Introducing myself, and questions about two possible bugs/issues

[edogawa]

Hello,

my name is Edgar, and this is my first post to this forum, so I'd like to introduce myself shortly

My first contact with QLC+ was around 2 or 3 years ago when i met Giacomo at Volkstheater Vienna, working on the show by Ivo Dimchev that is described on the QLC+ website as showcase #2 (my role being lighting technician for the festival, i.e. hanging and focussing lights, and running the shows if needed).

Last autumn I purchased the enttec DMX-USB pro mk2 for the opera company i regularly work for as lighting designer, and right now in preparation for our three projects this year, I'm in the process of getting familiar with QLC+.

So far it works rather well for me, with a M-Audio Axiom61 or a nanoKontrol2 as MIDI input controller, apart from a few issues I'm still not sure if they are software bugs or user errors :

1) I've used the system (under Linux Mint 17 on a Dell laptop) on two occasions for small cabaret show in our Village's music shool hall, with just 6 Dimmers and Fresnel/PAR64 lights. Both times, just during audience entering the hall, I realized that the program had stopped to control the dimmers. Both times I was able to restart the program before the show started, without anyone noticing, and running the show without further errors. Now this doesn't really add to a feeling of reliability , and I'd really like to find out what might have caused that .

2) Occasionally during my first tests at home, during programming and running a cuelist, the playback of the scenes started to do weird stuff like changing or keeping intensities when it shouldn't, in a way i could not make sense of. I searched this forum quite a bit for matching bug reports but couldn't find any, so that leaves me thinking it might have been user error. I have no recipe of steps to reproduce, all I can say is that after some fiddling (including hotplugging the DMX interface and restaring the program) it eventually started (and sometimes after a while stopped again)to work, leaving me rather clueless...

Anyway, next week fun starts as I'll build up lights for the first part of this opera trilogy http://www.sirene.at/aktuell (sorry, web page in german only), and I'll try to use QLC+ for it, with a Compulight Spark 4D as fallback solution if it starts to misbehave or to become too time-consuming. I'll report how it went, afterwards, and eventually will seek for help here during the rehearsal phase. I'm also aware of D::Light or even MagicQ as software alternative, but learning one program (QLC+) is about just what I can handle now besides all the other stuff I have to prepare, so I don't think that is a realistic option during this show.

Meanwhile I also can offer two new fixture definitions. I reworked the Martin MAC600 NT to match the older MAC 600 E model, which was a piece of cake, and created from ground up the LDDE SpectraConnecT5, a RGBW (fluorescent tube)bar with 6 channels. Both are untested so far, but I don't see a reason why they shouldn't work. Just tell me if that is OK and I'll announce in another thread, in the respective forum subcategory.

Thanks for now,

Edgar

[janosvitok]

Hi Edgar,

in reverse order:

3. Good quality fixture definitions are always welcome. Check the guidelines: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6667

2. I've seen stuck intensity channels as well (I by chance may even have a video of it). I don't know the cause, and I don't have a way to make it work again.
From time to time it helps to trigger a scene that contains the stuck channel; sometimes not. When I find some free time I'll check it.
The biggest problem with debugging this is that it is not easily reproducible. So if you find a way to reproduce (it doens't need to be 100%, perhaps even 50% or 30% does help), please let us know.

1. What does it mean "stopped controlling dimmers"? No DMX output, no light output (DMX stuck at 0), DMX stuck at some value?

BTW. I'm living in Bratislava so we're quite close...

Jano

[edogawa]

Hello Jano,

regarding the fixture definitions, yes I've read the guidelines and followed them to my best knowledge. With the MAC 600 E it was just a matter to remove one channel (CTO) from all four modes and the channel definition, and add different value ranges/meanings to another one (Frost). The SpectraConnecT5 is pretty simple, it uses six channels for Dimmer, R, G, B, W and Strobe, where only Strobe has three ranges (Off, Speed, and Off again).

As for 2., I'll collect my observations and report.

And finally to 1., by "stopped controlling dimmers" I'm actually not sure what I mean by that, both times I really had to hurry up with restarting QLC+ to be able to run the show, so there was no chance to check what exactly had happened... from what I remember, the state I had left the laptop in when leaving a while before was all faders down, and when I came back, the fader moved and QLC+ seemed to do just fine, but the dimmer didn't react. Most likely some loss of communication anywhere in the QLC+-OLA-FTDI/USBDMXmk2 chain; I admit that's not really helpful, but at this moment i cannot say more.

