LSP 2.0 Additional Features

dmoore

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Apr 26, 2010
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Houston, TX, USA
LightShow Pro 2.0 has had some pretty impressive functional features added to the following areas:

* Masking of transition videos so you can create "on the fly" modifications to transitions. Say for example you needed a left to right "swipe" starting with green and ending with red. In the past you would have had to create a specific video just for that. Now you can take a basic black and white "swipe" then make the leading color green and trailing color red and it will merge the colors into the video. This feature also works with videos instead of solid colors so you can "merge" two different transition videos. You can also flip and rotate video transitions, so a transition that is a left to right swipe can be rotated 90 degrees to become a top to bottom swipe without creating a different video transition.

* One of the issues in the past was the huge number of timing marks and no real good way to move the ones that didn't matter out of the way while sequening with ones that did matter. Now there are timing "layers" that allow you to make some timing marks active, while still seeing the others, but having an effect only apply to the timing marks in that current timing mark layer.

* Huge changes in copy and paste. You can now copy and paste backwards and inverted. So if you have a section of on and off commands, when you paste it with invert, it will then be off and on commands - the same applies for fades, a fade in becomes a fade out, etc. You can also mix inverted and regular so you can go back and forth when pasting.

* Improvements in clipboarding so you can save common sequence types to the clip board easier and apply them easier.

* There is also another feature that makes it clear which specific timing mark you are working with.

See the video for more details:

LightShow Pro v2 Grid Enhancements
 

lithgowlights

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May 6, 2010
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1,023
The new features look great. Now we just have to wait until the end of the month to get our hands on V2.
 

TimW

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Jun 15, 2010
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Melbourne
Those features look great. But last year's features looked great.....

This year LSP (at least for me) will stand or fall on the basics....
- Is it stable (how many times do I have to click on the 'output' button to get output? Will the channel tester work as I expect, or randomly?)
- Can it handle E.131 without choking either LSP or the downstream controllers?
- Does the grid (and the preview) accurately represent the timing of the lights? Will there be one timing for the preview and a different one for the grid and a different one for the audio?
- Can I work on a section of my sequence, either looping or rebuilding it without having to go back to the start each time?
- Will I need to randomly reoptimise the sequence and wait minutes for this to happen each time?

I had great expectations for LSP last year... and now I have great expectations for it this year..... I'd just like to be confident enough in its reliability that I can re-invest the time programming it and , I assume, the money in repurchasing what I couldn't use last year.... There's no point in fancy features and enhancements if it doesn't work consistently.

For me that's the basic test for 2.0. Not how many new features there are....

I hope David and the team nail it!
 

taybrynn

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Dec 30, 2010
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Castle Rock, Colorado
Looks very promising indeed.

I really like the timing highlighter and being able sequence using those ... kind of gets around the timing madness the program still seems to use when effects are applied.

Stability and speed also looks vastly improved, but what Tim said is 100% spot on. I think everyone knows that its gotta be stable and reliable. I wonder if the show player is also stable now.

Side note: LSP strikes me as being like a video editing program retrofitted for use in light shows ... so I'd like to see more lightshow-centric effects and transitions ... instead of video editing type effects, which are powerful, but kind of an odd way to program a typical lightshow layout. Ok, let me clarify ... the LSP visualizer seems very lightshow-centric. The effects and transitions ... not so much ... as they seem more like a list of transitions I'd find in a video editing program. Again, doing a "worms" or "windows" effects is very cool, but isn't going to produce anything great in my tree line. Sure its great in a RGB matrix, or in a display where you basically cover everything in sight with RGB items ... but I think most lightshows are more limited and classic in design and as such, need more lightshow-centric features (i.e. effects for arches, megatrees, spinners, fans, tree lines, mini tree circles/lines, snowflake walls, etc.) I think David is finally starting to 'get' the difference between whats cool from a developer standpoint ... and whats truly useful as an artist trying to program a Christmas Lightshow ... some things are very cool, not as useful. Somethings are both.
 

dmoore

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Apr 26, 2010
Messages
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Location
Houston, TX, USA
TimW said:
- Is it stable (how many times do I have to click on the 'output' button to get output? Will the channel tester work as I expect, or randomly?)
I had problems with this in the past but I've done quite a bit of testing with actual hardware and currently not seeing any issues.

TimW said:
- Can it handle E.131 without choking either LSP or the downstream controllers?
Even last year (in early Dec), E131 was working fine for me at 2,800 channels and I think Eddy was running quite a few channels on E131 also without issue.

TimW said:
- Does the grid (and the preview) accurately represent the timing of the lights? Will there be one timing for the preview and a different one for the grid and a different one for the audio?
In the past there have been issues with out of sync display to actual output when testing inside the sequencer but other than a minor issue that I reported and was fixed a few weeks ago, I'm not seeing any problems.

TimW said:
- Will I need to randomly reoptimise the sequence and wait minutes for this to happen each time?
LSP now defaults to on-the-fly optimization. Of course you can go back to manual optimization.
 
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