Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

create scenes with steps

Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby Beekle » 09 October 2018, 05:10

Hello!

Is there a reason when I enter the duration of a step such as .08, it rounds it to .10? For Example: If you were to set the total duration as .32 and had four steps, it allows them to be .08, but if you change the duration individually, it always rounds the number to the nearest .05.

Is this intentional or am I missing something?

Thanks!

- Beekley
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby support » 09 October 2018, 07:20

This is because the smallest possible duration for a step is 0,05 sec.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby Beekle » 09 October 2018, 19:54

But you can make 5 steps with an overall duration of .20s making each step .04s. That is less than .05s. But if you manually type .04s on a step it rounds to .05s.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby support » 09 October 2018, 21:41

This is a small bug (noted in our ToDo list).
The software should change the values to multiple of 0.05s.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby Beekle » 10 October 2018, 18:03

Is there a technological limitation that requires steps to be .05? What are you supposed to do if you're creating scenes for a song in a BPM such as 135 and 1 Beat is 0.44s and 1 Bar is 1.77s? Just looking for some suggestions :lol:
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby support » 10 October 2018, 18:13

0,05 is a safe duration for the software to calculate everything between two frames of channels, with a standard computer.
With a 0.44s beat, the frame will arrive sometimes a bit earlier, and sometimes a bit later. At the end of the song, the max delay is 0,05s.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby support » 31 January 2019, 09:02

In the fix for V9.1.12, the duration of each Step is forced to modulo 0,05 sec.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby Pitwipe » 15 February 2019, 08:49

I'm currently at 9.1.11. Is there a way to override this modulo?
I'm running lights from the stage while playing and using a MIDI pedal board attached to a ShowXpress laptop. Many of my scenes are timed specifically through trial and error. Because of the GUI enforced rounding, I've been forced to manually edit the XML in many of the scene's ".scex" files to get the timings "good enough." Even though you indicate potential frame/channel problems - it works. For example, in the "Rounding Problem" attachment the overall tempo for the scenes in this song is approx 125 BPM which is .48 per quarter note so my scenes revolve around that measurement (1.92 per measure) but even this, over time still skews so depending on how many bars that scene is programmed for and so I have to make adjustments to various step's duration depending on where it starts to skew.

Here is an out of date example that has since been updated. The lights goes out of time in this clip for two reasons, 1) I miss-hit the midi pedal the first time and 2) the timing skew mentioned earlier kicks in later. And while these scenes are written to the recording from the original artist it's close enough for our purposes when we play live.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mLLMA ... k1-76KUh7V

It would appear that if I upgrade/patch to 9.1.12+ all my scenes may now out be of sync.

Ideally I'd like the drummer to trigger the lights via MIDI drum triggers and I've been looking at using MIDI notes with the BPM and Beat options in V9 but as of now I haven't found a workable solution. Let's assume I set the Beat Trigger to MIDI Notes and MIDI triggers on the kick and snare:
1) If I have midi triggers on the drums and the lighting scene requires quarter notes of kick/snare/kick/snare in the measure and I need the MIDI note to pulse every quarter note to achieve the effect it will fail because its only on beats 1 & 3. (Scene= Blue/White/Blue/White -- Kick/Snare/Kick/Snare; only Kick/----/Kick/---- will trigger the steps). I can't force the drummer to change the song and I'm unable to allow for more than one midi note (kick) to trigger the Beat Trigger.
2) I'm wanting a scene to match a "4 on the floor" beat every quarter note but in order to achieve that it will require on/off per quarter note (8 scenes [eighth notes]) to pulse with the beat otherwise the light will simply stay on (4/4= (1)Light on/Light off, (2)Light on/Light off, (3)Light on/Light off, (4)Light on/Light off). There is currently no way to execute two steps per single Beat Trigger/(midi note).

I've tried setting the Control/Data2 from Monostable to Bistable but it's a global setting and it appears to depend on the duration from note-on to note-off and would likely not work with drum triggers which, from my understanding, are typically only note-on. You also cannot control the note duration of drum hits.

Would something similar to the following be possible? Follow me here, this will be annoying.
a) To allow for multiple scenes per single Beat Trigger(MIDI note) create a data entry box to provide the delay between the steps for each trigger hit. (Midi Note = Step1 (delay 48ms), Step2 (At this point we're back to the 0.05 problem)
b) Could the Beat trigger monitor the current BPM and perform calculations from step "a" above -- i.e. Beat trigger is set to 2/1 (2 steps per trigger[midi/note]); it sees the BPM=125, thus delay is .48 between step 1 and step 2. This approach would require the drummer to set the tempo at the beginning of each song via a separate midi trigger using the BPM trigger but it would probably work because you'd only need it on the scenes where a Beat Trigger is active.

[image]
Last edited by Pitwipe on 16 February 2019, 23:09, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby support » 15 February 2019, 09:56

Is there a way to override this modulo?

Sorry but this is not possible.
The time unit is fixed and can not be changed, once the software is running.
And all durations (steps, buttons, ...) are a multiple of the time unit.
If the unit is 48ms or 52ms, then no way to have "standard" durations (1 second, 5 seconds, ...).
So the time unit must be 50ms.

8/1, 4/1, 2/1, 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8

This is noted.
We will check the possibilities asap.

Note
We understand that after a certain time in a scene, a drift may happen.
The solution is to trigger a new scene after a fixed time (TimeLine / Sequential List), before the drift becomes too big.
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Re: Duration of Steps Rounding to Nearest .05

Postby Pitwipe » 15 February 2019, 17:27

Yes, I have separate scenes triggered by different pedals on the MIDI pedal board (Intro, verse, etc) and if things go awry they usually get re-aligned on the next pedal hit. My trouble is more with extended sections where I'd like the scene to be a beat trigger tied to the drum kit. This would hopefully take the slop out of the timing.. along with the removal of all the manual timing edits.

Things work now for static scenes but well timed punches and other timing based scenes are really what make a light show worthwhile.

My main fear is with upgrading and losing all the timings for what I have already done.. and not being able to upgrade any further. I'll probably just back up what I've got and see what happens after upgrade and back out if I have to.

Thanks again for your time and consideration.
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