I’m trying to setup a Live Show for a music/play type production for kids (think small play with lots of music and a childrens book being read/acted).
I’m trying to sync my lights to the background tracks, but I have a problem. I can create DMX tracks and program them to change my lights using my Enttec Open USB, but if I pause the project it always reverts back to zero - meaning all lights off. If I create a DMX track that spans over the whole song, lets say 4 minutes, and make changes here and there and gradual changes it sorta works as long as I never start in the middle of the song or pause it. Is this a limitation due to VST Live not being able to read data from the middle of a track? I remember this was a problem in Cubase with Midi tracks, but dont know of that’s still the case?
Anyway, it would be amazing if VST Live would read the data from the DMX track at all times, not just whenever a datapoint/change is present.
Or have made an error in my setup? Anyone knows of a way to fix this?
And yes, it’s important to be able to pause here and there because of interaction with the audience among other things.
I was first trying to find a way to control the lights with my midi controller, so that I have certain colors setup on my pads and then send that data MIDI->DMX and control the lights simly from my ATOM controller in real time, but could never get this to work…
Macbook M1
MacOS Monterey
Enttec Open USB
Presonus ATOM
Babyface PRO FS
Hi! That sounds interesting. On my config (would be great if @Spork or @musicullum could confirm this) I can’t see VSTLive sending “0” values at PAUSE / STOP to DMX channels (at least via ArtNet) and it is expected to happen. But if it sends, should be not (I gave all my node+light setup to light the programmer colleauge, can’t try it out right now, just checked via ArtNet monitor)
While chase dmx events are coming soon regarding @musicullum ’s reply from another topic (that I’m waiting too )
Question is: what should it do on Stop? a) keep lights on, b) switch to black? Also this is not easily answered generically, because sending zero means something different to a PAR than to a steam machine…
It should do what I want it to do
Would be perfect if the user could decide what happens on pause/stop.
I would, however, think the default should be to not send any signal at all (leaving the lights as is). Like how a mixer behaves. If I disconnect the mixer while having green lights, the lights will stay green - usually.
Also, is it possible to save something like “scenes” in the DMX mixer that can be recalled? That together with midi control would make my life much easier. Now I’m thinking I’ll stick with the good old small mixer. In which case I might also go back to Studio One and its show page. Switched to VST Live Pro mainly for the DMX functionality.
“Chase DMX” feature is coming next. At the moment VL resets all channels to 0 when the Transport will stop. ArtNet is missing that operation, that’s a bug. We can understand your request, @Milien. So we will add a Preference to control that behaviour. Default will be “Do nothing on Stop” and an option will be “Black Out”.
… you are talking about the “DMX Input Mixer”, I guess? And you would like store a current state as a “Preset”? Then you would be able to load any saved Preset?
@Spork do you see! That is the problem to him!
(And will be mine if you do the same with ArtNet Out)
Just think about real life situation, it’s nonsense to send / overwrite our setting just because stopped.
Until VSTLive has solution / pre-set scene to song-inbetween-song, the only chance to us set lights to “inbetween setting” at end of every songs. If VSTLive overrides our “inbetween” settings, then what happens? A dark stage between songs +additional extra noise as optional moving-head lights are resetting their head to zero-pos?
I think
chasing events should be implenented
DMX set to zero should be wiped out from code or make is selectable (for the 1% who willing to set system to send zero@all)
But please don’t just implement send zero@all for ArtNet-OUT because most of us will be screwed, at least until VSTLive has dedicated scenes for pause/stop state
Thank you for this! Sounds great.
How quickly will something like this be implemented? Just so I know if I can keep my upcoming november tour in VST Live or if I have to look at other solutions for the time being.
hi @MorayM , as far as I know in practice DMX devices (nodes, lights) are holding last value until new one is coming. Sending zero@all on STOP by default would go somehow against insdutry standard as meight cause non-predictable result. Do you have different experience?
But for sure then, if this is selectable, anyone can set the preferred behaviour
I agree that the industry standard for lighting consoles is to hold last value. A lighting consoles where a person is controlling the state is different from an automatic playback system though. For a playback system, the current state of all output, (MIDI, audio and DMX) I would expect to be dependent ONLY on the location of the playback head.
In a playback system, I would expect to have two different ways of stopping playback:
Hard stop: returns the playback head to the start of the track. As no data can be sent at 00:00, I would expect all audio outputs to be silent, all MIDI to be reset (as if Panic had been sent) and all DMX channels set to 0.
Soft stop (pause): Stops the playback head wherever it is in the timeline and doesn’t move it. No additional messages are sent. This would hold DMX output at the last value, although it would have to make sure that audio outputs are set to zero to prevent damage to speakers. For the same reason, all MIDI notes would need to be turned off, but any MIDI CCs etc remain at their current values. When playback resumes, resend the stopped MIDI notes.
If VST Live does ever implement a soft stop as described above (and I think it would be great if it did), then what it does need to make sure there’s a way to safely and quickly kill DMX output, in the same way that many lighting consoles have a dedicated blackout button. I personally use VST Live DMX to control special FX (smoke jets, sparks, strobes etc) that need to fire at precise timings during a show, so being able to kill everything quickly is really important to me (and anyone who might be in the blast radius!)
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