Laser growing up

[kecked]

Laser display has been relatively the same for decades. There have been advances in projector design and better lasers and the occasional innovation. GITD, Beambrush, new transitions and effects, building mapping.... all for the most part rely on preprogrammed material.

going all the way back to the start, most laser art was on the fly temporary, and immersive to the operator. While programmed material is truly great, I just received my Radiator last night and I have to say I think we lost something with preprogrammed shows. Bring yourself directly into the experience is nothing short of ....well you have to experience it.

i think the radiator in combination with other tech will elevate laser once again to a fresh place in art. If you can you owe it to yourself to try it.

[laserist]

I don't want to take anything away from The Radiator. It's an impressive piece of work, and has the vast possibilities that going digital and programmable makes possible.

And there you have the difference. It was the analog nature of the old Laserium systems that made the shows different than what came later. Before completely recorded shows became the norm, Laserists created and interacted with the imagery using quadrature oscillators, spirals, audio mod, offsets, image rotation, chopper, color mod, motor speeds, fiber focus, beam torquer, intensity, joysticks, and even shaking the entire machine. There was a 20 byte automation channel that controlled sizes and configurations, but that data was like the score in a modern dance piece that says where the dancers should be relative to each other and the stage. Take the dancers off the stage and the score is meaningless. Laserium was a performance art where the Laserists had the potential to refine their art while performing or just watching each show. It was also difficult, and required a lot of effort. When I brought back a classic version of Laserium for its 40th anniversary, one of the things I discovered is that doing that kind of show without a team backing you up is just too hard...

Perhaps with tools like The Radiator (And software updates to make it less programmable and more perform-able.), and other tools yet to come will yield up the bits and pieces and the TEAM that future Laserists can lean on and use to learn to perform again.

[kecked]

I don't want to take anything away from The Radiator. It's an impressive piece of work, and has the vast possibilities that going digital and programmable makes possible.

And there you have the difference. It was the analog nature of the old Laserium systems that made the shows different than what came later. Before completely recorded shows became the norm, Laserists created and interacted with the imagery using quadrature oscillators, spirals, audio mod, offsets, image rotation, chopper, color mod, motor speeds, fiber focus, beam torquer, intensity, joysticks, and even shaking the entire machine. There was a 20 byte automation channel that controlled sizes and configurations, but that data was like the score in a modern dance piece that says where the dancers should be relative to each other and the stage. Take the dancers off the stage and the score is meaningless. Laserium was a performance art where the Laserists had the potential to refine their art while performing or just watching each show. It was also difficult, and required a lot of effort. When I brought back a classic version of Laserium for its 40th anniversary, one of the things I discovered is that doing that kind of show without a team backing you up is just too hard...

Perhaps with tools like The Radiator (And software updates to make it less programmable and more perform-able.), and other tools yet to come will yield up the bits and pieces and the TEAM that future Laserists can lean on and use to learn to perform again.

I've tasted the nectar and all I can say is I want more. I had not even considered a group think approach to this. THAT would be something else.

[laserist]

I've tasted the nectar and all I can say is I want more. I had not even considered a group think approach to this. THAT would be something else.

I suspect there could be a number of paths leading to different flavors of performance solutions. (Always assuming that anyone bothers with the road less traveled.)

I see The Radiator as an insanely capable image generator rather than a performance tool at the moment. Perhaps the addition of a midi control panel (or yet another pc...) and/or some software tweeks will help that.

Laserium used 4 scan pairs back in the day, and while scanners are way faster today - multiplexing things isn't IMO always the way to go. Laserium multiplexed images in Summer Madness in Laserium II not to get more images, but for that "look" and the ability to play the multiplexing frequency against the image frequency. Throwing in fixed rotation on top of variable rotation made the number. (And there was a pretty cool Lumia done with a wheel and standoff lacquer kind of negative lens array...) Having different "looks" is absolutely essential if you want to hold an audience's attention.

Old Laserium motto, "When in trouble joystick and colormod!" So next steps might be having a joystick or two and colormod that isn't identical for all the other scanners...

