an online sequencer

[tjames]

Most of my display is done using video files that are rendered against a whole house model in Nutcracker. my Let it go sequence took me 3 hours in sony movie studio cropping the video the way I wanted and boom done.  MUCH easier... Plus it is very easy to share the video files.

I've never heard of this technique or how to handle this in xlights/nutcracker, is there some video functionality I'm not aware of? What exactly are you doing with the video?

[Livermore-Dad]

Most of my display is done using video files that are rendered against a whole house model in Nutcracker. my Let it go sequence took me 3 hours in sony movie studio cropping the video the way I wanted and boom done.  MUCH easier... Plus it is very easy to share the video files.

Nutcraker is the closest thing to element based sequencing. I can usually bust out a new sequence in 4-5 hours vs. the 30 it used to take me in LOR or LSP.

Still room for the technologies and techniques to grow though...

Frank

Okay Frank, I've grabbed a glass of water and have pulled up a chair!!

? Que?!

Tory

[arw01]

Brings a different flavor, that to me becomes light animation to music vs very precise placement in the grid.  Room for both and with David's video macro he released for LSP you can do both very seemlessly in LSP.

I suppose I should figure out how to do the timing marks in audacity with it's tools, would shave a few hours off my LSP time.

David hasn't posted anywhere I have been for a few months.  LSP is way along in the re-write and it promisses to be a totally different animal when done.

There was a fellow working on an independent visualizer, I would like to see a 3d one of those  ;P

[Livermore-Dad]

Brings a different flavor, that to me becomes light animation to music vs very precise placement in the grid.  Room for both and with David's video macro he released for LSP you can do both very seemlessly in LSP.

I suppose I should figure out how to do the timing marks in audacity with it's tools, would shave a few hours off my LSP time.

David hasn't posted anywhere I have been for a few months.  LSP is way along in the re-write and it promisses to be a totally different animal when done.

There was a fellow working on an independent visualizer, I would like to see a 3d one of those  ;P

You know I tried LSP, I couldn't get a single light to blink in quite a few hours of playing with it. This was when i was looking for something that was more pixel friendly (vixen 2.0 at that time).. LSP was very frustrating, seemed to be quite powerful but nothing made a lot of sense. I then went to HLS and while that's another "complete re-learn" it worked and i had some success with it.. But nothing so far makes sequencing fun. I don't mind and enjoy listening to the songs over and over again, but no program has the ability to overcome my lack of artistry/music

Tory

[Frankr]

First off I have to give credit to the originator of the concept sielbear.  He did a presentation a few years back at one of the conventions on the topic.  For the last three years I have done this with LSP and that spurred me going off and creating Light-elf.  Light elf made it easy for us to make huge sequences by stringing together 25 second sequences since LSP usually crashed with anything larger, after processing for more than an hour sometimes...

Last year dpitts also used this methodology.  The nice thing is it is very easy to share videos...

Here is Alan's (Sielbear) facebook page with some of his sequences.  A couple of years back he did a side by side video with the display and the video used to generate it.
https://www.facebook.com/liptonlights

Here is my facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/rocklinlights

Now on to this year. with the addition of the whole house model to Nutcracker I was able to use the picture feature in Nutcracker. With ffmpeg you extract your videos into a sequence of jpegs at a rate of 20 per second. (ffmpeg -i <inputfile.mp4> -r 20 frame-%d.jpg)

You then just point the picture effect at frame-1.jpg and nutcracker will render each frame sequentially.  I think there was a check box added recently to force the picture effect to use 20fps and ignore the speed slider.  I am using a customized version that I forked a while back but you can still get the same effect.

Alan also switched over to Nutcracker. My render time went from >40 hours last year to roughly 40 minutes this year.  Major improvement!

Frank

P.S. I can share my frozen sequence and the video provided you can prove you own a copy but Alan would need to approve sharing the other videos.

[tjames]

You know I tried LSP, I couldn't get a single light to blink in quite a few hours of playing with it. This was when i was looking for something that was more pixel friendly (vixen 2.0 at that time).. LSP was very frustrating, seemed to be quite powerful but nothing made a lot of sense. I then went to HLS and while that's another "complete re-learn" it worked and i had some success with it.. But nothing so far makes sequencing fun. I don't mind and enjoy listening to the songs over and over again, but no program has the ability to overcome my lack of artistry/music

Tory

This. 100 times over. The biggest problem with all of the available solutions that I've seen/tried, is that regardless of how powerful the software is, or how many things it can do, none of them are easy to use, even for those like myself, who write and design software for a living. Some of them are so counter-intuitive and poorly designed (interface wise), they're almost unusable without hours and hours of tinkering.

I think this is primarily because the majority of the solutions out there have been created out of a need, by developers wiling to take a stab at it. And while many of these developers are extremely talented, very few, if any, have experience in usability, user experience design, or actually designing software interfaces. Most of the time, features are implemented in a way that's easiest or that makes sense to the developer, but many times this is a skewed point of view since they have intimate knowledge of the program and how it works, or they use built in controls or cross platform gui tools/frameworks. I don't necessarily fault them for that, it's much easier and faster to do so as custom interfaces are hard and usually take exponentially more time than native controls to implement.

[tjames]

First off I have to give credit to the originator of the concept sielbear.  He did a presentation a few years back at one of the conventions on the topic.  For the last three years I have done this with LSP and that spurred me going off and creating Light-elf.  Light elf made it easy for us to make huge sequences by stringing together 25 second sequences since LSP usually crashed with anything larger, after processing for more than an hour sometimes...

Last year dpitts also used this methodology.  The nice thing is it is very easy to share videos...

