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Thread: Best LIVE software

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
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    Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    32

    Default Best LIVE software

    Greetings,

    I'v been searching for the best software for use doing live shows though an external midi controller. It seems most software is geared towards preprogrammed shows. Love what you can do with Pangolins live and the closest to that I beleive is Mamba Black. Seems to be the only other program to offer midi control over xyz rotation, color and other such variables. Is there any other software I have overlooked?

    Thanks,
    Brian

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Norway, Fauske
    Posts
    1,206

    Default LDS live

    Laser Design Studio has an live feature. Can also use an midi keyboard...

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    Central Florida
    Posts
    7,067

    Question

    Does LDS work on the Pangolin card?
    Love, peace, and grease,

    allthat... aka: aaron@pangolin

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Melbourne, Australia
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    Default

    If you like Pangolin's Live! Then i think you should look at LivePRO
    KVANT Australian projector sales
    https://www.facebook.com/kvantaus/

    Lasershowparts- Laser Parts at great prices
    https://www.facebook.com/lasershowparts/

  5. #5
    Join Date
    May 2006
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    Norway, Fauske
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    Default

    LDS works on panolin card also.
    Just edit the geobas.ini as followes:
    [1]
    nScanner =1
    MasterName =MASTER
    SlaveName =SLAVE
    bRouting =1
    bEnableRi =0
    bEnableLD =1
    bEnableEL =0
    lana_num =0

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jan 2007
    Posts
    163

    Smile

    Also have a look at Phoenix Show Control, it has 16 independant midi line you can control from a plug in source or the software can simulate a midi sliders on screen which you can adjust with your mouse....

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Orlando, FL - USA
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    Default

    Hi all,

    The Live! program that is built into Showtime is mostly geared towards "corporate shows". For example, maybe you press a button to trigger text, animations, effects, etc. as someone is walking up onto a stage to receive an award, press another button to stop it. Press yet another button after he has given his acceptance speech and is walking off the stage, etc. You can think about Live! as a "monophonic" program -- i.e. you can only get one "visual" at a time (although that visual may be quite complex and involve multiple laser projectors, video, DMX lighting effects, etc.) but you can not press two keys at the same time and get two visuals simultaneously.

    On the other hand, LivePRO might be considered "polyphonic". It has four independent tracks, plus in addition to this, it has a TTL sequencer, beam sequencer, command sequencer, DMX moving head effects, etc. You can press multiple keys simultaneously (if you want) and get multiple visuals simultaneously.

    As far as I know, LivePRO is the most capable live controller for laser shows, and deservedly so. I think we have around 8 man years of work on this program alone, and also involved top laserists around the world in its development, including Glenn Turner and Hugo Bunk. Both of these guys do huge shows (Hugo did the MTV2 show with 23 projectors, that everyone was talking about a while back...).

    Both Showtime:Live! and LivePRO can be controlled by MIDI if desired, but they can also be controlled by DMX Input, touch screen, mouse, Lasershow Performer console, all of the above simultaneously or none of the above (fully automatic operation).

    Although I have not studied other Live programs carefully, my impression is that the Live capability of other programs (including Showtime:Live!) is pretty primitive when compared with LivePRO.

    Best regards,

    William Benner

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    SoCal
    Posts
    508

    Default

    Heh, I'll chime in, Live! Pro is indeed one of the best live "mixers" (Lasergraph DSP beats it out IMHO, but at a hefty price premium) but it's MIDI and DMX support is lacking in comparison to say conventional non-laser programs. The main thing I really wish it had is an input parser and flexible assignments. If you're running in front with a livepro, I recommend just buying their special keyboard.

    Best thing to do is try them out and see which you like! For example, I was rather pleasantly surprised by Laser Illusion's live capabilities (given the huge problems the package had elsewhere)

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
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    Orlando, FL - USA
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    Default

    Hi Yadda,

    Let me ask you something. How much esperience -- I mean DIRECT experience -- do you have with Lasergraph DSP?

    The reason I ask is because I have observed that a lot of people *think* that Lasergraph DSP can do this or that, but they have no direct experience with it. There are a lot of assumptions made "from afar"...

