A few days ago I was asked to set up some lasers for a party, so I thought was a good occasion to experiment with the timeline feature and do my very first gig in front of an audience. Nothing too complicated, and Liberation worked flawlessly.
Setup is 4x4w and 2x10w, all are cheapo-chinese-projectors (yes, the cheapest you will find on Ali). Took me a while to colour calibrate and tune the render profiles to get the most of those poor galvos and obtain all the tints with good gradients, especially in the red-orange part of the spectrum (damn, I have zero experience with lasers but the analog modulation in these things is terrible). 2 Helios DACs, long ILDA runs (and I discovered that daisy chaining 4 lasers isn’t a good idea, some shades gets screwed).
Sorry for the shaky first seconds, I had to make my way through the floor after launching the show.
A couple of improvements I would like to see in Liberation after this experiment:
ability to fade in/out a clip directly into the timeline, the workaround is to clone the clip you need and add fades with oscillators+delay
ability to select which beams receives the cue from the timeline, the workaround now is again to clone the clips and edit the beams assignment, so you end up again with mixed cloned cues around the deck
And I totally agree with “ability to fade in/out a clip directly into the timeline” and I went a step further in a feature request I posted. Something I expected intuitively, but did not behave like I expected… I think inserting a clip in the timeline should “lock” the current state of the clip deck as a unique instance of that clip. It could work like… if a clip in the timeline is selected, the clip deck reflects the state of that specific timeline clip (call this clip deck edit mode). Then deselection of the timeline clip could return the clip deck to previous state (call this clip deck programming mode).
In other words, every clip in the timeline is a unique instance of the clip with its own state variables; active zones/lasers, fade times, speed multipliers, etc.
I’m a BRAND new user (literally tonight), but that’s the one thing that, upon my first impressions, would make timelines so much easier.
But, that said, I typically give new software somewhere between 15 minutes to 1 hour to decide, almost no software survives my initial demo, so now that I’ve been tinkering for about 2.5 hours, I’m fairly comfortable saying Liberation is a keeper. It’s already lightyears faster to get results compared to LaserShowGen. A few small (being a software engineer myself, I realize that “small” is highly subjective) tweaks and this software might have the potential to be a Beyond killer.
Wow! I have tried to make some timeline shows and gotten no where close to yours! Impressive as hell for some cheap lasers too. I also learned on my first big show that chaining 4 lasers and running 150ft to FOH is a pretty bad idea! LOL
Would you be willing to share a quick vid of the timeline in action? Really curious to learn
@nskaane sorry for the late reply, I rarely read the forum lately. Here’s the full project attached, I guess might be a little more useful than a screen grab. It’s not that fancy, took me one day to build (I’m just a laser hobbyist)
@seb if there are clips you think worth to throw in a future release (both from timeline or clip deck) consider them all free to use
Thanks @Lanz1, this is great work! I notice the timeline doesn’t really end properly - I assume you did a “takeover from timeline” and live busked as the DJ mixed into the next track?
Thanks @Lanz1 - every time I try to open the project my Liberation (1.0.0) crashed, but oh well been working on my own timeline shows lately.
I’m looking for some advice on the timeline side. @seb are there any plans to make a more intuitive timeline for positioning? Similar to Beyond where you drop clip into “center, front right, outsides, etc” right now having to duplicate clips multiple times and set to different beams is a pain for scripting lots of tracks. Maybe theres an easier way then im doing? e
I’d suggest starting out with a template that outlines section changes in your songs and color code for your groupings to have their own lane. One way to achieve this is by making dummy clips. Create a blank clip. You can do this with or without groupings baked into it.
Once you have them, lay them out. You’ll need to come out with a system of grouping. Hand wrote your groupings on a sticky note or a virtual sticky note that is always on top until you have a semi permanent system that you’ve memorized. You can do a text clip label too. Sort your clips horizontally in the clip deck to match your timeline. I have not fully utilized this setup yet but I think this should help some with ideas.
edit: you can make text only clips to identify grouping too
Thanks for the in-depth explanation. I may be misunderstanding, but this is pretty much what I’m doing. The problem I have with it is I have to duplicate clips so many times to have 3-5 different section groupings. Whereas in Beyond there are say 5 timeline horizontal layouts and each is a different section/zoning. So I can just drop the same clip into different sections without having to recreate the clip 5 times.
This sort of goes back to a convo you and I had awhile back about how great it would be if we could script effects within timeline. I envision it being nearly identical to Ableton automation drawing lines. What a powerful tool it would be!
@Seb I know you’ve said you’re too busy for the timeline, any plans to add to it in the coming versions now that 1.0.0 is out? Super excited
Hi Nils, I made the project on a beta version, here’s a copy upgraded to v1.
And if I got it right (I never used Beyond) you’re asking the same thing in my first post in this thread, because I have to duplicate clips every time I want to put a cue in a different beam. That would be my top request for now (and maybe in the future a way to keep clips in a folder structure outside the clip deck which you don’t want to clutter, though I know that for now Liberation ins’t strictly focused on pre-programmed shows).
I’ll respond to the timeline stuff later but more importantly - the project should load into the latest version just fine, you shouldn’t need to resave it - so if it’s crashing I could really do with the crash report. Thanks!
I think this is amazing! As a new user I have a couple of questions - how did you run this using just two Helios DAC’s? How were your lasers set up for this arrangement?
Also, did you find an alternative to daisy chaining 4 ILDA’s after a long run? If so what was it?
There is a first row of 4 lower power projectors connected to a dac and a second row of higher power ones connected to the second. Since my cheap lasers cannot invert axis on ilda (but only via dmx) i had to build two custom cables where I inverted the X+ and X- signal.
Long cable runs weren’t a problem because FOH was only 50 meters of cable away and balanced cables really do not suffer until 200m. Having 4 lasers on a single line wasn’t a great idea, not because of the cable runs (they were mounted only 5 meters apart) but because since every projector needs to read the same analogue line, the fourth one had a jerky signal, which was clearly visible but only at the lowest power of the rgb spectrum (I believe those lines are not read balanced on my projectors) so some color shades were different from projector 1 to 4. But nothing terrible and was only noticeable to an eye that knew where to look, for a nightclub was good enough.
OK thanks for the explanation. I did wonder how you managed to get that X inversion and I did not realise ILDA was balanced (learn’t something!) which makes complete sense.
All the ILDA cables I have seen have moulded ends so I guess if I want the same I would have to chop off one end and manually wire everything whilst inverting pins 1 and 14 - would that be correct?
