Sean Meighan
Welcome => Do You Need Help? Post it here => Topic started by: RobertB on September 29, 2015, 11:18:54 AM
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I was following Gill's video on Papagayo Matrix Faces. I imported the lyrics to "Shake It Off". In trying to get the phrases separated, it wouldn't let me go in between the marks that I originally set up. This was at 100ms. Also it was almost like they were locked in on each other. I had a little bit of success breaking down the phrases, but even then ran into problems. Everyone says this is really easy to do. Maybe I am not doing something correct.
Help!
Robert
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I really can't tell everything you mean so I'll just pick one thing I think you meant. "Separating phrases": Just goto the right and grab the midpoint and drag the whole phrase to the right and continue moving left dragging each phrase. That will pull it away from the phrase beside it. OR...to disconnect two timing marks put the cursor near the timing mark and move it away till it turns into a pointing hand and then you can pull it away from the effect beside it. I'm assuming you are using a fairly recent version.
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Robert,
Also use the zoom to magnify out and then u can either move the timing mark or drop a anew one and then shift or merge if that helps with what you are trying to do.
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Yeah... the pointing finger did it. Guess the "fickle finger of fate" worked ;-)
Now, if I can just find the "undo" button... we will even e happy :-)
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Yeah... the pointing finger did it. Guess the "fickle finger of fate" worked ;-)
Now, if I can just find the "undo" button... we will even e happy :-)
I think you right click to undo. Not 100% on that.
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Not that I have found.
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Also can I not lay down timing marks ANYWHERE? For example I would like to lay down a timing mark at 5.835. Marks are at 5.80, 5.90, 6.00, etc. I can't put marks down in between.
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Not that I have found.
Ok. On the the effects bar there is. Sorry ;-)
However, in the faces effect... I can't get the "Lyrics" timing track to show up. It is just blank.
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Also can I not lay down timing marks ANYWHERE? For example I would like to lay down a timing mark at 5.835. Marks are at 5.80, 5.90, 6.00, etc. I can't put marks down in between.
If you created a sequence with 100ms divisions you can't place anything in between. For a "faces" sequence you may want to create a 25ms sequence. If you wish to switch a current sequence you must do it manually. Close everything, delete the fseq, and manually change the sequence frequency in the header of the xml file.
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Ok. I will go back to the other one (20ms?). However in using Auto Faces, I can't get it to recognize the timing track. I went into my pixel tree properties and changed it to a matrix. Also not sure if I have to put the mouth movements in there with Auto Faces or not. Can't find where to do that.
I guess with it just being a fraction of a second on the timing, it won't matter with the sequencing and dropping in timing marks?
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Ok. I will go back to the other one (20ms?). However in using Auto Faces, I can't get it to recognize the timing track. I went into my pixel tree properties and changed it to a matrix. Also not sure if I have to put the mouth movements in there with Auto Faces or not. Can't find where to do that.
I guess with it just being a fraction of a second on the timing, it won't matter with the sequencing and dropping in timing marks?
We don't have a 20ms option...we have 20 frames per second which is 50ms and we have a 25ms option. I forget all the variations but I thought the effect that you use with a Papagayo timing track was called "Faces". For timing marks we round them to the same boundary they will be transmitted. It doesn't help to get any finer resolution than what you will be transmitting to the controllers. Are you on the Facebook group? There are a ton of folks that have been successful doing this that could help out. I haven't had time to use it.
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Ok on the resolution. It is kind of hit and miss when I can work on this, so that is why I am trying to "bang away" on this. My time is NOW ;-). No I am not on the facebook group. What is the link to that? Now on your video it shows that you were able to change your timing track to "Lyrics". Mine shows blank. Can't see how to change that in the Auto Faces mode.
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On Facebook you just goto the top and search for xLights like you would any persons name. There is an Official and unofficial one. Sean runs the Official one.
I think I need to see a screenshot. Show us what your timing track looks like and have the Faces effect window open.
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Unfortunately with tech difficulty here, can't get onto that Facebook page right now.
In this screen shot on the effect settings;
Left picture is mine. I drop down the timing track and nothing shows.
Right picture is yours Gil from the video showing the drop down with being able to choose "Lyrics".
I can't do that. You see my choices are empty. I think this is the problem.
