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[absolom7691]

LSX isn't open source, but i have considered selling a cheap package of wipes, transitions and effects..

Oops, my bad. I thought it was open source. Don't mind me!

[swamidog]

Oops, my bad. I thought it was open source. Don't mind me!

there are a *lot* of us that wish it was.

[colouredmirrorball]

Well, to be fair, it doesn't lock me to their system. I mean, yeah, it could but why would I want a format other than what works best with my software? I will admit that I don't know for sure but I am willing to bet there is a lot more in the Beyond's file structure than just vector points and color information.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Pangolin uses ilda files to store their art! Even LSX doesn't do that, and rightfully so because ilda has several limitations (it's frame-based, each frame has to be stored independently even if consecutive frames are identical, it's point based so not really vector etc.). It won't make sense to save Pangolin art as ilda and load it in again...

Now, I fly my Pangolin flag often but I will also admit that the inability to export to a common format can potentially hurt artisits who sell their work instead of displaying it but I don't believe it is a ploy or a tactic to get the world to use Pangolin. I think it's just to preserve quality. When you see Pangolin performing, you are seeing it at the highest quality that it will ever be (obviously, quality as it pertains to the system, not the art created).

I get that argument but I have two objections.

1) It's not up to Pangolin to decide that. If the user exports content and plays it on another system, it's no longer being performed on a Pangolin system! I feel this should really be the user's responsibility. If he uses the art he created in Pangolin on other systems, he should accept it won't be the same quality.

2) What you're sending to the DAC are points, much alike what's stored in an ilda file. I don't buy the quality loss argument. I don't know how Pangolin dacs work but every other dac works by streaming points to it. So it can't be much of a quality loss since you'd get that anyway by sending the art to a DAC...

So if you don't believe in the quality preservation argument, what options are there but to think Pangolin does it to lock users into their system? :P

Swami, this is a bit off topic but, as LSX is open source and should you have the time to throw away, I wonder if you could write plugins to add some of your favorite effects as a preset with some sliders to point to math expressions, rotational events, clone copies.... make it a little more user friendly. You and CMB have the best grasp on the software (based on the tut threads). Having used LSX and Beyond, I would say that this is the defining difference (as abstracts go). One has a steep learning curve, the other does not and both can make some really pretty lights!

If LSX was open source, I'd have fixed so many bugs already :P Even if that required me to learn C++...

[White-Light]

Just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do!

So why single out Pangolin for criticism? When so far as I'm aware, only the hobbyist created packages ie. LSX and Spaghetti, still allow you to export shows in ILDA format.

If you want to make a criticism shouldn't it be along the lines of I wouldn't buy Pangolin because like all the commercial packages you can't export to ILDA. Singling Pangolin out when so far as I'm aware every commercial package uses proprietary export formats just becomes an unnecessary Pangolin bashing exercise by singling them out alone for criticism.

Wait what. I'm not following. If swami's shows are not abstracts, then what is? How do you define an abstract then? And what is a "cue", is it a list of frames? Sorry, I'm genuinely not getting what you're saying.

What Swami demonstrated to everyone, essentially when he started doing this, is that with lateral thinking there are 2 ways of creating abstracts - the traditional way, everyone knew about ie. the abstract generator, and the novel way ie. Take an ordinary cue, apply ordinary effects to the cue until you produce something that looks like an abstract generated abstract, with the advantage that you have much more control over the way the "abstract" behaves (because you can key it's movement thus allowing for more complex movements and more effective merges with the next cue). All very clever and full kudos to Swami for his innovation.

There are no "preset" shapes, you can use ANY shape. Even ones that morph in real time.

You can use any shape in Beyond. The difference is Beyond comes with a library of 1/2 a dozen very basic base shapes to start from ie square, circle, triangle, wavy line etc. After those, you have to create your own shapes. In 99% of situations, that's no handicap at all. However, when it comes to creating "abstracts" using cues + applied effects as opposed to via an abstract generator, having a small library is a disadvantage as the emphasis then falls on the user to have the creativity to think up shapes that might work and to create those shapes himself one by one. LSX on the other hand comes with a huge library of pre-drawn base shapes. For anyone thus wanting to make a cue based abstract it's much easier as you have hundreds of shapes to choose from "out of the box".

There are lots of differences. I hear the live features of Beyond are very nice (probably a lot better than LSX) and the 3D capabilities of Beyond Ultimate will be hard to beat for any software. But I don't think it's better for abstracts :P (which is just an impression since I don't have Beyond).

