Exporting completed laser shows to other software - PROBLEM!

[LASER-AD]

Ask Laser Lover, He can help you out i think.. Hes the team leader for the project.... Im just trying to help in the trenchs with this timing / ilda *hit.... :roll:

I read the Mambe black manual last night befor ebed, and i didnt really see anything much that looked hopeful.. there was a few export things in there, but im not sure how they operate.... Things not looking tooo good......

[JimBo]

@Laser Ad
To be honest the manual is very poor and the help file with the software is none existant :evil:
I would have expected Medialas to have a user forum but it doesn't do that either.

@Laser Lover

Ask Laser Lover, He can help you out i think.. Hes the team leader for the project....

Can you give me the FTP details?
Now that I've got Mamba Black I will try to contribute, do bear with mew though as I am very new to the software.

Jim

[liteglow]

The manual for mamba black has helped me OK
All thing you can do is in the manual PDF file...

And I daily talk with Media-Las on e-mail if there is a problem, and often the problem is fixed the very same day


there is forum for mamba black www.laserfreak.net but it`s only german !

[JimBo]

The manual doesn't give any sort of tutorial though, just a short explanation of each option/function.
When you're new to this it helps to have some sort of tutorial.
As you say laserfreaks would be great, only problem is that I dont understand a single word of German

Jim

[liteglow]

yea that is true, tutorial would have been nice
But mamba black is so simple to use... so if you play with it in 1-2 hours you know all the details and effects

if not, ask me and I help !

[buffo]

Hey guys.. Im not sure how you get your software to work, but heres how Pangolin outputs to ilda frames.. <snip> I also told it to output at 10 frames pers second, and its a 10 second sequence. I have th option to have it output as frames per second, or refresh based ....if i use frames per second i can keep the show to a certain size.<snip> . Everyone would have to be able to output to the standard ILDA files

Does the ILDA file standard have a setting for frames per second? I didn't think so... (Which is why Mamba asks you how many frames per second when you load a whole show from an ILDA frameset.) This is part of the problem; the lack of accurate timing information in the ILDA file standard.

I agree that the original plan was for everyone to output their section of the show as ILDA files. And like you mentioned, we all need to be working at the same frames-per-second speed. But 10 frames per second isn't fast enough to get the animation properly syncronized to the music. The default for Mamba is 25 frames per second, which seemed to work well for the short 50 second clip that I did for the song "Hit That" by The Offspring.

The problem is, when that clip is exported as a set of ILDA frames, all the timing information is lost. Mamba has several "save" options, but the one that is supposed to be cross-platform capable is the "Create Releasable Show" option, which is supposed to render the final output (as it would normally be sent to the scaners) back to a set of ILDA frames. Unfortunately, when we tried this option the timing ended up being lost. (We saved it, then re-loaded the resulting ilda file and tried to play it back with the music, only to discover that the timing was wrong.) The effects were rendered correctly in that fileset, however.

The .mrs file that Mamba creates includes all the timeline information needed to re-create the show exactly, but I think the .mrs file format is unique to Mamba. (Much like the .shw file format mentioned earlier.)

Adam

[LASER-AD]

So, it sounds to me as if mamba is doing something other than rendering 25frames per second... because i can play back a section of audio that i did and it times out well....Maybe its an issue with the computer and dac not being able to spit out the data fast enough from ilda frames, but can do it fine from a show file... A throughput issue??

Anyway, maybe you mamba guys can do a show, it seems as if you are in the majority right now, and im way in the minority...

[JimBo]

Anyway, maybe you mamba guys can do a show, it seems as if you are in the majority right now, and im way in the minority...

You have toooooo much money if you can afford Pangolin

Jim

[LASER-AD]

Well, As i see it, its a tool like any other.. I feel that its a very professional relaible tool that works every time i need in in all conditions... It is different than most because its not streaming through a DAC the same way Most of the show operations are done on the card not onthe computer... It acutally is a complete system on a card, bypassing most of the windows gunk that can cause you slowdowns and interuptions....

You just dont see them with pangolin.. no hot dots, or image stops, blanks, none of that, that you do see with some DAC's...

Yes it does cost more than most, but not all.. there are some europeand systems that cost more..I have tried them, but i like pangolin much better..

Bill and the Guys are nice to deal with, always open to new ideas, and they care about the laser industry. they wanna see it be around for a long time to come... That means a lot to me...

