Help making an effect QuickShow

Hey guys, my school has asked me if I could work some laser magic at their school musical, doing a basic time tunnel. The effect they want is a very large square (Turn the size right up in the abstract editor, before it goes out of the white box), that has multiple colours rotating around it.

Over about 5 seconds, the rotating colours slow down, and the box fades out at the time time.

I have been able to make the box fade out, however I haven't been able to make the rotating colours slow down. Anyone know how to slow the colours down? I added a color effect to the plain square cue, as well as a brightness effect. The speed slider in the color effect slows the colours down like I want, but I can't seem to make it slow them down by itself.

Cheers,
Dan

Key effect I think.

What programme are you using? Quick Show?

EDIT: mmm harder than I thought. I've found a manual work around but still stuck on slowing it automatically. I think you're going to need Live Pro to create this as not enough control in QS.

So far as I can tell you want the Fast RGB effect but need to actually edit the effect itself over time by using key frames. That can't be done in QS to my knowledge.

Yeah QuickShow.

I know I can do it manually frame by frame, but really trying to avoid that if I can :p

I'll keep playing around with it. It's interesting the "Decelerate" mode in the colour effect doesn't do what I want.

Key framing is different to doing it manually.

You set a key frame at the start at full speed then another key frame at the end at no speed and the effect should start at full speed and then slow progessively to a stop at the end. Effectively you're setting a speed gradient.

The problem is to my knowledge, you can't edit the elements of effects themselves in QS, only the cue elements.

I would think it could be done in Live Pro probably if some kind sole would do it for you.

Well, the decelerate effect does do what I need, however it doesn't actually stop. It slows down, then just takes off again.

Hmmm ....

I'm, going to take a guess and say thats due to the overall cue duration. My guess is its looping and when its gone through all of the frames in the cue, the animation restarts which is why the cue speeds up again.

I've just created one from scratch to test with.

The problem lies with the fact that the colour changing is controlled by the "Speed" slider in the editor under the colour effect:

Attachment 20137

So far as I'm aware this can't be keyed. Thats almost certainly something for Live Pro.

The only work around I can offer other than for someone to key it in Live Pro and save it to .lds for you, is to use the bpm and animation speed sliders manually.

In my trial, I found that if I set the BPM speed to 160 bpm I had a good intial speed. Sliding the slider down towards the bottom resulted in being to reduce the colour spinning animation to an almost dead stop. Combined with your fade out I think any remaining movement would be un-noticeable as we're talking only a few mm per sec.

BTW you'll need to choose the inital BPM based on experimentation with your tunnel as it will be dependant on the cues individual animation speed.

If you require a dead stop then option 2 is to set the animation speed slider to the right of the workspace to the minimum (25% I think). The find you intitial BPM setting using the bpm control so you have sufficient speed to satisfy your needs. Then sliding the bpm slider towards the bottom should allow you to bring the animation to a dead stop as the animation speed control will have killed the residual movement.

Best I can come up with, I'm afraid unless anyone else has found something else in QS that allows for a different solution. However for automated speed slowing I'm sure keyframing is the answer but in QS its not possible to create the effect this way.

Has anyone already got an effect that kinda does what I want? If not, I have rehearsals on Sunday again, so might just play around with some other features and see if I can achieve an effect they still like.

I'm afraid theres no simple way to create this effect in QS.
I tried fiesta, mamba and laserboy, but none have an easy way to do this.
Maybe you can give the abstract generator of LA studio go, it has tons of settings for these kind of things. Due to my upgrade to QS2 so my LAstudio gives error messages.

You somehow have to key the speed of a colorscroll on a rectangle.
If the tunnel would be round that would be a lot easier, then a simple decelerate rotate function would do the trick.

I've cracked it for you!!!! But I've had to use a round tunnel.

You now owe me big time as this was a difficult one to do! ;)

It looks so simple on the Timeline - its a show that needs importing via Quick Timeline BTW.

I've added a blank cue onto the end to stop it recycling straight away as the timeline seems to loop and I'm not sure how to turn it off so you'll need to hit stop after the tunnel blanks out.

See what you think, its attached.

PS I hope its zipped Ok. The server won't accept QS formats at the moment.

BTW remember I have no laser so you need to check the output in real life as well as the preview.

Hi,
I found this thread and felt that I had to try this out and I believe that the result is what you want. A full square with rotating colourgradient slowing down to a stop and after full stop a fade out, all this in a total time of 8 seconds that you easily can customize to your needs.

All this made in Quickshow 2 with quicktimeline in a matter of minutes.
Attachment 20220

I just started trying all this features out and I am really impressed of all the things that's in there "under the hood".
I still havent had the chance to try LivePro out but hope to meet up with it soon, from what I've read and results produced by other members here, I would probably like to upgrade soon, since it seems that it's easier making use of your creativity live [popcorn]. Quickshow is the only lasersoftware I've used and I'm still very new to it. But very simple to get started with and easy to use if you want to *DZ

Nice job.

I see how you've done it analysing the file. Obviously whereas the cue is short by default when decelerate is used at cue level and thus recycles, with the time line there's no such problem.

I was wondering if it's possible to do an effect like the "chop" but instead of lines, just do the individual dots (points) instead of small short lines.

As it took me a while to get my head around this I thought I'd add this to your post to make it easier to visualise what you're asking for (I'm still thinking about it).

This is what chop does to an effect (I've used an animation as it becomes much clearer):

Attachment 20334

Edit: I'm going to say very difficult and probably impossible because of the way it is created.

Chop uses alternate brightness effects to raise and lower the brightness, so in actual fact the whole animation is still there but sections of it are hidden by reducing their brightness to zero whilst leaving the alternate sections at full brightness.

This is an altered version of chop where I reduced the bright portions as small as possible:

Attachment 20335

I still had visible lines.

Now to achieve that at point level you're going to need to have those white segments much closer together or with repeats at a much higher rate than is possible in QS.

You could try increasing the pattern frequency in the box above by drawing in many more dark / light segments. I haven't tried that but think its unlikely you're going to get down to point level. Plus I wonder what effect this is going to have on overall effect brightness because of the speed with which you're trying to modulate your lasers up and down.

If you want a specific effect with points alone, its probably going to be easier to go in and edit some line points out of the effect and refill the gaps with discreet hot beams yourself. The option then would be to save the new cue and switch between them during the show to turn "super chop" on and off.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by -bart-

I tried fiesta, mamba and laserboy, but none have an easy way to do this.

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Bart, I also tried to do a thing like that. Can you tell me in what version of fiesta have you tried to do that?

I realised this only later, my sense of perfection was in my way.

In fact the effect isn't hard at all, it's just how you implement the slowing down.
In the packages I know off, there's no straight-forward solution in a gradual slow down to a stand-still.

But for the average spectator a sequence of cues with decreasing speed 100%-75-50-0%, will look just as good.