid-season repairs but overall everything worked great from the guest point of view all season long.   

But I had a lot of problems with S4 sequence saving slowness.  Major issues with previewing 100 pixel strings in S4.  And also network slowness, a big part of that is the Cosmic macro channels.    The macros have prevented me on S4 from using an enhanced network as they are not seen on the lights. No hope that will be fixed. They do however always work on the S4 visualizer.   

I have been giving more consideration to switching away from S4 to something else, maybe S5 but I am plagued by heavy use of macro channels which are not even previewed in S5.  It seems very few people embraced the macros in the early days so I am in a small minority with this problem 

I wrote a sequence scanner which summarized how may effects exist on a macro channel on my sequences and found nearly all of them use a macro in some way.   Today I modified 5 sequences to remove minor/moderate macro use.  But others are going to be a really big task.   All the sequences I changed were using just LR logical Resolution of 1,5,16.   So I was able to multiply the controlling pixels to get the effect on the entire string.   

I there anyone else who is a macro user? 

 

[ItsMeBobO]

Is anybody a S4 macro user?  

[ItsMeBobO]

This thread got zero attention.   It seems I am alone in embracing the pixel macro's.   Honestly I loved them and they were used in every song.    Even tho no one cares,  I wanted to close out this chapter and report that I spent the last six months removing the macros from my sequence collection.   All of them are macro free now except for two I decided to drop from the show.    This involved a LOT of copying and replicating to simulate the auto replicate the macros did on the fly.  My sequences are now much bigger.   But my config is smaller/simpler since 10 of my 22 tracks were dedicated macro support.  

Now I am hoping for this year to use the S4 enhanced network on all of my pixels.