Nicolaudie Architectural Forum

Hi. I've just recently purchase Sunlite after a full year of demoing & trialling other lighting software (Lightjockey, Clarity, Ecue, etc). I have to say that Sunlite was not the easiest one to get my head around, but the more I get into it the more I like it :-) It's well organised for today's colour-oriented LED lights. I've only had the chance to play with moving lights once, but it was easy with all the presets & controls in Sunlite.

My main gig for lights is programming entire shows for dancing concerts. We use pre-recorded audio tracks, so the music is defined, and it's simply a matter of programming changes to fit in with both the audio track & the dance moves. I'm just trying to work out the best way of organising this in Sunlite. Obviously using Easy Show with it's timeline is the way to go, and is one of the reasons I bought Sunlite. I'm just not sure how big a file Easy Show can handle. The concert I'm doing shortly has one dance often flowing into the next, and therefore it would be good to have the whole thing (about 30 songs) as 1 file. Is this too large for Easy Show to handle, or will it be ok? I think I would prefer to run the audio from another program/computer, but I'm having trouble syncing the two up via timecode. I active timecode, assign the input to the correct midi interface, but every time (except for once) it just doesn't sync up. I lose manual control of playing the audio file/timeline (ie the space bar doesn't work) so I've obviously activated external control via timecode, but it just doesn't play when I start the external device. Just in case there was a problem with the external device, I tried doing exactly the same thing but using LightFactory instead of Sunlite, and it works fine. So it must be something to do with Sunlite. As I said, it actually worked on 1 occasion, but I didn't really do anything different, and haven't been able to re-create it.

In that 1 time that it worked, whenever I stopped or paused playback during an audio file, the sound from that moment in the audio track kept 'playing', a bit like a CD that get's stuck. I probably wouldn't do this during a show, but you never know - with live stuff on stage (especially little kids dancing/tripping/etc) anything could happen.

I would appreciate any help or comments re this.

While I think of it, I've also noticed that when dragging buttons across to the Easy Show window, Sunlite often freezes & crashes. I've just found the 'import all buttons' feature, which is great, but it would be nice just to drag individual buttons across with confidence also.

Thanks.

Oops, sorry guys, just read the rules for posting.

Re my post for Timecode, I'm running Vista Home Premium on a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop, Core2 T5300 @ 1.73GHz. Not sure where to find dates for firmware and software. I downloaded Sunlite on 7th Sept 2011. The 'About' page just gives me my hardware serial number. And it's Suite2-FC.

Thanks,

Chris.

Hi

I probably wouldn't use EasyShow if you don't need to add audio and video. I find it much easier to use a cycle. You could create a cycle for each song and sync each cycle with midi time code. Select the midi timecode device in the software preferences and select MTC IN in the cycle window or cycle button settings. You could then:
1. Activate the cycles manually for each song
2. Active the cycles by a MIDI messages coming from the playback computer
3. Put all your cues in one cycle

Note: you need a cycle or EasyShow project playing before it will follow the MIDI Time code

We are aware of the audio stuttering problem and it will be fixed in the next release.

We are not aware of the crashing when dragging from Suite 2 to EasyShow.
-Does this happen in the latest release Oct 31st?
-What OS are you using?
-Can you try to find a pattern to reproduce the problem? (maybe it happens only when a scene/switch is activated and dragged, or when it is a large scene/switch?)

If you do wish to run everything from EasyShow, a 30 song show should be ok but be careful if you are inserting 30 large high quality audio files as all files are loaded directly into main memory.

Hi Chris,

Not sure where to find dates for firmware and software. I downloaded Sunlite on 7th Sept 2011. The 'About' page just gives me my hardware serial number.

Please take a closer look at the "About" window, under the Suite 2 logo it should say something like " Nov 21 2011". This is the software version.
To check the interface firmware version use "Tools.exe" located in the main Suite 2 directory.


Best Gernot

Hi,

Thanks for all those comments. I haven't had time to explore cycles yet - I've only started to use Sunlite regularly in the last month or so (it's a long story....) and now I have about a week to program a whole show. Re playing audio from within EasyShow, I tried using a more powerful computer & it worked fine on a recent i7, and it seems to be playing reliably on my newly-purchased i5 (there goes my budget for this show...), so we'll try that & use the cycles as a backup if I encounter more problems.

Re the freezing when dragging switches from Suite2 to EasyShow, I'm not sure I can identify a pattern yet, and I haven't tried doing it on my new computer. Generally it seemed to be that I would drag 1 switch across ok, it would make a new folder or 'bin' for it. I would then try dragging a 2nd switch (for the same fixtures) to that newly-created bin and then it would freeze. I think the switches contained data from the 'Master' page, but the total number of lights isn't that great - maybe 20 LED's, and up to 20 profiles/par 56's. I was running Vista on my old laptop, will see if it's different on the new one running Windows 7 Home Premium.

Thanks again for your comments & help. I'll experiment with the MIDI timecode some more.

Cheers, Chris.

PS I keep finding great features in this software, such as assigning switches to computer keys (great for live work), and being able to adjust the overall dimmer value, which will be great for fine tuning a pre-programmed show when I can see how bright the lights actually are. Very helpful :-)