Support Forum

Hi everybody. I'm trying to replicate part of the sound to light programming from Abstract fixtures. Basically, when a beat is detected, the unit will flash quickly to the next colour and then back again. I have as of yet not been able to come up with a method of doing this in Freestyler, especially when using S2L.

So far, I have had the following ideas:

1. Use beat multiplier. This doesn't work as it also multiplies the steps for movement etc.

2. Sequence restart in S2L. This doesn't work as if you have to set a long final scene time otherwise it will loop, and it also only allows for one colour to be flashed. Useless if the rest of the cue uses multiple colours. If not looped, it won't restart on each beat.

3. Macro. This could work, but I don't think Freestyler has the option to do what it needs to. For example, make a macro formula to increase the colour index by one and another (on the next step) to decrease by one (or maybe when released from an override flash, revert to the previous value). It appears at least that you can use the colour index as an input to the equation, but not an output. You can't tell Freestyler to jump to the next colour, you can only tell it to increase the dmx value by x. This is fine if the colours are evenly spread from 0-255, but they are not on many fixtures.

So unless anybody has an idea, I think what I'd like to see is either/all of:

1. beat multiply/divide per sequence. Ie first sequence in a cue is normal, second sequence multiplied, third normal, etc. It would allow for much more dynamic timing, and I imagine would work similarly to the restart on beat option in S2L.

2. Flash setting to increase or decrease a channel by index, NOT dmx value. Ie when flashed, increase the colour index by 1.

3. Macro formula to do the same as above. Would be useful for what I need, and I also imagine useful to have an override button to simply jump to the next colour, gobo, etc.

4. Unreleated to the above, I'd like a "random play" option for the cue buttons, so that busy Dj's for example can press go and not have to worry about changing the cue so much. Nobody wants scanners set on red all night because the Dj forgot.

If anybody has any ideas feel free to let me know.

You can briefly see the function I am trying to replicate (in this case, white flash on beat) at about 0:04 in this (bad, not mine) video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBhJ3nPWp5M

Nobody....? Again....?

With sound activation speaker symbol chosen in the cue window, could you not just create a scene of 0.1 second duration with snap to second colour, then a scene of say 2 seconds (unless your music is below 30 bpm 2 seconds will be fine) with snap to first colour?
If your interfaces refresh rate isn't so great, or you need to allow time for fixtures to react you could potentially go to 0.2 or even 0.3 seconds on the second colour scene before it would cause any issues.

The reason this would work is because the detected beat would advance the scene before the 2 seconds could ever finish on the beat, and 0.1 seconds 'flashing' scene would return back to the start of the next 2 second scene so quickly that even the fastest drum and bass track would not have hit the next beat that quickly.
...hope this makes sense to you.