Lumiverse. Awesome but painful.

[dmx]

Hi all,

Super stoked about the new features in Arena 5. REALLY excited about the Lumiverse / DMX functionality. I'm getting some fantastic results.

Here are my gripes:

Lumiverse is limited to a single DMX universe. It seems to me that it would make more sense to apply the universe with the channel number per fixture? I'm currently mapping out 4x40 LED strips which are 480 channels each. This means I have to make an independent lumiverse for each fixture. When there are 40+ LED strips that quickly turns into a lot of lumiverses. This is compounded by my want/need to make duplicate mappings with alternate LED layouts (flip every other fixture, change source to a different layer.) This means I haave to double, triple, quadruple my lumiverses for alternate mappings.

With that said, I am working around it and making a lumiverse for each fixture. However, snapping and group selection doesn't work with fixtures on different lumiverses! Super frustrating!

Very happy this is working as well as it is. I hope this can be refined in future updates. Maybe I am an odd duck on this, but I feel like there are more people who will be using high channel count LED fixtures rather than individual LEDs or moving lights with this added feature.

If snapping and group selection is added between universes that would be sufficient for me to drop Madrix out of the mix. That would make things soooo butter.

[dmx]

My apologies if this should be in the 'New Features' room. New to the forum, admins please move if needed.

[Joris]

It seems to me that it would make more sense to apply the universe with the channel number per fixture?

The choice to separate Lumiverse and fixture was made so that you can create pixelmappings in advance, and easily switch between 'physical' outputs. So there's no need to go back and change the output for every patched fixture, just one place to change the output for all patched fixtures in a single Lumiverse.

I agree that that advantage disappears for your specific use case of using single fixtures that take up a whole Lumiverse. Still, using the Lumiverse approach, changing outputs doesn't require opening the Advanced Output and modifying the patched fixture settings. It just requires scrolling through the DMX preferences and changing the Lumiverse outputs. Same thing, just in a different place.

snapping and group selection doesn't work with fixtures on different lumiverses! Super frustrating!

Yeah, I feel you. Snapping to other Screens/Lumiverses is one of those things that only comes up once those features are already implemented. So we didn't have time to properly implement and test anymore before public release. It's on our roadmap for 5.x.

This is compounded by my want/need to make duplicate mappings with alternate LED layouts (flip every other fixture, change source to a different layer.) This means I haave to double, triple, quadruple my lumiverses for alternate mappings.

This is a 'problem' that people using layer to slice routing to do a lot different video mapping setups also have. It mostly grows out of the difference in approach we take to setting things up. Because our background is in performing, and not engineering, we take a slightly different approach than what you may be used to from other tools.

Resolume takes a very content oriented approach. Content is and always will be king. Instead of flipping a fixture in the AO, you set the fixture input up once. If you then want to flip the output on the fixture, you flip the pixels that go into that fixture, not the fixture itself.

The Advanced Output is meant as a setup tool, not a performance tool. Composing your output and performance should be done in the composition, because that's where all the other handy GUI stuff for performing also is.

The fact that so many people are requesting access to AO features on a performance level, simply means that we should improve the composition to make it easier to do those things there. This is something that takes time and it's good to hear about things you would like to do and the problems you run into doing them. That way we can improve Resolume to make it more fun to play with.