[buffo]

I agree that Pangolin is the cat's meow. And part of the reason is that they offloaded all the effects to the hardware card, though the forces that drove that decision date back to the days when it ran on the Amiga. But you're right, doing it that way eliminates nearly all possibility of the PC being the bottleneck. (Note that these days, the PC isn't going to be the bottleneck anyway, unless you're using the parallel port. The USB bandwidth is *MUCH* greater than that required to keep up with a set of galvos.)

Also, I belive Jimbo was merely poking fun with his comment about the cost of Pangolin, though he does have a point in that it's *quite* expensive for what it does.

Yes, Pangolin is a fine tool, and while it is expensive I'm sure that there are advantages to using it over some of the other solutions out there. As to whether it's as superior to those other packages as it's high price tag would suggest is a matter that is open for debate. Indeed, it would seem that there could be an interoperability issue with Mamba, though I'm not yet ready to condede defeat on this problem. But if it does prove to be an insurmountable issue, then that would be a strong argument in favor of Pangolin's higher price.

Regardless of all the above, however, I really must take issue with your statement that "Bill and the Guys are nice to deal with, always open to new ideas..." Bill logged in here back in March, 2006 and promptly began argueing with Yaddatrance about how Pangolin's method of accomplishing certain tasks was the one true way, and that it was not only a waste of time, but a borderline insult to even try a new approach. To me, Bill lost a *ton* of credibility with that whole series of posts. He was not open to the new ideas at all, nor did he have any respect for Yadda and his team. (Or for that matter, any respect to the other members of PhotonLexicon that had been posting here for over a year before he decided to log in one day and start telling people that their opinions were all wrong!)

Yadda and his group had put together a custom DAC that was capable of color effects that Pangolin could only dream of. It also had a unique means of determining the appropriate draw speed independent of what the file was originally created at. All in all, it was an incredible project, and many here were hoping that development would continue...

Evidently Bill thought that Yadda was just some fly-by-night tinkerer. When Yadda finally had enough of this, he posted his bonefides, along with the specific shortcomings of the Pangolin hardware that first prompted him to try to build something better. He detailed the tedious process of testing several different microcontrollers (each of which had to be hand-programmed before they could be tested) before choosing the one they ended up using. Then they had to write the firmware code. Write the software to control it. Lay out a PC board. Get it etched. Have a prototype board assembled. Test it extensively. Fix the bugs in the layout. etc, etc, etc...

At this point, any smart businessman would have realized that Yadda could have been a *HUGE* asset to the future development of Pangolin, but Bill couldn't be bothered to humble himself and admit that the guy he'd been arguing with was in fact a brilliant (but rather shy) engineer that was really on to something.

Eventually, Yadda stopped posting to PhotonLexicon, and he hasn't been back in over 6 months. Bill, too, has moved on, no doubt patting himself on the back for his perception at having won the upper hand in the debate. What did he leave us? Not much in the way of substantive information - just a lot of Pangolin fanboyisms. (Yadda, on the other hand, was a treasure trove of information. His presence is SORELY missed.)

I do not begrudge people that use Pangolin. I do recognize that they are the 800lb gorilla in the laser show industry, and the fact that they can trace their roots to the Amiga makes me happy to see that they've done so well. But I also feel that their software is obscenely overpriced. If I were doing shows for a living, and making really good money doing so, then I probably would not balk at the cost because it would be possible for me to pass it on to my customers. But for the casual business owner, not to mention the hobbyist, it's simply out of reach. And after I saw what the president of the company was capable of, I'm not so sure that I ever WANT to own their software. Evidently in the years between the Quad-Mod 32 board for Zorro-II slot Amiga's and the current QM2000 board, the heart of the company got just a little too black for my tastes.

Anyway, back to the real issue at hand - the outputting of ILDA frames for use in other show software...

I think the problem that we are having with Mamba and the output of ILDA frames *MAY* actually be exposing a weakness in the ILDA file format. I could be mistaken here, but after looking into the file spec I can't see where the frame speed information is stored anywhere. And without that information, you need to set the speed by hand... This is not to say that there isn't a work-around possible. For all I know we may be missing a key feature of Mamba that we simply need to activate to solve this problem. (I don't think it's a PC performance problem, considering the high-end machines we've used to perform the tests.) I'm hoping to get some more input from other members that are familiar with Mamba soon...

Adam