Max-Paul Posted May 13, 2009 Posted May 13, 2009 I am still new and trying different things while sequencing. I wanted a fast paced turning on and off of some lights to represent a snare drum. So my timing is set up for 20 events per second. I was turning on for 1/20 second and off for the next. I could see that some on states were being shown in the visualizer. Any yet some where missing. Only when I slowed it down to 1/10 sec ( 2 20s) would all of the "On" states properly flash on the visualizer. Actually this also happened watching the buttons on the left of the seq window too.Am I doing something wrong? Or is this just to fast for LOR to compute?ThanksMax
Paul Roberson Posted May 13, 2009 Posted May 13, 2009 IDK the answer, but I would hook up a controller and some lights, if possible, and see what it looks like then.The visualizer is a good representation, but not always exact.
-klb- Posted May 13, 2009 Posted May 13, 2009 The visualizer is known to throttle the events it draws, under the theory that dropping elements is better than lagging behind the correct time.
DownTown Posted May 13, 2009 Posted May 13, 2009 To expand and clarify what klb said, you may not see them in the visualizer, but they will show up fine when you have your controller hooked up and you're driving lights.D.T.
Max-Paul Posted May 13, 2009 Author Posted May 13, 2009 Thanks guys,I am a little bit anal retentive and would prefer the lights be as accurate as possible. Flashing lights vs flashing lights to the sound. Well just aint the same thing. This is for the Snoopy's Christmas version that starts off with the sound of artillery fire and O Christmas Tree in German. Then there is some snare drums when the narrator starts telling the story.Again thanks for the help.Max
DownTown Posted May 13, 2009 Posted May 13, 2009 Max - I did the same song... Some great machine gun fire to synchronize to... by the way, as I count it, it was a 14 round burst (great effect with some DMX strobes ). But I digress. I used to have the same problem with the visualizer. Then I upgraded to a new PC with a far better video card, and that problem went away.D.T.
sjmiller Posted May 14, 2009 Posted May 14, 2009 The visualizer is very good - but does lose very short timing events. I went out to buy parts to build a 16 channel c7 bulb box to view timing - almost $9 per channel ($2.49 for the socket, $1 for the plug, bulk wire, $15 for the box to house it, and the time to build it. I now have 16 100 minilight strings in my offce - $1 each off Craigslist.
Max-Paul Posted May 14, 2009 Author Posted May 14, 2009 DownTown,Here is what I am planning to do. For the machine gun fire, I want to mount two 3-4 flash per second strobes under the eves pointing out to the street. Just imagine what the people in the cars are going to think when they hear the machine gun fire and see the rapid flashes of the strobes shooting right into their car. As for the artilery exploding. I plan to put 4 slow 1 flash per second in the yard at ground level. And for each explosion I will pick a different strobe. yes two strobes will flash twice. I think the count is 6 explosions, not counting what sounds like one or two bangs as the shell leaves the cannon. Well at least that is what I think I am hearing. I never did count the rounds from the machine guns. Just the start and end and let the strobes flash as many times they can during that time spand.maybe we can compare after I get done with mine.Thanks for your repliesMax
iresq Posted May 14, 2009 Posted May 14, 2009 Good luck. It is damn near impossible to sync strobes unless you have strobes with the ability to fire once. Cool idea though.
Max-Paul Posted May 14, 2009 Author Posted May 14, 2009 Hi Dave,I know that one of the things I will have to do with the ground mounted once per second strobes is find out how long it takes to charge up (see delay) and turn it on that far in advance so that it does discharge when I want it to flash. As for the 2 strobes that flash at a rate or 3 - 4 times per second. I just dont think anyone will be able to tell if it is in sync with the sound. Again there might be a slight delay and I will need to take that into account and maybe turn it on a .5 sec or something like that before I actually want it to start flashing.So, I do expect some playing around to get the ground ones to fire as needed. Wish me luck, cuss if I can pull it off. It will have to be real neat for the viewers. Kind of make them feel like they are really there during WWII on the battle field. I must have a slight mean streak with those two flashing with the sound of machine gun fire. Max
Ponddude Posted May 14, 2009 Posted May 14, 2009 You may want to look take a look at this to see how he did his strobe chaser. This shows a good way of modifying the strobes to fire one at a time.http://www.christmasinkent.com/howto/HowToChaseStrobes.htm
DownTown Posted May 14, 2009 Posted May 14, 2009 iresq wrote: Good luck. It is damn near impossible to sync strobes unless you have strobes with the ability to fire once. Cool idea though.Easy to do with DMX fixtures.D.T.
zman Posted May 14, 2009 Posted May 14, 2009 DownTown wrote: iresq wrote: Good luck. It is damn near impossible to sync strobes unless you have strobes with the ability to fire once. Cool idea though.Easy to do with DMX fixtures.D.T.DT,Have you been successful with firing a lower end strobe with DMX on command when needed? I thought this should be a no brainer 2 years ago too. I got a Chauvet and American DJ strobes to attempt this. After much frustration and conversations with Dan B (LOR) and Paul Smith (AL), they both confirmed what I was seeing, and attemping with those DMX strobes. I am not super electrical savvy, as to why, but they both said those units lack the circuitry to be able to flash once, on command and not have other stuff happen. I could go into a long dissertation of efforts I tried in sequencing to work around this.I had to go to a high end professional strobe, Martin Atomic to get this to happen.Now with that said, I still have 2 Chauvet DMX Mega Strobe II's that I could pull out, and want to use if I can get some input on this.As far as Wirekat's (Christmas in Kent) strobe chase, he swears that it works when it is supposed to. I may borrow his set up and take it to PLUS to demo.MarkNow back to the thread, sorry to step on this.