I would agree. But the point I was making in the reason why LSX is better for Swami style abstracts falls back to the most basic of things, the shape library. There's nothing in LSX otherwise that can't be done in Beyond (to my knowledge). The difference comes from the library of shapes onto which the effects can be applied.

[White-Light]

I get that argument but I have two objections.

1) It's not up to Pangolin to decide that. If the user exports content and plays it on another system, it's no longer being performed on a Pangolin system! I feel this should really be the user's responsibility. If he uses the art he created in Pangolin on other systems, he should accept it won't be the same quality.

One big caveat here - Pangolin have paid literally tens of thousands of dollars / pounds to obtain the rights to commercially produced shows that are included free with LD2000 and soon Beyond, once the compatibility has been sorted. The same can be said of the cue artwork - that has also been commercially commissioned from a company in Canada.

In the past, some of that artwork has been acquired by certain Chinese vendors and included in their programming (I believe maybe illegally but wouldn't actually know).

I think it is entirely reasonable therefore that when you have spent tens of thousands of pounds purchasing exclusive shows and commissioning exclusive art work to give your package an exclusive quality edge want to protect that from export to other systems.

I would presume that is also the reason other vendors have started to do the same.

2) What you're sending to the DAC are points, much alike what's stored in an ilda file. I don't buy the quality loss argument. I don't know how Pangolin dacs work but every other dac works by streaming points to it. So it can't be much of a quality loss since you'd get that anyway by sending the art to a DAC...

Apart from Pangolin say their DAC doesn't use points. I wouldn't know but obviously if true, that could be a problem.

- - - Updated - - -

@ Dillweed, haven't had time to look at your shows but I will eventually do so.

Many thanks for sharing.

[colouredmirrorball]

So why single out Pangolin for criticism? When so far as I'm aware, only the hobbyist created packages ie. LSX and Spaghetti, still allow you to export shows in ILDA format.

If you want to make a criticism shouldn't it be along the lines of I wouldn't buy Pangolin because like all the commercial packages you can't export to ILDA. Singling Pangolin out when so far as I'm aware every commercial package uses proprietary export formats just becomes an unnecessary Pangolin bashing exercise by singling them out alone for criticism.

Good point but this discussion started because someone did the effort to create a new show with Pangolin and share it with the community for free, but doesn't have the chance to share it with the whole community. It's just not a decision he can make, all of this has been decided for him! You can expand my critique to all other software which doesn't export to ilda. Also the "still" in your post bugs me. Professional software used to export to ilda, why cut that feature?

What Swami demonstrated to everyone, essentially when he started doing this, is that with lateral thinking there are 2 ways of creating abstracts - the traditional way, everyone knew about ie. the abstract generator, and the novel way ie. Take an ordinary cue, apply ordinary effects to the cue until you produce something that looks like an abstract generated abstract, with the advantage that you have much more control over the way the "abstract" behaves (because you can key it's movement thus allowing for more complex movements and more effective merges with the next cue). All very clever and full kudos to Swami for his innovation.

But what comes out are abstracts! So only when you put a base shape through some oscillators you get a "real" abstract? Sorry but why the difference?

You can use any shape in Beyond. The difference is Beyond comes with a library of 1/2 a dozen very basic base shapes to start from ie square, circle, triangle, wavy line etc. After those, you have to create your own shapes. In 99% of situations, that's no handicap at all. However, when it comes to creating "abstracts" using cues + applied effects as opposed to via an abstract generator, having a small library is a disadvantage as the emphasis then falls on the user to have the creativity to think up shapes that might work and to create those shapes himself one by one. LSX on the other hand comes with a huge library of pre-drawn base shapes. For anyone thus wanting to make a cue based abstract it's much easier as you have hundreds of shapes to choose from "out of the box".

I would agree. But the point I was making in the reason why LSX is better for Swami style abstracts falls back to the most basic of things, the shape library. There's nothing in LSX otherwise that can't be done in Beyond (to my knowledge). The difference comes from the library of shapes onto which the effects can be applied.

I think there are many things you can do in LSX you can't do in Beyond (but maybe not anymore since the development of PangoScript). I'd say one difference is the abstract generator. I bet it's just a regular oscillator bank in Beyond: sines, triangles, squares, ... if it's fancy, you could even do frequency modulation. Because that's just the old way of doing abstracts. But in LSX you can create very lengthy expressions without any limits in number of oscillators or modes or combinations. You don't even need to do that to create nice things as swami repeatedly demonstrates! Obviously if PangoScript is as powerful as the LSX expressions this doesn't matter.

