Kicking off a light sequence (stage show)

[spaulgal]

Question for you pros.....


We have an annual stage show with constant rotating audiences. It’s live actors, music, and sync’ed pixels. From 2016 to 2021 the Pixel portion was a Vixen sequence via a e682 board. We always played the pixels by pressing "play" on the Vixen timeline in conjunction with pressing the "Go" button for the rest of the show. It actually worked fine,

It is now an enhanced xlights sequence via a Falcon F48 board. We added about 2x the pixels for 2022 and (painstakingly) replicated the Vixen sequence in Xlights.

In early tests before opening It is running sluggish off the xLights timeline. We do understand that this is not the ideal playback situation (playing a sequence off a live timeline)

How would you folks recommend us to kick off this particular pixel show?

 

[Indigogyre]

Just to get a better understanding, are you in xLIghts, on the sequencer tab, with the desired sequence open, hit the lightbulb for output to controller and hitting play?

 

[spaulgal]

Yes. That is also how we did it previously with Vixen for this particular show.
Our ultimate goal would be to integrate playback with our main show controller (a multichannel A/V program called ProPresenter). I do understand this is possible using a trigger that ProPresenter can output to the GPIO pins on FPi, but I do think we may fall short of that goal for this year.

 

[Mark_M]

FPP on a Raspberry Pi can support triggers from a GPIO pin on the Pi. Such as a physical button.

Both FPP and xSchedule can support artNET or a variety of other triggers.

xFade allows you to create preset effects and fade between them, sort of like OBS in studio mode.

xSchedule and xFade is installed with xLights.
FPP is software to install onto a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone single board computer.

 

[spaulgal]

We've been using Jukebox for years so x fade will be so helpful for many of our installations!

In this particular case Jukebox and x fades will not help, because the timeline is proving to be too much to play direct from the timeline.
we have a 12min stage show with constant rotating audiences. The addition to the 12 mins show, there is a separate 1 min lightshow loop that plays as each audience is loaded.
What is the best way to playback these two light shows (the loading loop and the 12min main show)?
I know they will be fseqs played from a FPi, but how can I best set this up?
I did just purchase the big red and green buttons from adafruit.

 

[dkulp]

Can ProPresenter send out an OSC event? That would be the best option. When you hit the start button in ProPresenter, it would trigger FPP via the OSC plugin to start the appropriate sequence.

 

[spaulgal]

It does not to appear to. It can send out Midi notes as a trigger when the show is started.

 

[dkulp]

Midi can work as well (fpp-MIDI plugin), but that would require a bit more hardware as it would require some sort of USB midi adapter to get the Midi events.

 

[spaulgal]

Neat. I've found some USB midi adapters, but we are running Propresenter (PP) on a Mac M1 -- which of course does not have a standard midi output.

i saw this on the support pages of PP:
If you are using MIDI hardware you may need to change the Hardware type. However, we have found that the majority of our users who send/receive MIDI in ProPresenter use software controllers like Ableton or Playback by MultiTracks. These software controllers send MIDI over Ethernet (or wifi), which makes them much more convenient to use when the computer running tracks that is sending MIDI may be on stage and your ProPresenter computer is in a different part of the building.