Calling all Showtime guru's

[Insanity]

ha ha, you should know me by now, LivePro all the way... though once QS hits the QM2000 I'm sure I'll give it a go...

Mark

[White-Light]

Actually I can output as LDS from Quick Show editor. The problem is the editor is very basic and unless I'm missing something only has built in animation effects for rotation.

I can see what you need to do Mark, but as someone who's not very familiar with point manipulation, I can't do it in QS's editor.

What you're needing is a series of frames where in each consecutive frame the lines in the fan take one step to the right (looking from the audiences point of view). Where it takes a step back to the left, then you obviously need to repeat the frame before the last one you created to make the step back. These frame steps then need repeating at regular intervals until 1 cycle is completed at which point you can loop the effect to get a continuos stepping effect and adjust the timing cycle to get the speed that you want.

Unfortunately my point skill set and the basic editor in QS don't combine to let me create this for you otherwise I'd gladly do it.

[White-Light]

Mark I think this is what you're looking for, although I can't check it as an output, as I don't have a laser or DAC, but it has everything apart from that backwards step, which if you're bothered about it should be editable back in. Its also more than 3 points but again thats editable from your end. (I'm going to let you do that one anyway as I'm not too good with adding / removing points!). You also might want to edit it from 2 shades of blue to 2 shades of green. I've left it in the blue spectrum because the effect is easier to see. It difficult for me to adjust for 2 shades of green without seeing actual output as the contrast might not be great enough.

I created it in QS but its an LDS file so should play back in LivePro.

[Insanity]

Thanks for your efforts Al... Unfortunately the colours cycle through the fan, but the laser beams are still stationary Who would have thought this could be such a pain in the rear???

Mark

[norty303]

I'm not sure why, but every time I create a simple animation in ST and save it as ILDA to import to LP, I end up with an obscenely huge file... No idea why something so simple has eluded me for so long...

Entirely expected as ILDA is a format for storing a series of frames - so if you choose to save the effect and points as ILDA it will effectively render it to an animation. The 'effect' part is entirely proprietary to Pangolin so you'll need to export in a Pango format that allows just the effect math to be stored.

[Insanity]

Thanks for the explanation Norty... I found the answer to this particular little issue yesterday...

What I am actually working on is a new workspace for LivePro ready for a bunch of gigs next weekend...

LivePro effects and key effects are point oriented rather than object oriented. So, if for example I draw 4 circles and want to fade them in one at a time, LivePro can't do it, it will just fade them in all at once.

So for more complex effects I use Showtime. here I can put one circle in each of 4 tracks and treat them independantly.
However, Showtime effects are not compatible with LivePro So, I build the cue in Showtime and then change the output settings to output to an ILDA file rather than the QM2000 output connector.
A simple effect as above was taking up 34MB rather than 500KB for example...

I found the problem was the fact that I was saving a Refresh Based animation which caused the huge file. Saving as a Time Based animation gives me 500KB file sizes... One checkbox changes everything

Cheers
Mark

[norty303]

Glad to hear you got it all sorted - I was going to go through and sort out what was needed, but then realised as I'm only a LiveProUSB user I couldn't replicate or test the Showtime bit of it.