[Greg]

I don't yet know much about the Radiator, but an other suggestion (the first being MIDI) is an ILDA in port that, under user programmable preset, can have any of it's analog signal lines switched to replace that line in the output port. Example, anyone can configure analog signal generating hardware to their taste, and then switch just the X and Y from the ILDA in port to the ILDA out port, while using the radiator for intensity and color modulation.

Would those with experience in such agree that the look of a beam under the continuous control of a function generator, in many instances cannot be duplicated by frame based ILDA output?

[laserist]

I don't yet know much about the Radiator, but an other suggestion (the first being MIDI) is an ILDA in port that, under user programmable preset, can have any of it's analog signal lines switched to replace that line in the output port. Example, anyone can configure analog signal generating hardware to their taste, and then switch just the X and Y from the ILDA in port to the ILDA out port, while using the radiator for intensity and color modulation.

Would those with experience in such agree that the look of a beam under the continuous control of a function generator, in many instances cannot be duplicated by frame based ILDA output?

That is the problem. If what you're trying to sum or replace on one side has some discontinuous aspect (frames) and the other side doesn't that'll be hard - especially if the discontinuous side is inconsistent.

There're some things that will work either way, fixed image rotation and static offsets for example. Also with multiple scanners you can switch the scanner inputs rather than sum. That would add difficulty though.

[swamidog]

this is a really great conversation and i appreciate it.

i'm very interested in knowing what things we can do to make the radiator more of a performance tool. any suggestions and feedback is very appreciated.

it's not clear to me what you mean by "less programmed and more perform-able". can you expand on that? i'm working on notes for the next software update and would like to stuff as much good stuff in there as we can.

I don't want to take anything away from The Radiator. It's an impressive piece of work, and has the vast possibilities that going digital and programmable makes possible.

And there you have the difference. It was the analog nature of the old Laserium systems that made the shows different than what came later. Before completely recorded shows became the norm, Laserists created and interacted with the imagery using quadrature oscillators, spirals, audio mod, offsets, image rotation, chopper, color mod, motor speeds, fiber focus, beam torquer, intensity, joysticks, and even shaking the entire machine. There was a 20 byte automation channel that controlled sizes and configurations, but that data was like the score in a modern dance piece that says where the dancers should be relative to each other and the stage. Take the dancers off the stage and the score is meaningless. Laserium was a performance art where the Laserists had the potential to refine their art while performing or just watching each show. It was also difficult, and required a lot of effort. When I brought back a classic version of Laserium for its 40th anniversary, one of the things I discovered is that doing that kind of show without a team backing you up is just too hard...

Perhaps with tools like The Radiator (And software updates to make it less programmable and more perform-able.), and other tools yet to come will yield up the bits and pieces and the TEAM that future Laserists can lean on and use to learn to perform again.

[kecked]

this is a really great conversation and i appreciate it.

i'm very interested in knowing what things we can do to make the radiator more of a performance tool. any suggestions and feedback is very appreciated.

it's not clear to me what you mean by "less programmed and more perform-able". can you expand on that? i'm working on notes for the next software update and would like to stuff as much good stuff in there as we can.

I think he means what I was talking about before laying hands on it. More external expression controls like ribbons, foot pedals, vbeam, midi, cv input.

truely I thought the same till I got it. It is all of those things as a performance instrument right now. The only few things I would like foot pedal for are size and brightness and a joystick for rotations. Well and foot pedal patch changing via midi. Got that one. Ok and a foot button for the shift button to reset controls. Actually that’s really needed. It’s hard to reach across the box to hold shift while touching a control on the opposite side of the device. If that can be done via midi that would cover it. At first I thought make the pots touch or push but the switch would bounce and wear out. Oh and a way to jump from a value to another quickly in a coarse mode but not have the image change till you arrive.

i only have a few hours on it and at first I thought it would take a lot of time to be able to use it. Nope. It’s pretty intuitive. I’m not a swamidog but then he is swamidog and has two plus years experience. Like any instrument the more you play the better you get.

what I am having trouble with is color modulation. It feels limited thus I don’t much understand it just yet.

also it would be cool to have an hdmi output to a monitor where you can show the device with values below each control and ability through touch screen to do entry or select modulation ramps like in lsx. Thus function expansion via a usb touchscreen feedback. I do this in protools when mixing on a slate touch monitor. So an extra hdmi selection. Obviously you can’t output via hdmi then but oh well.

morph between presets or fade between. Set rate. Fade in out buttons. Have dog fetch photons and bring back to reload projector when done. Can’t leave stray photons all over the place. Put your toys away when done.

