A couple of enhancement ideas

[chuckd]

My display currently runs 800 LOR channels, and while I realize that this puts me in the mid-size display category, there are a few software enhancements to the sequence editor that would REALLY help out people like myself. I've fired them at LOR a couple of times, but I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only one that could use these. Here goes:

1. Area fill, much like the paint bucket in Windows paint. Ever try to spiral on or spiral off your mega tree? Filling in those areas drives you nuts.

2. Line drawing. I simply want to click on a start and end point, and have the software connect the dots (simple DDA algorithm for you software guys out there). Simply spinning a 192 channel mega tree without this takes a long, long time. A cool enhancement would be to add fades to smooth out the line (which would make your spin smoother), but this isn't absolutely necessary.

3. OR copy. How often do you copy areas of your sequence on top of other areas, only to find out that the blank area of the copy wiped out other stuff that was on. I'd like the copy mode to optionally work in an OR fashion, meaning that only the 'non-off' areas of the copy will actually do anything. You could easiliy copy and paste overlapping diagonal areas of your sequences with this feature.

3a. OK, if OR copy isn't your thing, then copy and paste of non-rectangular areas (parallelograms maybe?) would work equally well. It's a bit harder to do a selection this way, but the end result would be close to the same.

That's it. Give me these three features, and I can easily go far larger next year.

What do you guys think?

Chuck

[George Simmons]

chuckd wrote:

My display currently runs 800 LOR channels, and while I realize that this puts me in the mid-size display category..

Are you kidding? 300 channels puts ME in the mid-size category. I'd say that 800 channels is definitely somewhere above mid-sized...

[jimswinder]

MID SIZE?!?!?!

I would think anything over 500 channels is in the category of "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas" size... (and yes, it is Yust...not Just). lol

Am I sensing a "small man syndrome" here and we are trying to compensate with our "large" displays? :cool:

[chuckd]

I had concerns awhile ago about 800 channels running about .02 second intervals, and was told by quite a few people that 800 is really not big at all. They were talking about displays that were maxing out the LOR upper limit, so that I shouldn't worry about a display my size.

Turns out I do need multiple networks though (unlike I was told).

I would agree that if you have over 3,000 LOR channels, you're definitely large! No fair counting DMX though.

[-klb-]

Why wouldn't DMX count? If you are controlling it through LOR, you still have to sequence those channels the same as any others, and the commands still take up the same bandwidth on the LOR network.

Really, why worry about where a channel count ranks you. I don't even really know what my channel count on the house is for any given year, as it never seems to all get set up, and I never do go back and count what did get set up.

The city park show started at 209 in year one, 600, for year 2, and will be around 750 this year. Of those year 2 and 3 numbers, about 60 channels are DMX. And it is still fewer channels than some home displays.


ETA, we went to three networks our second year, mostly to simplify wiring, but also because we had heard that we were potentially close to where we would need to split to 2 networks to avoid possible visible delays.

[chuckd]

I guess it depends on whether or not you use all the DMX channels your particular device provides. For example, my Chauvet 200 has way more DMX features/channels than I'd ever use. I'd only use a very small subset of the channels.

I reference the channel count because the features I am looking for really help when the grid gets that tall. Somebody with a total of 16 channels probably doesn't need these features. Somebody with 3000 channels probably needs features that I haven't run into yet. I'm simply saying that somebody with channel counts like mine could really use these features, that's all.

[-klb-]

I'll admit that I cheated on line drawing for 102 channels this year. I wrote a PERL script to draw them into my existing animation window. But that is not a solution for the average user.

[chuckd]

While line drawing on the animation window would be nice, I want it on the sequencing grid. Arch left/right bounces, mega tree spinning/swaying, light pole shots, etc. would be much faster to program.

Area fill is for the sequencing grid too.

I've hand edited LMS files before, but have so far resisted the urge to drop into code for anything (yet).