luminair and bandhelper

[hovisp]

Hi

I'm setting up Bandhelper and Luminair and have attached midi files to recordings in bandhelper to trigger scenes in Luminair.

This works well as several people have posted however, I've experienced several times after "learning" midi program change commands into luminair that one or 2 of them randomly reset to "None" with no warning in luminair. It's not always the same trigger that resets and it's usually only one or 2. The first thing I notice is when some lights don't trigger and when I check luminair that's when I discover the trigger has reset.

Has anyone else had this issue? I've raised a ticket with Luminair but they're not very quick at responding and it's frustrating as I can't rely on using this live until it's resolved.

Also I notice when I back up my luminair project to the cloud and then it syncs to another device, everything copies across except for the trigger settings. Has anyone got a fix for this?

Thanks for your help in anticipation

Jon

[Ahiru]

I use Bandhelper and Luminair, so I'll preface my comments by saying I spent quite a lot of time working around Luminair 'issues' and pondering the limited doc (and no forum) until I finally got a stable set of defined scenes (~50) associated with MIDI notes.  I found that making a change to one scene or setting could sometimes trigger unrelated changes elsewhere.  So I make a point to modify Luminair's data as little as possible for fear of unintended consequences.  I don't use 'sequences' (I got unexpected results when invoked from MIDI), and just stick with scenes.   I keep auto-save off, so I only explicitly save changes with the Save Project command.  I have never used the cloud backup / restore.

One thing that flummoxed me for quite a while is how assigned MIDI events are associated to scenes:  They are associated positionally with whatever scenes you have defined, and not to the scenes themselves.  So if you insert a new scene in the middle of the list, delete a scene, rearrange scenes, etc. then the scenes that follow the inserted or deleted scene will get their assigned MIDI events changed since they now occupy a new 'position' in the list of scenes.  Not sure if that could be causing some of the issues you are seeing.

This is a Bandhelper forum, so I hesitate to spend more time on Luminair, other than to say it works well and reliably once you get scenes set up, associated with MIDI notes, and then leave it be.  (I've  run it > 100 times since I completed the stable scene definitions without any loss of scene data or MIDI assignments.)

[Ruckman65]

Ahiru's suggestions are well stated. Turn off autosave, do not allow access to the Cloud and make sure you save your changes each time before exiting Luminair. I found out the hard way, at least twice, and had to reprogram around 300 light scenes. 

[hovisp]

Thank you both for your replies.

Luminair seems to be a good tool but the manual and lack of detailed information makes it a struggle to use.

I'm not doing anything too fancy and the support desk have advised using a new midimap for my triggers so I've done this also and keeping my fingers crossed.

I really want to use the cloud as a backup to allow me to have some way of recovering the project if the ipad died or got lost but I note your comments on not using auto save.

Thanks again

Jon

[hovisp]

Hi Ahiru

Just run a gig with some completed midi files and there are a few glitches I noticed so wondered if you've experienced them at all.

1. There seems to be a random and regular blip on active lamps on a static scene. Every few seconds the lamps seem to flash off for an instant and then come back. This seems to happen for no apparent reason as nothing is being changed on Luminair. It's very distracting and I haven't got a clue what's going on. It affects all active lamps.

2. When sending midi commands from bandhelper to cue 2 or more scenes quickly after each other, sometimes the first scene seems to stop before it brings the lamps up to full brightness so your left with some lamps at half brightness until another cue changes them.

The fade time is set to 0.2 secs so it should have enough time to run as all my commands are at least 0.5 secs apart

I wonder if you have any ideas?

Thanks

Jon

[Ahiru]

1. There seems to be a random and regular blip on active lamps on a static scene. Every few seconds the lamps seem to flash off for an instant and then come back. This seems to happen for no apparent reason as nothing is being changed on Luminair. It's very distracting and I haven't got a clue what's going on. It affects all active lamps.

No, I haven't seen that issue.  Maybe something amiss in the DMX interface downstream from Luminair?

2. When sending midi commands from bandhelper to cue 2 or more scenes quickly after each other, sometimes the first scene seems to stop before it brings the lamps up to full brightness so your left with some lamps at half brightness until another cue changes them.
The fade time is set to 0.2 secs so it should have enough time to run as all my commands are at least 0.5 secs apart

Yes, I've found that you have to avoid sending MIDI commands for a new scene too soon after a preceding scene, particularly if that preceding scene has a fade time.  On getting the new scene commands, Luminair appears to just abort whatever it previously had in process (even if the new command does not involve any of the same lights in the previous command).  On paper it seems like you should be OK with FT=0.2 and next command 0.5 secs later.  But in my programs I usually make scene changes farther apart.  For some special cases with very rapid changes tightly sync'ed with backing track beats, I only use scenes defined with FT=0.0 to avoid these issues.

[Ruckman65]

I have set the fade time in Luminair to zero where I want quick lighting scene changes. I have not had any issues with latency or lost midi commands.