One big caveat here - Pangolin have paid literally tens of thousands of dollars / pounds to obtain the rights to commercially produced shows that are included free with LD2000 and soon Beyond, once the compatibility has been sorted. The same can be said of the cue artwork - that has also been commercially commissioned from a company in Canada.

In the past, some of that artwork has been acquired by certain Chinese vendors and included in their programming (I believe maybe illegally but wouldn't actually know).

I think it is entirely reasonable therefore that when you have spent tens of thousands of pounds purchasing exclusive shows and commissioning exclusive art work to give your package an exclusive quality edge want to protect that from export to other systems.

I would presume that is also the reason other vendors have started to do the same.

But as has been said before, it'd be trivial to protect frames and shows to disable ilda export with licensed frames. LSX does that too, you can't export the stock shows to ilda. I get the point of protecting your hard-worked for art and don't dispute this. But why the limit for the art you created yourself? It frustrates me that people like Dillweed spend hours creating shows and share them for free with the Pangolin community but us peasants can't watch it even if Dillweed would have wanted to!

Apart from Pangolin say their DAC doesn't use points. I wouldn't know but obviously if true, that could be a problem.

It would be interesting to learn what they used then. But I'll reiterate my point again: all other systems do use points in their DACs. This means the users of such systems have already accepted the quality loss versus Pangolin (the hypothetical one caused by it being a point based system versus a presumably vector based system). So Pangolin saying they don't want the art created with their systems because it wouldn't look good on other systems is not a valid argument: it might (?) not look as good as on Pangolin but it'll look as good as it can on other systems. They might even include a warning upon export if they care so much about that.

[absolom7691]

But what comes out are abstracts! So only when you put a base shape through some oscillators you get a "real" abstract? Sorry but why the difference?

I also didn't get what Al meant. I take "abstract" to mean any non distinct shape that goes through oscillations, undulations and whatever else while making a cohesive pattern. Also, it must be something cool to get lost in!

I think there are many things you can do in LSX you can't do in Beyond (but maybe not anymore since the development of PangoScript). I'd say one difference is the abstract generator. I bet it's just a regular oscillator bank in Beyond: sines, triangles, squares, ... if it's fancy, you could even do frequency modulation. Because that's just the old way of doing abstracts. But in LSX you can create very lengthy expressions without any limits in number of oscillators or modes or combinations. You don't even need to do that to create nice things as swami repeatedly demonstrates! Obviously if PangoScript is as powerful as the LSX expressions this doesn't matter.

This may have been true in LD2K but Beyond has evolved the Pangolin universe by a lot. Even without expressions or using pagoscript, it has some very powerful features for creating abstracts. Yes, it does have the different waveforms (sine, triangle, square...) for creating "analog" style abstracts but it has a multitude of tools beyond that now. You can even map a USB joystick to any function in the Abstraction tool for live manipulation. For a long time, I was hooked on using the analog abstract generator (I still love those old school abstracts) but I have gotten much better at using the Abstraction tool and I am starting to become quite fond of it. When I get some time, I'll see if I can export to ILDA, a good portion of the abstracts I have created using beyond and you can see that it is more that just an emulated analog console.

[colouredmirrorball]

That is exactly what you can do in LSX with expressions: you can easily use real time inputs in them (all kinds: mouse, joystick, osc, midi, music, ... ). This is why it's such a great tool. I'm not sure if beyond offers the same amount of flexibility as the expressions and the expressions are probably a lot more annoying to work with than the shiny GUI of Beyond. In the end both are equally capable at doing the same thing.

[Stuka]

Wow...

The original poster made, what, 2 posts in this entire thread - including the post in which he offered his show to the community - and never once seemed to be bothered by the fact the the Pangolin gear he decided to use didn't export in some universal file format. Nor did he openly express any concern about the way LSX did or did not work with abstracts.
(For that matter, I haven't seen any other Pangolin-only users chime in to "express their concerns", either.)

Dillweed was simply sharing content created on a Pangolin system with other users that also use Pangolin equipment.

WTF -
Nice hijack of a thread from a new user that was trying to contribute to the community...

[Bradfo69]

To be honest, $1500 is WAY more than I'd EVER be willing to spend for a software package... There's hundreds of priorities in life that come way before I drop that much money on a piece of software!!

While I understand exactly what you are saying, keep in mind that laser software, as with ANY commercial specialty field software, it is going to generally be more expensive than your run of the mill spreasheet or desktop publishing product you can by at Staples or Best Buy. The installed user base is simply smaller so all that cost of development is spread over a lot less copies sold.