Is Vixen good enough for everyone?
I have been using Vixen for almost two months now, and it is a really good product, it allows controlling every detail for every channel, I won’t lie, I have only 64 channels and I spent about 1-2 hour for every minute of sequence. Probably I’ll be upgrading to 128 on 2010 and adding several more songs, I can’t imagine the amount of work that it will require for all this.
Is like Vixen is made for professional light controlling but doesn’t help the newbie or a person that doesn’t have too much time on his hands.
The preview is great, but there is a big separation between what is preview and what is editing.
I was looking at the sequence files .VIX and they are just XML files with base64 encoding, so it is not difficult to generate .VIX files.
What do you think about a software that generate.VIX files that can be loaded with Vixen, but this software allows to create the whole sequence in the preview screen, basically there is no preview screen.
The user upload an image and works on the image itself, basically adding lights, channels and setting timing and effects, all this with drag&drop and setting the properties for the lights/channels.
At the same time the audio is available and synchronized with the working area, so you could scroll the position in the audio file and see the working area changes.
I think the learning curve will be minimal, also since the file can be exported to Vixen it allows to even more fine tuning if necessary.
Take a look at the attachment, this is part of a project that I did for a company couple years ago where it allows to create IVRs (Interactive voice response, those annoying system that hold you in the phone going everywhere for 20 minutes before speak with a real person) just using drag&drop and setting properties for the sequence. Usually it took about 4 days to create an IVR setting fields on tables in a DataBase, and with the interactive software could be made in 2 hs getting the same result.
The attachment is a video of part of this project and I put in there with balloons what could be done to make it work to create our light sequencing.
Take a look at the attachment (it is a video that runs on a browser, tested with IE, don’t know about Firefox) and if you want I’d like to have some feedback about.
1- What software are you using to create the sequence and how good it is?
2- Vixen meets all your expectative about the sequence creation?, do you think is too time consuming.
3- What do you think about a software that could provide more abstraction for effects and light control, as for example, In Vixen you create a ramp to control the intensity at specific time, versus a software where you give an instruction to a light as for example to fade from the current intensity to off in 3 seconds.
4- What would you like or problems that you had that took too much time to resolve and how do you think it could be archived without need to set intensity for every sequence period as 25ms for example.
Basically is kind of the concept to work with Adobe Photoshop versus work with a raw bitmap setting every pixel color.
In Adobe Photoshop you create layers of effects what you want then you export to a bitmap as a final result. If you try to achieve the same result without using Photoshop it requires an immense amount of time working on the raw bitmap changing pixel by pixel.
So the idea is not create a software to replace Vixen, Vixen is fantastic and I love it, the idea instead is to create a software to make things easier but the final result is a .VIX file that can be loaded by Vixen.
What do you think about it, if this software exist you would like to use it, or you think Vixen has most of what do you need?
Like a brute approximation I think I can make this software in about 6 months since usually I don’t have too much free time (freeware of course
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Other idea in mind is to create the same software but instead do it completely in 3D so the user can upload several pictures to create a 360 degree view and then the user can put the lights at any position in a 3D space, so a preview could be seen from any angle since the camera can be reallocated at any time, even when a sequence is in progress, that will give the whole picture how your display will look even before put the lights on the street.
This would need more time of development, but not much more, since once the engine is created for 2D it can be fully reused for a 3D environment.
May be if many people are interested, a 2D version can be made and if the response is good I could make the 3D version of it.
What do you think about this, I would like to give my 2 ½ cents to the DIY community!!
Gus.
P.S.: I don’t know how rich is the plug-in SDK in Vixen, but I don’t think the SDK will allow me to store my own tags and attributes in the XML file .VIX and be persistent even when the final sequence is generated, in which case I would need a different software which allow to save the files with my own extension and then allow to be exported to Vixen.
