Single Strand Effect Improvement

[Dabil]

On single strand I find the chase tab to be very confusing, and I can rarely achieve the desired effect. Shouldn't the settings for the chase tab be exactly like the settings for the skips tab only have the effect run smoothly? An example recently on an arch I was trying to do a red, white, and blue chase. Each color band I wanted to be 4 pixels long, with 2 off pixels in between. I could not achieve the effect using single strand - chase.

Attempt 1: I set red, white, and blue in the color palette. But that just gave me a single red, white, and blue band.  There was no slider to skip pixels in between the colors.

Attempt 2: So then I tried a palette of red, black, white, black, blue, black. But then for some reason only the last color blue showed up. So I lowered the number of chases and could get white to show up, but the most I could get of red was a single pixel. So this was a complete fail. I get my string length of 50 pixels was too small?

Attempt 3: Moved to the skips tab, set band size of 4, skip of 2 number of advances to get the desired speed. This worked good, except that it was too jerky. I really wanted a smooth chase.

Attempt 4: Looking around at the other effects, I found I could accomplish what I wanted using Marquee. I set band size 4, skip size 2, thickness 1, then set to desired speed.

While this works great, I can't help but think I should be able to get that same effect using single strand and chase tab.

[Gilrock]

I didn't fully digest what you said but the main point is we can't just change how an effect works very easy because 100's of users have the existing functionality in their shows.  So any changes need to not break existing sequences.

[Boof63]

try playing with spirals . you can break up the width, speed, direction , length etc,
 might be  solution
Cheers Boof63

[dkulp]

The "Chase" effect is designed to define a single chase type.   The colors can be used to create a band of colors within that chase, but it's still a single chase.   If you want 3 different chases, use 3 layers with 3 chase effects.  (stagger the start)

The Skips movement is "jerky" because that's exactly what it was designed to do.  It's designed so that the lights don't "move" except for specific points in time (like a beat).