Edgar

[danieoomen]

I have the same problem with my Showtec Compact Lightset 30266.
After some time of working with chasers to turn individual pars on and off, It starts to remember the red channel last settings and stays on value 255. Later this also happened with the blue and green channel.
The fixture monitor shows indeed the right value of the red channel on 255 while fading in and out on the green and blue channel.

Up to now I had no trouble after reinstalling QLC Plus 4,8,5 AND switching off the overall Intensity dimmer on the Channel fade configuration.

I suspect that when you leave the overall intensity channel AND all the colour channels (red, green blue) are turned on, you get problems with stuck DMX values.

The fixture monitor shows that in my case only red stays on 255, and the overall dimmer, the green and blue channel fade in and out between 0 and 255.

I hope this will help in the search of debugging this problem.

Greets, Danie

[edogawa]

Hello again,

the premiere of our opera was on last friday, and was received very positively by audience and critics, from what i hear and read

So after recovering from a crazy amount of work, I'll try to briefly sum up here my experiences during set up and rehearsal phases:

1. My MAC 600 fixture definition worked just ok.

2. During set up and focussing i prepared my workspace according to what I expected to be the easiest workflow when programming cues with the director. So, apart from the functionwizard autogenerated moving light widgets, I created several channel groups for my dimmer channels, functions with according names, to adjust intensities of the lights in that group individually, and a slider matrix to access them quickly.

3. In our first lighting rehearsal, I sequentially built one scene after another from the slider values, saving (only the dimmer fixtures as the MACs were treated separately and statically during the show) to new scenes, using DMX dump. This went pretty smooth for me.

4. Second and third lighting rehearsal: I prepared a cuelist widget in the virtual console, and a chaser running my scenes from the day before, adjusting channels again, using the simple desk faders to lower intensities if necessary, and again save via DMX dump, to a whole new set of corrected scenes that I afterwards replaced in my cuelist chaser . This is where I think I made a mistake, looking back it might have been way easier to stay in the Functions tab and program the scenes I had made already, directly...

5. Setting up the chaser/cuelist widget gave me quite some trouble. My own and my director's workflow normally employs only manual crossfades of scenes, for at least two reasons:

- not enough time to reharse with all the cast often enough to determine working crossfade times
- needing flexibility with crossfasde timings for scene changes that depend on onstage actions that may take different time from show to show, rather than musical cues.

Now the manual Xfade doesn't do dipless fades as you might know, there's a lengthy forum thread about this, but only some of the ideas discussed there have actually been implemented. So deciding to settle with preprogrammed fade times, lead to my next problem, how to easily enter the times for both existing and newly created scenes? I think the speed dial is much too complex for this task, and always having to reopen that window when mass.editing a scenes list is cumbersume to say the least. the centiseconds field is the one taking key input by default after opening the speed dial window, but i'm bothering with integer seconds only, normally. So excuse if I'm asking for a way to enter simple whole second times when storing a scene via DMX dump (right in that dialog that appears) as well as directly in the scene editor, not in a window that automatically closes when you change the scene there. For the premiere and 2nd show I had not gathered enough information for my fade times anyway, so my solution was to define a speed dial widget that only shows seconds, and controls the common chaser fade times in that cuelist. this worked well but gave me a bit of stress while running the show, to change the time quickly enough between cues. so before the third show, I programmed individual step times directly into the chaser tha's called by the cue list, and i think this is the most elegant solution for now, although it really doesn't allow for live changes anymore. once in operate mode, I cannot go back to the chaser list in Functions, as this stops the cuelist widget and throws me out of my sequence. I'd wish there was a blind mode like there is for scenes.

Also, I really missed basic playback features that almost any lighting desk used in theater offers: a "Hold" button to stop a running crossfade, a way to override preprogrammed fade times, and "Go to Scene #" functionality. (Actually I'm pretty confused about this right now, as QLC+ 4.8.5 on the laptop (linux mint cinnamon) behaves very different in that regard than on my desktop openSUSE with KDE4 - in KDE if I click on a cuelist entry, it immediately runs that cue, thus allowing "go to" but risking wrong jumps with a wrong click, while in Linux Mint I can select a cue, but playback always stays in the running sequence unless I rapidly press the stop/playback button (or assigned remote controller) twice

So sorry for a lengthy and seemingly rather critical post, in fact I'm pretty impressed and hope we can sort out the remaining issues so this will become a great solution for theater lights. There are a couple of minor issues I have not mentioned now, mainly because i'm not clear on what to think on them yet, or if they aren't in fact user errors
the Communication loss I described in my original post didn't occur during this whole production period, I sometimes had trouble controlling the MACs but that might well have been my confusion. I experienced a single program freeze when extensively trying to set up and test remote controlling that speed dial widget, and that's about it, in general QLC+ behaved rock stable

I made backup copies from the show file at the end of every workday during this whole week, and if someone is interested in looking at them, I can post them here.

