Looking for the warm fuzzy on vixen 3

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olingerjccj

Active member
I have been watching videos on vixen 3 the program looks way more complex then what I did in the past with vixen 2.1. I am not going crazy about 120 channels with renard 24 controllers. All incans no pixels. I cannot download till tomorrow issue with my laptop. So is the learning curve hard or is it a fairly easy program to use. I will have 3 singing trees and it looks to have a nice feature for that. So looking for input since it does take a while to sequence with 2.1.
 
It is a different way of thinking than Vixen 2. You need to forget about the fixed time blocks. You group things together to form a prop. Your singing faces for example: Mine use LED strings (same as incans), I have a group called Face1. It has elements (aka strings) called outline, Eyes Open, eyes closed Mouth open mouth closed, o, and another (total of 8 channels). There is a mapping function that turns phonems into mouth positions. Then you apply phonems to the face1 group. You do not touch the child elements. The mapping controls which strings get triggered.

I could just as well have applied a chase effect to the face1 group. This results in each child element getting turned on, one at a time, doing a chase. Same concept for a multi string tree. and any othe rprop. Just get in the habit of grouping things and applying effects to the group. As for time, You set when you want something on or off. The program figures out which time slice to output the data. You no longer apply intensity to a time slice.
 
I have yet to make the leap as well, so all I can offer is what I've heard, read and experienced myself.

Vixen 2 is a simple, channel-based system and you learn right away that channels are listed vertically and time is horizontal. This becomes how you think in terms of sequencing. It's hard to use channel-based thinking inside the context of Vixen 3 sequencing. What you will have to do is learn a new way of sequencing thinking. And that's okay, but it's quite a bit different.
 
Channels are still vertical and time is still horizontal. The alignment of time is now free to float. Think of the timeline as being 1us time slices. Just too damned small to see on the screen. Put the start of your effect where you want and the program figures out which time block to put it in.

For channels, they are all still there (elements in my discussion above). But adding the group functionality and applying effects to a group as opposed to setting the intensity on each individual channel + time block, makes life much nicer.
 
The key concept is to try and move away from the thought of channels and start to think in human terms of an element of your display. The Face outline used to be channel 1, but now you just think of it as I want the face outline to turn on or ramp on or ramp off. Then as suggested you start to group these things together. The singing face is made up of multiple elements. The eyes and the parts of the mouths. There are many effects in V3 that abstract away the tedium of sequencing. Instead of having to sequence every part of the mouth independently, you start to think in terms of phrases, which can be broken down in to words and then in to the phonemes that are parts of words. The Lipsync effect can translate those into which elements are turned on at what times.

One of the big things that helped me many years ago was the chase effect. In the V2 world, you had to highlight the blocks in all the segments by hand to try and get your chase to perfectly come out over the time you wanted. If you needed the time to be a bit longer, then back to adjusting all those blocks again very tedious. In V3 you have a group of those elements that you want to chase over and you just size the effect for the time you want and the sequencer figures out all that tedium for you and the chase is perfectly timed all the time. Need to adjust the time, just drag it to the new length or location and it instantly adjusts.

The key thing, is once you wrap your head around thinking of things as elements of your display instead of channels, your mind is more free to be creative. Take the leap, a whole new world is ahead of you.
 
The process of sequencing on Vixen 3 not that different from the Vixen 2 process for the case of shows/displays that were originally done with Vixen 2. There are a lot of options described in the Vixen 3 documentation, but in the simplest case the steps that you go through are quite analogous to the Vixen 2 sequencing steps.

For sequencing (independent of actually controlling hardware devices) a minimal number of steps are as follows:

1) First time around it might ask you for a profile, just create a new profile using the default. After this you might want to access the tools->options on the Vixen home screen to set the update (refresh) interval to a value other than the default 50 mS (20 Hz).

2) Open the display preview window and add a new preview (defaults s/b OK). Select that preview and press configure (that might open the actual preview window on the upper left side of the PC screen, but you can ignore that for now). Then add a picture of your house (if you wish) and then click on any of the various props from the top of the window and then click on the preview area of the 'preview configuration' window where you want them to appear in the picture (Don't use the '+' option in the sidebar for now). Then pop-ups will appear to ask you about the characteristics of that prop, such number of lights, type of lights (single uni-color string, RGB pixels, etc) and so forth. These props might include such things as a outline string on your house or fence, a mega-tree, etc. Save and exit this window, naming the preview if it wasn't already named. Now press OK, and you should now be back in the vixen home screen. There are a lot of steps here, but you probably only do this once.

3) Forget about the display setup window for now, that will come in later when you want to map the props described above to external controllers that drive the lights.

4) From the Vixen home screen press 'new sequence', and a new sequence window will open. The left sidebar is where the various possible effects are listed. The timeline window to the right of that has a vertical bar is where the props that you defined in step 2 above appear and the actual sequence editing window. The right side of the screen is effect editor window. Use the tools->sequence length option to specify the length of the sequence (e.g. 5 minutes instead of the default) and the tools->audio window to specify the 'song' that goes with this sequence.