[laserist]

I think he means what I was talking about before laying hands on it. More external expression controls like ribbons, foot pedals, vbeam, midi, cv input.

I think my difficulty stems from another difference between the old days and where laser shows have evolved. A gross simplification: In the old days we did things to the beat, today things tend to be done to the tempo. In most stuff I see today major musical cues come and go without the imagery changing at all. (It's not just laser shows. In the first John Wick movie, there's a club scene where the music is doing a accelerating wop, wop, wop..., but the imagery on the screen overhead was expanding off the screen at a constant tempo.) Or the other side of the coin where the music doesn't change but the imagery does. Today's stuff is pretty, but my minds eye sees all the missed opportunities.

To get a decent amount of granularity out of low resolution encoders - demands spinning the knobs a LOT. Don't get me wrong I'm not against spinning knobs. Glenn Thomas and I had a ongoing thing about my replacing the coarse/fine potentiometers for the spiral freq adjust on my Mark VI with a ten turn pot. But if I can't get to where I want to go in a couple of fast turns - I can't use it in a show. That doesn't make the Radiator bad. It means I would have to find my imagery before the show, store them all as presets, and then use them in the predetermined order to do the show. I could live with that, (at least some of the time) but I'd still want to use MIDI or something to give me more analog control with less carpal tunnel... On the other hand the preset route also moves further from that (online) how can I make this better during the performance while feeling the energy of the audience to a (offline) preset kind of thing.

I be a Dinosaur?

[swamidog]

not a dinosaur at all... you laserium folks paved the way for my laser show work and the radiator. we want to learn from your experience and make sure the radiator evokes some of those experiences.

the encoders have acceleration curves (turn them faster and they increment in larger jumps). we can make those more aggressive. potentially, we can make those user controllable. as you mentioned, having presets helps, but more and more i'm enjoying just manually exploring shapes and not using presets.

everything is midi controllable. the midi mapping table is in the user manual.

adding an additional monitor is not trivial, but one of the things that we haven't really touched on is the radiator can also be controlled via tcp/ip. with a little bit of tinkering with our code, you'll be able to create alternate and additional custom control surfaces. including things like touchOSC running on a tablet. this could also provide routing visualization and other system information.

we're really proud of what we've made, and i know with input from this community we can make it even better.

i'll be making some video tutorials to help folks get started, but i'm always happy to do some one on one video calls to walk through things.

kecked, let me know if you want a color modulation tutorial

I think my difficulty stems from another difference between the old days and where laser shows have evolved. A gross simplification: In the old days we did things to the beat, today things tend to be done to the tempo. In most stuff I see today major musical cues come and go without the imagery changing at all. (It's not just laser shows. In the first John Wick movie, there's a club scene where the music is doing a accelerating wop, wop, wop..., but the imagery on the screen overhead was expanding off the screen at a constant tempo.) Or the other side of the coin where the music doesn't change but the imagery does. Today's stuff is pretty, but my minds eye sees all the missed opportunities.

To get a decent amount of granularity out of low resolution encoders - demands spinning the knobs a LOT. Don't get me wrong I'm not against spinning knobs. Glenn Thomas and I had a ongoing thing about my replacing the coarse/fine potentiometers for the spiral freq adjust on my Mark VI with a ten turn pot. But if I can't get to where I want to go in a couple of fast turns - I can't use it in a show. That doesn't make the Radiator bad. It means I would have to find my imagery before the show, store them all as presets, and then use them in the predetermined order to do the show. I could live with that, (at least some of the time) but I'd still want to use MIDI or something to give me more analog control with less carpal tunnel... On the other hand the preset route also moves further from that (online) how can I make this better during the performance while feeling the energy of the audience to a (offline) preset kind of thing.

I be a Dinosaur?