Okay! Then let me tell you about the setting, first:
I had three working days from friday, the 27th, till sunday, the 30th november.
Friday, there was a hiphop-event with 14 acts, both dancers and rappers. Saturday was all about modern dance, 12 acts. And sunday, there were two events with improvisation theater, one for children and one "x-mas-show" for the adult. In every show, there was place for about 150 viewers.
My setup was the already installed conventional light equipment (2 dimmers with 12 channels each), 2 of my own
IMG Stage-Line PARL-4SET, my laptop running QLC+ 4.10.1 on debian testing with a realtime kernel, an Enttec DMX USB-Pro and a Behringer BCF 2000.
For all the shows, things went great using QLC+, although I always was in a hurry to get things done. Neither hard- nor the software broke down while the show.
While programming, I experienced some more crashes. One crash was especially annoying as it killed my qxw-file and therefore hours of work (See:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9227&p=40540#p40540. Since then, all savings was done in two files, seperately, to avoid standing naked in the show.
To explain some of the problems I had with QLC+, I'd like to focus on my work for the friday show:
I already had all the music that was needed for the show on my computer the weekend before, so I decided to make a lightshow for every act, at first. I started programming the LEDs at home to make them work together with the music and use the conventional light later for a simple frontlight bound to faders on the BCF2000. I mainly worked with the QLC+-show-manager, importing mp3-audio-files and chasers respectively scenes for special effects. After a couple of hours I realised that it just wasn't possible to finish in time.
There were several reasons why I was so slow. One reason of course is, that I've never used QLC+ that seriously and I really needed to practice. Second, I didn't knew about the concept of RGB-matrices, which might have led to nicer effects in less time.
But there were also some hurdles in QLC+ itself:
* Using mp3 as a time base is nonsense. It may work if you always go through the whole track at once. But if you jump inside the track, f.e. to check your latest edit, you're always out of time. Using wav-files instead worked perfectly. So, I transcoded every mp3 to wav, once, I realised that mp3 doesn't work that good - it didn't matter that much, because in my workflow I'm relatively good prepared to transcode audio-files. For the normal user I guess it would be better to transcode mp3-files internally before using the track, OR pop-up a message that warns about using a mp3-track as a time base. (Of course, the best option for the user was to fix the time-inaccuracy with mp3-files, but I *guess* this is the most complex way to fix that.)
I only talk about mp3 and wav, because that weekend I only got in touch with them - don't know, if the use of ogg, flac (or other formats I'm not that interested in
) are also working.
* It would have helped me, if the audio file I want to make a lightshow to, would not only be a coloured bar. A waveform as an orientation would be great, especially for getting the bpm with no bpm-counter at hand.
* Snapping to grid in bpm-view didn't work. Maybe I did something wrong?
If it would work some day (for me), there is one feature of the DAW Ardour, I'd really like to see realised in QLC, too. Instead of clicking "snap to grid" to activate or inactivate, just use "Shift" or "CTRL" to override snapping. I'd love to see that feature also, if I want to move a function just a few (hundred) miliseconds.
* Full numbers is not precise enough when working with bpm as a time base. You need one digit after the point, at least for the vast majority of songs with less than 100 bpm.
* Copying an item (chaser, scene, whatever) and insert it again caused QLC+ to crash. I was bound to press "+" and choose the function from the list.
* Zooming wasn't fun. See:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9229&p=40549#p40549
Besides that: Zooming in was detailed enough but I wished I could zoom out more than the ~ 6 minutes.
* The information on the left side must stay there and mustn't be scrolled away. It might be in the way for small displays, but it would be better to get smaller instead of getting out of sight.
* Chasers didn't work reliable if they're too close to their predecessor or cross them in time.
* If you choose to insert a chaser you have to make him "single shot" and copy it as often as you need it. If you don't, the chaser goes on and on and on till the end of the show.
I'd prefere that behaviour: Insert a chaser and make him "loop", "ping-pong" or "random", insert another function on the same track makes the chaser stop and the show continues with the inserted function. If you want the chaser to continue - use another track!
Besides the mp3-problem which I could workaround relatively easy, all the combined issues listed here really slowed me down. I guess, a 5-minute-track with - let's say - 4 diferent chasers and some scenes as special flashes has cost me several hours to complete. I only got a continuous working chaser with no hole if I'd manually put them 0.2 seconds away from each other in "single shot" mode… And that is really time consuming…
Maybe someone would say that my working flow is just too detailed and complicated or maybe I just didn't understand the way QLC+ should be used. On the other hand I think: Sometimes I want to have a chaser to exactly follow the beat and sometimes I want a special scene on some special note. And QLC+ is not that far away from that to program such a show in arguable time. So, I hope it won't be too complicated to implement some of my wishes…
Keep going!
QLC+ is really a phantastic project!
Greets!
Mitsch