-klb- Posted May 14, 2009 Posted May 14, 2009 I keep thinking that it might be worth looking at some of the strobes that indicate that they have a 10 volt remote trigger input. If they are opto isolated, and not tied to ground, I would think that they could be triggered from a DC card. But I have the three DMX LED light bars in the entry where I want most of my Halloween strobe effects now. I never use the built in strobe commands, as I can not get specific timings I want. I also don't get the results I want when ramping the strobe speed. But, I can easily sequence as on/off commands the strobe effects I want, and it seems to work quite well. So, I haven't much motive to follow up on the 10V triggered strobes.
Max-Paul Posted May 15, 2009 Author Posted May 15, 2009 Seeing how I started this thread and it has morphed in this discussion about Strobes. I have no problem with your input zman. Thanks for your comments.klb, are you saying that you have managed to get your strobes to fire when you wanted them to? Is it as I am thinking, that you have to take in allowance for the delay while the cap. charges up to the discharge voltage? I am figuring that I will need to time how long between applying power to the time the strobe flashes. Once I know this, all I have to do is skew the timing (on command) to an earlier time.Max
Dr. Jones Posted May 15, 2009 Posted May 15, 2009 Mark/KLBa couple of years ago I acquired some pencil strobes that have a firing wire. Though they don't recharge extremely fast, the ability to fire on command was a great beneift. Might be able to reverse engineer the unit - Also know of someone who added a firing wire to a strobe kit from Ramsey (I can't seem to remember which trace to cut)As for DMX strobes - Birket Engineering makes a nice strobe, though a bit pricey. For a powerful unit I would use an Atomic 3000. (or an AF1000 Data Flash if you could feed it 208v/220v)
DownTown Posted May 15, 2009 Posted May 15, 2009 zman wrote: DT,Have you been successful with firing a lower end strobe with DMX on command when needed? I thought this should be a no brainer 2 years ago too. I got a Chauvet and American DJ strobes to attempt this. After much frustration and conversations with Dan B (LOR) and Paul Smith (AL), they both confirmed what I was seeing, and attemping with those DMX strobes. I am not super electrical savvy, as to why, but they both said those units lack the circuitry to be able to flash once, on command and not have other stuff happen. I could go into a long dissertation of efforts I tried in sequencing to work around this.I had to go to a high end professional strobe, Martin Atomic to get this to happen.Now with that said, I still have 2 Chauvet DMX Mega Strobe II's that I could pull out, and want to use if I can get some input on this.As far as Wirekat's (Christmas in Kent) strobe chase, he swears that it works when it is supposed to. I may borrow his set up and take it to PLUS to demo.MarkNow back to the thread, sorry to step on this.Mark -I have only tried it with a Martin Atomic 3000, and that was just a loaner from work to test the effect (I have been shopping EBay since then to acquire one). I currently using some big DMX LED floods to simulate the strobe effect in the sequences that need it. (see photo below)They work really well, but are certainly not as impressive as the 3000.D.T. Attached files
-klb- Posted May 15, 2009 Posted May 15, 2009 For strobe effects where I care about exact timing, I am not using strobes. Rather the three LED wall washers in the entry way are bright enough that just sequencing fast on/off effects gives a good strobe effect. (I believe I had some areas as fast as 2/100ths on, to 5/100ths off)I did also have a pair of ChristmasLightShow strobes behind each of my six animated tombstones. Each pair was on it's own channel. If they had not been fired recently, a 2/10ths delay was a pretty close approximation of how long they took to charge and fire the first time. I could even stagger the start times, and have each one on for about 2/10ths, and get a sweep across the front of the house, that kind of looked like someone swept a spot light across the front, even though it was really just 6 pairs of strobe lights firing in sequence.
zman Posted May 15, 2009 Posted May 15, 2009 -klb- wrote: For strobe effects where I care about exact timing, I am not using strobes. Rather the three LED wall washers in the entry way are bright enough that just sequencing fast on/off effects gives a good strobe effect. (I believe I had some areas as fast as 2/100ths on, to 5/100ths off)I did also have a pair of ChristmasLightShow strobes behind each of my six animated tombstones. Each pair was on it's own channel. If they had not been fired recently, a 2/10ths delay was a pretty close approximation of how long they took to charge and fire the first time. I could even stagger the start times, and have each one on for about 2/10ths, and get a sweep across the front of the house, that kind of looked like someone swept a spot light across the front, even though it was really just 6 pairs of strobe lights firing in sequence.Good DMX fixtures should be able to respond fast enough to get you this effect.I think we need to start a new thread on the DMX strobes though, cause I would like to get more indepth on that. You can take regular strobes (AC) and apply a relay circuit to get them to fire with LOR. A lot do that.I did end up with a Martin Atomic 3000 and used it last year. Very nice, but spendy.
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