Anyone else using Twinkle effect?

kane

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Does anyone else use the twinkle effect in their sequences? If so, are you able to test live output in 2.8, to see if they perform as you expect.

It seems that the effect has been changed in 2.8 so that it looks more like what a shimmer would be, and all in a solid colour (and shimmer has been changed to be a slower flash version). Previously, you could do a white twinkle, and it would twinkle random colours (which I know many ACL people use, as it's been discussed in chat in the past)..
 

kane

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mmulvenna said:
Thanks Mike - I had also posted a link to the above URL in the bug I posted about this issue(http://lightshowpro.com/issue.php?issueid=1101)

It seems that they guys have attempted to "Fix" the white twinkle.. In that thread above, I posted asking about "white twinkle" being random colour (which looks great), and this worked fine in 1.8, 2.0 and 2.5. But it seems that in 2.8 (at least from the sequencer), white twinkle is doing a white shimmer, and white shimmer just does a slower version of the same.

I'm hoping they can put a workaround in place so that users can choose the old behaviour if they want. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that uses the white twinkle to do a multi-coloured effect. Basically, the "fix" has broken a few of my sequences..

Anyone can test this pretty easily by using "test controller hardware", choosing "Twinkle" from the dropdown, and turning a bank of lights on.. All of the 8 pixels in that bank will just strobe flash in unison, which is nothing like a twinkle. Previously, the 8 pixels would twinkle in random colours..
 

burner

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Hi Kane,
I've just whipped out 1 strip from my tree and plugged it into the J1SYS-P12R and can confirm that the twinkle effect is fast and just white when doing a "Test Controller Hardware" and that Shimmer is just a slower version (say 1 light-up per second).

I actually had some twinkle coloured effects in my show already and when I played that section back, it twinkled the correct colour too (aswell as the white section twinkling white). I have also tried a cross fade from red-white in twinkle and it's working as expected now.
 

kane

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burner said:
Hi Kane,
I've just whipped out 1 strip from my tree and plugged it into the J1SYS-P12R and can confirm that the twinkle effect is fast and just white when doing a "Test Controller Hardware" and that Shimmer is just a slower version (say 1 light-up per second).

I actually had some twinkle coloured effects in my show already and when I played that section back, it twinkled the correct colour too (aswell as the white section twinkling white). I have also tried a cross fade from red-white in twinkle and it's working as expected now.

Thanks for that Burner, same result as myself.

There's two issues that I can see - hopefully will get some feedback from the LSP team on the thread I posted on the LSP forums.

Firstly, the twinkle isn't really a twinkle (as far as I interpret it) - I would think that if you twinkle a string of 200 lights, that all 200 should be lit up with different intensities, randomly across the string. They shouldn't all pulse together quickly in a strobe effect.

The bigger issue is that in versions 1.8, 2.0 and 2.5, if you did a white twinkle, you received a multi-coloured effect, so many people (like myself) used this effect in our sequences.. By them "fixing" it so that it's white means that it's effectively taken a feature away from people that had been using it. Which means that if you want to reuse a sequence from last year (which is what I'm doing), then things won't look the same, which I don't think is reasonable..
 

burner

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Totally understand where you are coming from. Last year I sequenced in a bunch of twinkle effects, but after I realized that by accidental design that the twinkle went multi coloured I left it in, as the results looked o.k. in colour. I was surprised earlier when I was testing it that the whole strip did the same thing altogether, rather then different pixels doing different intensities.

At this stage, I have resorted to splitting my timing marks as 15 frames per second intervals (roughly) and setting my on effect to white, then randomly clicking in the grid and pressing enter. I then copy it 4 times, in reverse, flipped vertically and both and copy the lot, then paste all of that through the sequence. It's a slower process but I'm at least controlling the effect manually.

I could go 1 extra step and introduce a ramp up/down over 2 timing marks which will soften the effect.
 

twinkleclaus

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It is great that they fixed this 'bug', but I, as have others, relied on this 'bug' to produce a multi-color twinkle that looks amazing. Can the devs please re-introduce the 'bug' as a new feature? While there were times I wanted a white twinkle, I also want a multi-color twinkle.
 

kane

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twinkleclaus said:
It is great that they fixed this 'bug', but I, as have others, relied on this 'bug' to produce a multi-color twinkle that looks amazing. Can the devs please re-introduce the 'bug' as a new feature? While there were times I wanted a white twinkle, I also want a multi-color twinkle.

I've just put in a feature request on the LSP site for this - http://lightshowpro.com/issue.php?issueid=1106

The bigger problem is that twinkle doesn't actually work, for white, or any colour. It instead does a fast shimmer... Hopefully they'll fix this before the season starts, as I can see a lot of people complain once their shows look different to what they expected. (the visualiser is correct, the output just doesn't match it)
 

kane

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by the way, if we want things to be fixed, we need to be vocal - if anyone is able to test the twinkle, for example, and let us know what they expected the output to be, and what they actually get on their lights, that'd be great.

I'm betting that once people set up their displays, they'll be panicking when things don't work correctly - hence why I'm trying to bring it to their attention now.

Perhaps post on this thread if you think that twinkle looks wrong..
http://lightshowpro.com/issue.php?issueid=1101#note6832
 

fasteddy

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I did a bit of testing last night with twinkle and discovered how twinkle in the sequencer and the scheduler appear to be different, in the scheduler it does as it is meant to do and will even do a trasnsitional colour change whilst doing twinkle. I also did come across a little trick that seemed to create a 2 colour twinkle. using 2 diferent twinkle colours and then using fill in between them seemed to then mix those 2 colours togther which was a nice effect.

So the sequencer the twinkle doesnt seem to work properly as I saw similar results and unreliable twinkle, but in the the scheduler it worked great and its the scheduler it needs to work with as thats what we run our shows on.
 

kane

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ɟɐsʇǝppʎ said:
I did a bit of testing last night with twinkle and discovered how twinkle in the sequencer and the scheduler appear to be different, in the scheduler it does as it is meant to do and will even do a trasnsitional colour change whilst doing twinkle. I also did come across a little trick that seemed to create a 2 colour twinkle. using 2 diferent twinkle colours and then using fill in between them seemed to then mix those 2 colours togther which was a nice effect.

So the sequencer the twinkle doesnt seem to work properly as I saw similar results and unreliable twinkle, but in the the scheduler it worked great and its the scheduler it needs to work with as thats what we run our shows on.
Forgot to post on this - they asked me to check the scheduler, and I came to the same conclusion - it's just the output from the sequencer (including "test controller hardware") that is incorrect - the scheduler is fine.
I've gone through my sequences and removed the "white" (aka multi-colour) twinkles - as it turns out I don't use it as much as I did in my first year, so it didn't take too much time to do.

Can you provide a bit more info on that two-coloured twinkle effect as that sounds interesting... Wonder if you can have a primarily coloured twinkle (say with 50% fill), mixed with a white 10% twinkle or something?
 

Charl Marais

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I would love to see how that is done and maybe a little video to demonstrate the effect please?

If it looks like I am imagining this might be exactly what I am looking for and I cannot get this done with LOR without a major amount of work.
 

fasteddy

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Ive ended up just using the macro twinkle effect as it allows me a lot more control and power. This allows me to create any colour, mixed colour or RGB twinkle effect with little effort.
 
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