Jano - I forgot to mention, if you're interested and can find the time, come to Vienna and see our show, I'd love to show you my setup and discuss it all a little bit - I'll organize a free ticket of course. We're playing three more times, from this Wednesday to Friday at Ankerbrot Expedithalle, details at http://www.sirene.at/aktuell ... if you like to come I'll PM you my phone number in the forum.

Thanks for listening, and for developing this wonderful program,

Edgar

[giacomo]

Ciao Edgar!
I remember those days in Volkstheater, we had a good time and I'm happy you've tried qlc+.
Just a short answer to one of your points, about the function "Go to Scene":
in gnome I select a cue and then I press enter to start the xfade, it's true that this behavior differs in kde.
see you next time.
Giacomo

[edogawa]

Hello Giacomo,

hope you are well, and thanks for your comment. I'm not sure I understand correctly? are you saying you can click a cuelist entry, so it shows the green selection bar, and then pressing "Next cue" crossfades to that one? That would be a third behaviour, I'm not able to do that in Cinnamon, and neither in KDE...

Actually I wonder why the DE should have any influence on this, and why for a Qt4 application it would only work as expected in GNOME? I've tried to read the source - I see that in ui/src/virtualconsole/vccuelist.cpp VCCueList::slotPlayback() function calls startChaser(getCurrentIndex()), while VCCueList::slotNextCue() calls startChaser() without parameter... which would made me think it can only go to the next cue in the list (the one marked yellow/orange) but obviously in KDE a mouseclick already triggers startChaser() with the selected Cuelist index. It's a bit over my head I fear, and I don't want to spam the forum with noise, so I stop here.

I'm going to run the last show tonight, and party a bit before striking the lights and stage set tomorrow.

Edgar

[plugz]

hope you are well, and thanks for your comment. I'm not sure I understand correctly? are you saying you can click a cuelist entry, so it shows the green selection bar, and then pressing "Next cue" crossfades to that one? That would be a third behaviour, I'm not able to do that in Cinnamon, and neither in KDE...

He means clicking on an entry so it's highlighted, and then pressing the (physical) keyboard's ENTER key.

Actually I wonder why the DE should have any influence on this, and why for a Qt4 application it would only work as expected in GNOME? I've tried to read the source - I see that in ui/src/virtualconsole/vccuelist.cpp VCCueList::slotPlayback() function calls startChaser(getCurrentIndex()), while VCCueList::slotNextCue() calls startChaser() without parameter... which would made me think it can only go to the next cue in the list (the one marked yellow/orange) but obviously in KDE a mouseclick already triggers startChaser() with the selected Cuelist index. It's a bit over my head I fear, and I don't want to spam the forum with noise, so I stop here.

See this line:
https://github.com/mcallegari/qlcplus/b ... t.cpp#L162

You can copy this line and add one that connects the signal itemDoubleClicked (http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qtreewidget.htm ... bleClicked) to slotItemActivated.


The signal itemActivated seems to work differently from KDE to gnome... See http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qtreewidget.html#itemActivated

[edogawa]

Thanks again plugz,

I'll try your suggestion, play around with the code and read up on Qt4 a bit in the next few days when I find time.

If it's really behaving different in KDE and GNOME (or Cinnamon?), I wonder why I can't reproduce it on my main machine - originally an openSUSE 13.2 DVD install with KDE as desktop, but I added Cinnamon now and tried to run QLC+ from there. Strangely enough it still runs the cue as soon as I click it with the mouse.


Edgar

[edogawa]

Hi again plugz,

itemDoubleClicked is what I was looking for I connected that signal to the slotiemActivated function and now it starts the cuelist playback at he doublecklicked step, or jumps to it if it's already running, great.

The webpage for this Gilgamesh opera (in fact the composer calls it oratorio) has been updated and moved to the archive section on the site. A slideshow of around 40 photos has been added. In case anyone is interested, the web link now is http://www.sirene.at/gilga . QLC+ controlled 72 dimmers and four Martin MAC600 washlights (used only to paint the back wall to some dark sky-blue). All the shadowlights behind the stage curtain/screen (around 10 hndheld low voltage halogen lamps and a 1000W Xenon 35mm cinema projector (modified by me to use the lightspark without mirror and optics) were independently controlled by the puppet players themselves. It's not a spectacular demonstration of QLC+, but I'm really satisfied how well it turned out to work, Thanks once more for the excellent program!

Edgar