Shimmer and twinkle effects

[Ebuechner]

While sequencing I've attempted to use the Shimmer and twinkle and I've noticed that they really don't look very good on the preview or even the lights that I have hooked up. I have a sequence that would Shimmer just fine using light O Rama software then I converted over an Xlights does not represent it very well. It almost seems like a refresh rate problem in  Xlights. So I'm asking am I missing a setting or is there any suggestions? And does it act differently if it's played from the schedule? Until now I've done my sequencing between X lights and light O Rama and scheduled my show through light O Rama. My channel count is up over 12,000 now.

[flyinverted]

I'm curious if you're even using the effect settings box to adjust these.

The output of the effect depends on the length of the effect and settings like colors chosen, duty factor, cycle count, number of lights, steps, etc etc.

The beauty is that you can fine tune the effects to your own desires.

[dkulp]

While sequencing I've attempted to use the Shimmer and twinkle and I've noticed that they really don't look very good on the preview or even the lights that I have hooked up. I have a sequence that would Shimmer just fine using light O Rama software then I converted over an Xlights does not represent it very well. It almost seems like a refresh rate problem in  Xlights. So I'm asking am I missing a setting or is there any suggestions? And does it act differently if it's played from the schedule? Until now I've done my sequencing between X lights and light O Rama and scheduled my show through light O Rama. My channel count is up over 12,000 now.

Are you using a 25ms seq or 50ms?

Can you try something:   can you create a view with either no elements or a single, relatively unused element.   Select that view, then hit play and see if the House Preview seems to look better.    I've been playing around a bit and on my 4 year old machine (so relatively decent), playing the "Star Wars Funk" sequence at 25ms with my full "All Elements" view is dropping every other frame.   That would certainly make the shimmers not work since they are every other frame.   

Doing some timing, it's taking about 2-3ms to update BOTH preview windows, but it's taking another 32-40ms to update all of the stuff in the grid.   That includes the "Time" in the upper left, the play markers on the timeline, wave form, and grid.    If I use a view with only a single model, it takes about 12-14ms.    7ms of that is just updating the "Time" in the corner.

Thus, we have some stuff to think about:
1)  Is the "Time" in the corner useful?   If so, should we update it less often?  If not, eliminate it?

2) How we draw the effect grid needs a ton of work.   I've already been chatting to Keith about it, but this likely is enough to convince me it's more necessary.   We really need to aggregate all the "lines" together, all the rects, etc... so things can be sent to the graphics card in large batches.     The reason the House/Model previews are so quick is we DO aggregate things there.   My 1600 pixel mega tree is literally rendered with just 7 opengl calls.   Each EFFECT displayed on the grid is currently about 35 opengl calls PLUS the effect background if one is displayed.

[Ebuechner]

First off I'm using a relatively new computer that's not built to minimum standards. 32 gigs of RAM with a newer AMD A10 FM 2+ processor 7860k. I'm running dual Samsung monitors at 1080. My mega tree is 36 strands with 56 pixels each I have a sequence with very few effects on it that I imported from Lor. With the light O Rama software it ran fine and rendered fine in their visualizer and output it to the lights just fine. I imported into the X lights and I can't get the Shimmer to look very good at all or output to the lights properly. (I imported at 50ms) I'm still learning the X Lite software but I'm not completely green. I played with a new sequence trying to get a good Shimmer in xlights without much luck I was adjusting the colors duty cycle timing andeverything

[JonB256]

2 seasons ago when I became predominately RGB, I stopped using shimmer and removed it from all sequences.

I came from an LOR protocol start with AC controllers. Shimmer and Twinkle were fine because they were designed for incandescent bulbs and how they cycle.

Shimmer on LEDs and Pixels isn't that great, even in a pure LOR setup.

Twinkle, on the other hand, seems to still work well on a string of pixels. (just not like it did with LOR protocol)

[Ebuechner]

I guess I'm just wondering why a sequence in Lor software will render and output to the lights just fine. The same sequence on the same computer with the same network setups doesn't work well in xlights? I'm trying to compare apples to apples. I'm hoping that it's just a setup issue that I haven't found yet.

[Gilrock]

LOR does Twinkle and Shimmer in hardware....xLights does not use hardware specific features.  I say talking about this is pretty useless without us seeing your files.  Upload the xml file for the sequence you imported and the xlights_rgbeffects.xml file so we can see what you really have there.

[Ebuechner]

Before anybody asks I just toggled all the way down to the nodes and checked the Shimmer effect it's at a 50% duty cycle timed perfectly at 50ms so it's all channels on at 50ms then all channels off at 50ms and repeat.

[Ebuechner]

here are the files

[Gilrock]

Ok so it looks like you are importing as a Data Layer.  That means I won't see any effects or data in the sequence you uploaded and the ISEQ file is usually a big data file.

So are you saying you see the on/off shimmers in the node data?

And are you trying to playback the data from xLights over a LOR network?  I haven't dug into that code but from all the reports I don't think we run as well over the RS-485 network as LOR does.  Many people have lag issues.  Most of us run from an FPP so we use E1.31 network data which is awesome.  I'm sure it could be improved but it's hard to find a developer willing to sink time into something they don't use.

[Ebuechner]

All this started because I'm going away from the Lor Network everything is on  E1:31. I've even abandon my LOR ac controllers because they didn't work well in DMX mode. I just built some Renard plus 32 controllers and programmed them with DMX protocol. I was thinking about going straight X lights butt I need to address this one last performance issue before I pull the plug on LOR.

[Gilrock]

How big is the LMS file?  If it's not huge upload it and I'll import it so I can see the data.

[Ebuechner]

Even if I take everything out but the mega tree it's still too big of a file

[Ebuechner]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwDgEpqsgNhfY2Z3V0xFb2MwUUU

[dkulp]

I'm not sure what Gil is expecting to see from the LMS file.   A shimmer in LMS will be the 50% on/off per frame thing that you are seeing with xLights.   That's exactly how LOR outputs shimmer to DMX devices that don't have the hardware shimmer (someone verified that and sent the screen shots and similar to show it).   Thus, I'm sure that what we're doing is the same as LOR for that.   That said, if we have to drop frames (during preview or playback), then shimmer is going to look like crap.  I'd suggest (as a test) taking the fseq and running from FPP to real lights to see how it looks that way.   Alternatively, create a playlist and play it from there with output tuned on in xLights.  That would avoid all the video rendering and just blast out the data.

Twinkle is different as there is some randomness involved in that.