5) In the afore-mentioned sequence window you now do the labor-intensive process of sequencing the song. Your drag-and-drop effects from the left side-bar onto a line in the graphic area of the timeline window, size it horizontally to the time in which it should have effect, and then edit it's characteristics in the right sidebar. You can press the 'start' button on the left side tool bar to play the sequence in the preview window (if the preview window was enabled in the 'preview setup' screen of step 2 above. Then save and exit when you're burned out on sequence or your honey wants you to come and interact with her. This step is analogous to the sequence process in Vixen 2, except that you are placing effects onto the elements (props) in Vixen 3 instead of 'levels' onto individual channels in Vixen 2.

6) Next you would use the 'Display Setup' screen (accessed from the Vixen 3 home screen) to declare controllers and to map (patch) the props created in step 2 above onto these controllers (or vice-versa), which I won't describe here (it's pretty simple). Then you would schedule when these sequence(s) are played from the scheduler item in the top tool-bar on the Vixen 3 home page, which I also will not describe.

I expect that others will point out my errors and omissions, but that's expected.

I've listed a lot of steps here, but most of them are only performed once. Unfortunately the Vixen 3 documentation seems to be more oriented to starting with a completely blank slate and not someone migrating from Vixen 2. There are so many advanced options in Vixen 3 that it's hard to figure out which things can be ignored when migrating from the much simpler world of Vixen 2.
 
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I made the leap to Vixen 3 when it first came out. I took my Vixen 2 sequences with me and used the import tool to bring them into Vixen 3. It took me a couple seasons to get past the old "spreadsheet" way of looking at it but now I could not imagine going back. Applying effects across groups makes sequencing way easier. But still, if you need one element to light one time at a certain time with nothing else, Vixen 3 works just like Vixen 2 did except you drop an effect rather than fill a box in the timeline. Probably the coolest thing for me in my old, mostly incan string based, setup was the ability to build a mega string of red, white and green and in Vixen 3 just define it as a single element (roofline for example) then tell Vixen that element could be any of those three colors. So now when I want to fade the roofline from white to red to green it is one effect with a gradient rather than a bunch of individual channels to achieve the same output. Now that I have moved to mostly pixels Vixen 3 is great.
 
Though it would probably be a daunting task, it would likely be a useful class at a future mini.

Sequencer class.jpg

It would require knowledgeable teachers collaborating together to compare, showing how to move from each sequencer. Not necessarily teaching the sequencers themselves but how to move from one to another and how they're different. A video should be taken, maybe edited for time, for future users. Questions like this have come up multiple times. It would likely answer the question of "should I upgrade and how hard is it", instead of searching for poorly documented procedures in multiple or non-existent locations. Once determined, it would be up to the new user to learn the chosen sequencer. At least they can put all of their effort into learning one piece of software, instead of wasting time on something they'll never use.

Planning for mini's will start again next year and when they're asking for possible topics, this might be one of those that should be suggested.
 
That's going in the right direction, but perhaps tutorial(s) or thoughtfully designed videos might be a little better.
 
P. Short said:
That's going in the right direction, but perhaps tutorial(s) or thoughtfully designed vidmeos might be a little better.
Click to expand...
It hasn't happened yet, mini's happen every year. The advantage of a live gathering is that questions can be asked that might not have been part of the presentation.

Besides, I thought you didn't like watching video's? ;)
 
My personal likes aren't that important, and they depend on the nature of the videos and how well-done they are. Also, I'm not on Facebook and you guys never tell me when the mini's are, so I never attend (assuming that it's a mini located within perhaps a hundred miles from the Twin Cities.
 
Videos would be helpful if they're short and cover only one topic. To cover several topics in one video, you need to put a menu at the start along with time settings so that the viewer can go directly to the video segment he/she needs instead of having to go through the whole thing to find the one nugget the person is looking for.

Video creators should also resist the urge to divert from the subject by saying, "Or, if you wanted to do a (function) you could do it this way..." All those diversions from the topic just confuse the viewer.
 
That is one of the great things about Xlights. The presenters almost always focus on one topic. :D And there are videos of virtually aspect of the software.
 
I wouldn't mind watching an xlights video specifically on sequencing traditional light if you have a link. I've yet to be convinced to move off Vixen 2.
 
Here is one example that I found. If you want learn more about xlights, just google what you want to learn about, and 9/10 times there will be a tutorial for it.
 
xLights has a library that goes back Years. Click on the playlist tab and there are many xEssentials Lite videos that are short one topic
Videos. The xEssentials playlist range widely in time and topics. I will generally pay a video while working in my home office and when I hear
key words I'll stop what I'm doing and watch closely.
 
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