Here is Alan's (Sielbear) facebook page with some of his sequences.  A couple of years back he did a side by side video with the display and the video used to generate it.
https://www.facebook.com/liptonlights

Here is my facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/rocklinlights

Now on to this year. with the addition of the whole house model to Nutcracker I was able to use the picture feature in Nutcracker. With ffmpeg you extract your videos into a sequence of jpegs at a rate of 20 per second. (ffmpeg -i <inputfile.mp4> -r 20 frame-%d.jpg)

You then just point the picture effect at frame-1.jpg and nutcracker will render each frame sequentially.  I think there was a check box added recently to force the picture effect to use 20fps and ignore the speed slider.  I am using a customized version that I forked a while back but you can still get the same effect.

Alan also switched over to Nutcracker. My render time went from >40 hours last year to roughly 40 minutes this year.  Major improvement!

Frank

P.S. I can share my frozen sequence and the video provided you can prove you own a copy but Alan would need to approve sharing the other videos.

I had a feeling you were doing something with the picture effect. I poked around earlier and was messing with it, I figured you were converting the videos to .gifs, but when I tried that with a LSP transition clip I had it failed miserably. I'll have to give that a shot..

I'd love to see how the videos are set up. Not sure what you're referring to when you say 'provided you can prove you own a copy', a copy of what?

[Livermore-Dad]

Lots of good stuff snipped..

P.S. I can share my frozen sequence and the video provided you can prove you own a copy but Alan would need to approve sharing the other videos.

Folks by proving he means that you own a copy of the video, so when he shares he is not , you are not infringing on any copyright or whatever they call it now.

Would be interested in seeing it Frank. I watched the vid from the other side, where he is using a mega tree  and the everything else supports what is happening on the tree. Really neat

Tory

[tjames]

Folks by proving he means that you own a copy of the video, so when he shares he is not , you are not infringing on any copyright or whatever they call it now.

Would be interested in seeing it Frank. I watched the vid from the other side, where he is using a mega tree  and the everything else supports what is happening on the tree. Really neat

Tory

Maybe I'm not understanding something.. own a copy of what video? I was under the impression that the videos being referred to are effects videos being created in video editing software. Like the video transition clips in LSP. Am I missing something here?

[Livermore-Dad]

Folks by proving he means that you own a copy of the video, so when he shares he is not , you are not infringing on any copyright or whatever they call it now.

Would be interested in seeing it Frank. I watched the vid from the other side, where he is using a mega tree  and the everything else supports what is happening on the tree. Really neat

Tory

Maybe I'm not understanding something.. own a copy of what video? I was under the impression that the videos being referred to are effects videos being created in video editing software. Like the video transition clips in LSP. Am I missing something here?

I guess they could be edited, but they are sourced from the real movie. So I think the part of the spiel is "reproducing in it's entirety or partial is protected under, blah blah blah" . so maybe that's the rub, where one is reproducing parts of a video and thus one needs to have the video to be in compliance with the various laws.  I'm guessing here!

Tory

[tjames]

I guess they could be edited, but they are sourced from the real movie. So I think the part of the spiel is "reproducing in it's entirety or partial is protected under, blah blah blah" . so maybe that's the rub, where one is reproducing parts of a video and thus one needs to have the video to be in compliance with the various laws.  I'm guessing here!

Tory

Ha.. nevermind, I didn't realize he was talking about using the actual movie itself. I thought he was talking about using short video clips of color transitions/chases/etc and overlaying them on the models. I probably should've checked out both facebook pages . It didn't actually click until I looked closer at the let it go video and saw the tree. I'm not sure that would even work on my tree, I honestly don't think I have enough pixels for it to look right.

[Livermore-Dad]

I guess they could be edited, but they are sourced from the real movie. So I think the part of the spiel is "reproducing in it's entirety or partial is protected under, blah blah blah" . so maybe that's the rub, where one is reproducing parts of a video and thus one needs to have the video to be in compliance with the various laws.  I'm guessing here!

Tory

Ha.. nevermind, I didn't realize he was talking about using the actual movie itself. I thought he was talking about using short video clips of color transitions/chases/etc and overlaying them on the models. I probably should've checked out both facebook pages . It didn't actually click until I looked closer at the let it go video and saw the tree. I'm not sure that would even work on my tree, I honestly don't think I have enough pixels for it to look right.

I think the big win is that the entire display becomes cohesive, with similar colors, colors that work together etc. I'm going to give it a go,  but I don't have a ton of lights either, but even if it lit up my mini tree's and floods and strips with nice color, without me having to click lil boxes, that may be a big enough win!

Tory

[tjames]

I'm curious about the settings. I had a copy of the frozen sing a long version that I ran through ffmpeg and grabbed the jpegs, but when I try to test them it doesn't seem to really do anything, I'm not sure what the movement setting needs to be either, unless it just doesn't work in the preview mode. Does the grid have to be set up in a certain way or is this something that can be added to an existing sequence with grid timings imported from an LOR sequence?

[Frankr]

You need to check the box (though I don't know what it is labeled as I have not used the most recent code). This is so that nutcracker forces 20 FPS. I spent about an hour cropping let it go so that it was close up on Elsa's face most of the time.   This shows up great on my 32x32 grids.

The other sequences are just colors and effects from Sony movie studio so no copyright issues. My only concern is that they are Alan's IP and not mine. I'll check with him and share my Dropbox collection with everyone.

[Livermore-Dad]

You need to check the box (though I don't know what it is labeled as I have not used the most recent code). This is so that nutcracker forces 20 FPS. I spent about an hour cropping let it go so that it was close up on Elsa's face most of the time.   This shows up great on my 32x32 grids.

The other sequences are just colors and effects from Sony movie studio so no copyright issues. My only concern is that they are Alan's IP and not mine. I'll check with him and share my Dropbox collection with everyone.

That will be appreciated Frank!

Tory