How to do a countdown underneath scroll text

[deonb]

I converted my background Vixen 3 sequence to xLights to get a new Nutcracker effect, and I'm now stumped by the simplest thing.

I have some scrolling text on a 360 megatree: "Tune to 91.9 FM"
And underneath it a countdown that goes "60, 59, 58" etc.

I can't figure out how to do that effect. In Vixen the "Tune to 91.9 FM" was one effect, with the timer a second effect on the same megatree.

However, in xLights you can only put one effect per element at a time. So I figured ok, I'll just put by '60, 59' on my 180 megatree mapping, but it appears Layer Blending doesn't work with text. No matter the blend settings, the 180 megatree wipes out all the front 180 text of the 360 megatree, which clips the "Tune to" text.

So then I stumbled on the "Countdown" function in Text, but that seems to count down at double time. 1 second takes 500m/s.


Any idea how I can make this work apart from making this as a movie in After Effects? It can't be that hard...

[dkulp]

However, in xLights you can only put one effect per element at a time.

Umm... no.   You right click on the model and add another layer (or two or three) and you can have as many effects as you want on an element at any given time.

[deonb]

Umm... no.   You right click on the model and add another layer (or two or three) and you can have as many effects as you want on an element at any given time.

Ahh, sorry. xLights newbee. Ok that works.

Any idea how to get the countdown feature in 'text' to count in seconds instead of 1/2 seconds?

Not a big deal if it can't - I can just add 60 different text effects.

[dkulp]

Looks like you found a bug.  When you create the sequence, use 50ms timing.   This seems to be a leftover from V3 that only supported 50ms timing and wasn't ever fixed/adjusted to account for the other timings.

[Gilrock]

Yeah I always use 50ms sequences.  25ms makes your save times double as well as file sizes.  I don't think its necessary unless you are sequencing talking faces.

[deonb]

Is there an easy way to convert a 25ms sequence to a 50ms one?

[gerry]

From previous posts (that I have seen from Gil)

backup your sequence.xml file . Delete the sequence.fseq file that has been created.

Edit the xml file in notepad++  and look for where it says 25ms (or similar) and carefully change to 50.
Save the xml and reopen.
Render and save