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Just as I thought. Notice how I have 3 layers to my timing track and you have 2? You have no phonemes. You need to right-click on that timing track and select "Breakdown Words" and that will create your phonemes. We split up the breakdown into 2 phases whereas my video did the phrase and word breakdown all in one step. The reason is I expect you to want to reposition the word before they get broken down into phonemes. So the process is:
1) Import Lyrics
2) Position your phrases
3) Right click select "Breakdown Phrases"
4) Position your words
5) Right click select "Breakdown Words"
6) Position phonemes if desired
7) Now you should be able to place the Faces effect and select the timing track.
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Ok. That worked. Wow. That is going to be a lot of work for the chart I picked ;-)
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This has also been described in the manual with step by step instructions and screen prints..
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Ok....
Where can I get that?
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The user manual is available from the xLights/Nutcracker releases page where you find all Windows releases of the software.
http://nutcracker123.com/nutcracker/releases/ (http://nutcracker123.com/nutcracker/releases/)
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That's pretty new ;D Thanks!
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Actually not too new as it is already into the second revision - version 1.1 of the manual. The guys are doing great with keeping up with changes.
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Ok. That worked. Wow. That is going to be a lot of work for the chart I picked ;-)
Not sure why you think it's more work than you thought. It's really dependent on how picky you are about the placements. If you arrange the phrases and do the breakdowns it will be pretty close by default. Just remember you can break down all the phrases in one command. We give the option to do them one at a time but if you use the command on the row heading you can do them all in one step. Same with the words. Don't click each word and break it down. Arrange all the words across the entire song them do the row heading breakdown words command all in one step.
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If you are doing speech, the default breakdown is pretty close. Singing requires a good bit of tweaking the word placement (and even phoneme placement) because certain lyrics will be held longer. Also, as a general rule, the vowel sounds are held longer, too. Knowing that you can pretty quickly guess where the timings should be repositioned after a little practice.
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We need a song breakdown repository.
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Wish there was a copy and paste within the Lyrics or Word Breakdown. Make life easier. Getting quicker at it though ;-)
+1 on song depository.
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👍 for a song breakdown repository
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Wish there was a copy and paste within the Lyrics or Word Breakdown. Make life easier. Getting quicker at it though ;-)
+1 on song depository.
I'd love to have cut and paste there also. Every time I describe all the issues related to that nobody seems to have any wisdom once I spell it all out.
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Gill I have notice that within the lyrics if there are " ", it caused issues. Also the possibility of a hyphen. For example the word Heart-breakers shows up, but the lyrics tool had no idea how to break it down. There in turn would have loved to go in and tweak the lyrics. The song is sooo fast, dropping that word isn't real noticeable but is still there. I also have a whole dropped phrase. Guess that is when my coro singing 8 channel pumpkin will take over ;-)
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Can't you just double click on the timing element and type in whatever you want?
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You can. But the breakdown word does not work when I try to break it down.
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You said you would have loved to go in and tweak the lyrics. You can do that. Now you're saying the word breakdown isn't working. Those are different operations. When we breakdown a word we have no idea whether you've re-typed it so if it's not working then are you using a word that's not in the dictionary? You can search the dictionary files and you can add new words to the user dictionary.
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Its two words together. Heart breakers . Both are in there. I took the hyphen out and it still didn't recognize it. Mainly because I believe it is in one window. How can I break that apart or type in another lyric in amongst the old lyrics. I guess I could combine it as heartbreakers and put in the syllables from there. However I am not sure what file format to save the dictionary in. I looked in the user manual and didn't see anything on this.
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With the current state of the code you needed to edit the phrase to remove the hyphen not create a word that consisted of two words.
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Or you might be able to just add the hyphenated word to the user dictionary and copy in all the phonemes that are associated with both words.
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After you changed the word to two words , did you select each one , right click and breakdown word ?
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No the problem is he made it two words inside one timing element in the word layer. We don't have a way to insert a word because currently there is no way to independently select each of the 3 layers to add timings. All the original timing logic was written with timing rows only having 1 layer.
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Well....
Go read my cry for help in this forum. Won't be doing anything if I have lost this sequence :-( Help!
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I looked in the user manual and didn't see anything on this.
Cause the guy writing it did not know :)
Was not sure if the user dictionaries were supported in XL. I tried that in the old Papagayo program with not much success.
Normally when I find a word not supported , I move my mouth and try and come up wit a word that looks similar and use that instead.
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Actually kind of thought the same thing. Thought I would just insert a word. However, I couldn't find a way to insert any words after importing lyrics.
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You can add words to the Phrase row by double-clicking on it, then breakdown to Words and Phonemes again for just that one phrase.
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Ok.
Will try that ... if I can get the file back ;-)