    I don't have any DIRECT experience with it either, but we do have a number of mutual clients. Based on discussions with mutual clients, as far as I am able to ascertain, there is nothing (live) that DSP can do and LivePRO can not, but I am not sure if the opposite is true.

    As for MIDI and DMX -- well, you can make up your own DMX Channel Assignment with LivePRO, and can configure it to emulate four moving light fixtures, complete with selectable rotating gobos, RGB coloring, and everything else. So if you want to, you can make LivePRO strongly parallel conventional lights. And just wait to see what we have coming up ;-)

    Best regards,

    William Benner

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
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    SoCal
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    Default

    Hi Bill,

    We currently have a loaner "lasergraph DSP compact" unit. After our mutual client talked them up "as the best product in the world" we asked a buddy here in LA who has a couple of them to loan us a unit for a couple months, his shop has their "superior" workstation unit in stock which is actually pretty nice (if a bit "dated" IMHO in many ways). We also have direct experience with the "millenium board" which is much more technically impressive (an interesting unit with 4 dedicated processors and 6 dedicated DSPs controlling 5 scanpairs on an 8 layer PCB with a 4 layer daughterboard! Talk about spendy!) and a few other supposedly "best" units. The only "professional" system which I loathe is X29. I don't know those guys personally, but I feel that software transmits the soul of the author and I have much distaste.

    I do make it a point to try and if I like buy anything that can take my ideas and turn them into reality. I will not be buying Lasergraph but I do own Pangolin if that answers your question in some respects. I also think that anybody who owns either and migrates to the other will be happy and sad about various aspects.

    I would definitely agree that Pangolin stands over it in overall packaging, especially in terms of synchronised shows, and I wouldn't do a corporate gig without Pangolin, however in terms of live and especially in the area of input mapping there are a lot of areas that need modernization. I think the difference is focus, pangolin has a base architecture that has been "polished" but I think that some of the optimizations made in the name of "the user" actually hinders the authoring process. Lasergraph has only a little "polish" so it'd be terrible for end-users but if you feel like getting dirty, you can make it do some neat stuff. You are right that there are a number of things you can do in Live pro that you can't do on a lasergraph (without doing a lot of work
    manually adding the functionality, so lets make that "easily do on...")

    Name one thing I can do with lasergraph? One word. "Playlist"

    In terms of a more serious answer to your question, let's see... I can directly assign midi as independantly mappable inputs (not triggers) which control the internals of a show. Specifically, while I prefer pangolin's oscillators the input mapping is too granular so it lacks a smooth transition between oscillators. Now we both know this is actually a problem with device resolution, but with lasergraph they leave enough "exposed wires" directly accessible from their software that I can easily massage the inputs to do exactly what I want. From what I can tell, in Pangolin the base philosphy for input mapping is "globals" or "frame based" so while you can almost always haxor something that looks just like what you want (or at least close enough for government work), it's not always "really" there. This is especially noticable when people change their minds about what they want the laser to do.

    The best explanation I guess is that I personally don't care about MIDI as I think its a terrible standard, the problem is that EVERYONE asks me "does it support MIDI" and then proceeds to tell me what they want each knob to do on the laser! More often than not, they'll want a cascading sequence of "stream of consciousness bizzaro-vision show" which turns out to be even more work than it honestly ought to be. I think, really, the key difference is not features. Given enough time (infinity?) you might even get "Creation" from by giving a pack of monkeys those cute jiggly laser pointers. I just think it's that the philosophy of requiring offboard devices to be "useful" or even "behave" isn't always permissible.

    If you're working on a new version then PM me if you want a hitlist of fixes and features I want to see improved in Pangolin.

    And to let you where I am on the lasermap, I simply want to create and show off completely revolutionary shows... stuff that honestly have NEVER been seen before because we've never been in a decade of terabytes and terahertz before... I have burning visions of laser shows that just needs the right software and hardware to bring it out... If you're the one to provide the hardware and software to do it, we'll buy it, if we have to do it all by ourselves we'll build it. There's a goal in mind and luckily the journey's half the fun... (Except right now I'm neck deep in discrete math tomes which isn't so fun)

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