Jon Hopkins - Insides

[frostypaw]

My first show... please be gentle. I've kinda pointedly not looked at how anyone else's shows are done and made everything from scratch. Syncs with the normal original vanilla album track. Entirely made in Dynamics. Hope I've linked it and done it right.

Jon Hopkins - Insides

In case he reads this can I put in a request for Swamidog to have a listen to Open Eye Signal by the same fella? Or not and it'll force me to learn to lissajous, but I figure that's enough grown-up excitement for this Saturday night.

edit> ps done with the screen-sim on. just watching it back in lasershowGen and the shapes don't show so much there.

[swamidog]

you can, and he did.

it's not quite the style of music for me, but you should absolutely learn lissajous.

i've grabbed your .ild file and will take a look. thanks!

My first show... please be gentle. I've kinda pointedly not looked at how anyone else's shows are done and made everything from scratch. Syncs with the normal original vanilla album track. Entirely made in Dynamics. Hope I've linked it and done it right.

Jon Hopkins - Insides

In case he reads this can I put in a request for Swamidog to have a listen to Open Eye Signal by the same fella? Or not and it'll force me to learn to lissajous, but I figure that's enough grown-up excitement for this Saturday night.

edit> ps done with the screen-sim on. just watching it back in lasershowGen and the shapes don't show so much there.

[frostypaw]

you can, and he did.

it's not quite the style of music for me, but you should absolutely learn lissajous.

i've grabbed your .ild file and will take a look. thanks!

Ooh 'xciting

Musical taste is a perennial issue. I just couldn't help but picture bits of eye-meltyness to that tune with it's hugely cyclical nature.

Apologies for the unexpected earbashing from glitchy techno to all :lol:

[frostypaw]

Oh that's a fixed PPS file..... sorry if that's ended up weird for anyone who's downloaded it to see - worked out very oddly when I tried to resync it with the audio in lasershowGen this morning.

I'm switching it with a 50FPS version that'll make more sense to all involved I think.

edit to add I can't seem to get it to export at fixed FPS, so restored the file but be warned :/

[frostypaw]

FIXED

It appears a reboot then I can export as long as it's the first thing I do. Should be 50FPS. lasergenShow says there's a funky frame in there and ends up fractionally early by the end, not got other things to test it though

[mixedgas]

Two, Four, Eight, Sixteen.. Not Three. Do some counting and you'll see what I mean. Other then that, your timing is spot on and there is serious hope for you as a show programmer.

Steve

[frostypaw]

Haha thanks very much fella and yeah I know it drifted sadly. It all got very confusing during some of the complex bits as the texturing drifts too and I was making my own life hard by not setting up patterns more tightly before segments.

I've done a new one that's tight, and tried a stab with a lissajous...

The export shifts off sync at first too, are ILDA files a bit crap or is it my imagination? Or is good point/framerate management another of the premium software things? While in editor it behaves at split-second accuracy so only a video version for now. 50fps is 20msec a frame right? Still only down to 50msec granularity so far so dunno why it's not exporting bang on. Some intentionaly shifting between following the vocal's lead and the beat as it seemed to make it more attention-grabbing.

Certainly hypnotic fun. Must go learn about Xero now, no idea why it's taking me so long.

[mixedgas]

Musical notes work in measures, and measures have counts. Hence the numbers related to beats. For example the successful "Laser Dance Party" inventor in Canada insisted I learn to count to 16 for his live shows, some 20 years ago. Much of techno is in 16s. Zero is not an option. You must connect the music beats to the laser timing for synesthesia to occur. Then you get to learn about Glissandos, Slides, Choruses and Codas. Then how dark black is a good color to use some times.
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Learn about 4/4 time and 3/4 time.
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Oh my gosh, we have not had a good show programming / music theory discussion in like 2 years on PL. This is good.
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Yes, Good show software does some serious work to fit the events to the timeline without the user seeing it. This is difficult when just using a frame streamer. Hint: Open your music in Audacity, look at the waveform, and use the force, er frame count to learn about fine timing. You should see beats as big spikes on the Audacity screen. Write down the timer count in minutes, seconds, frames for each event you would like to sync to. Good laser software lets you view the music waveform "envelope" and slide a slider along the time track to match the music events. It then does the math for you and sends stretched or shrunk data to the hardware so the output fits.
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Frames are a leftover from production video that has made it into music and laser editing. There are 29.97 frames per second in NTSC video. Since Laser Shows had to be synced to video in the past, most modern software uses "hours:minutes:seconds:frames" for timing. Older, ancient, software used "refreshes" where each refresh was one complete scan of a laser image frame.
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Refreshes get interesting as the number of points in a laser frame changes, so they tried to standardize on a fixed number of points per frame to make equal time frames. That made life hell for the graphic artist or frame digitizer person.
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So you have Laser Frames, where like film, each frame is one scan of a ILDA file, and then you have timing frames, which are 30 or 60 frames per second in modern laser show software, Pangolin offers, and I program in, 29.97 FPS in case I ever have to sync to color video in the United States... Black and White TV was 30.0 FPS, but when color came, some technical changes had to be made to make things fit. Translation to user: Your events in modern laser software are synced to 1/30th or 1/60th of a second. The professional show software figures out how to make the animation frames fit, seamlessly in most cases.
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Confusing, but worth knowing.
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The ILDA files are fine. You just have to know something about music, and how the clock scheme in the software works.
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Steve

[frostypaw]

I did quite a bit of music playing back as a kid, now it's just my subconscious that lets me dance to it and I've lost the finesse. I think I'm trying to get past 4/4 too quickly perhaps. I can sense where there should be slides and where things happen off-beat but actually hitting that timing is tough-as but it's just what I've admired in the shows I've liked.

Totally get about the black - one of the strongest moments i thought in that one is the black pause then X. I've noticed ignoring certain building threads adds as much tension as following them could. There's a lot of interesting theory I'm trying to bull through

I try and remember it's not a light fixture it's an instrument, a grade-school holophoner in a sense (once we invent those). It should dance, like SD is so very very good at. Better FFT output on a timeline would help loads, looks like Beyond is the masterclass in that just now

I'd love any advice/tips/direction, there's so much to play with.

[mixedgas]

OK, I'm done editing that post.
Que up Swami for some award wining sage advice on timing shows.. OH Swami....
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FFT and Software/Hardware Beat Sensing is over rated for visualization, IMHO. I can do it better by hand 75% of the time.
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I find it helps to plan my show out on paper as a rough timeline.Then it gets more confusing as laser point rate is a bit different from timing frame rate. Which is why we try to make artwork to the ILDA 30K standard if we can.
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30,000 points per second is the scanner speed standard at a 8' scan angle. So the good software also adjusts the scanner speed independent of the show timing. Refresh based software and frame streamers (most SD card players) can't always do that.
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What hardware/software do you actually have now?

Steve