Thread: VSA Routine Length?

Tweet

I'm about to start playing with VSA and building my routine. The "show" if you would call it that is a live 12 hour party and I'm wondering if I can build a 12 hour routine or maybe a one hour routine that loops 12 times, or ??

Why are you asking? Here's the deal.. I have a light show. A pretty freakin huge light show. I want to run groupings for 10 to 15 minutes each. While the light show is going I want to automatically fire off some other props with VSA but the primary purpose will be to run the light show.

Anyone ever run some long VSA routines?

VSA has a loop option. So create your routine and just set it off on loop. I honestly have no idea how long you can have one routine. Most of us have routins that are in the minutes, not hours.

Id think you have to loop it. I couldn't imagine creating routine that long and then testing it would be crazy. We loop ours and add a single event after the last eevent that does nothing but add time before the show begins again in the loop cycle

You can loop a VSA routine???! <smacks head> You know how much trouble that would have saved me a couple of years ago? Darn it. Oh well...

I was playing last night with it and it seems like 1000 frames is equivalant to roughly 34 seconds give or take. Do the math on 12 hours

So basically I need to figure out how many sessions I have to get me a total loop length, program in the prop routines and have them each fire off accordingly.

This year is going to be very interesting to say the least.

With the excorcist board I can set up to 8 VSA routines to play 1 after the other....or loop, etc.....I'm thinking Monkey Basic does this sort of stuff also so you may want to check into that....This way you could program your VSA routines an hour at a time and then string them together when your finished.....Sounds like quite a project that will take most of your time between now and H day.....Good Luck.....ZR

Hmm, I have an exorcist board but I haven't played with it at all yet as I'm still waiting for my 3 axis skull. Maybe you can help me out with my thinking here...

So I have multiple sets of lights that work better on dimmers then if I program them manually to go via DMX. My plan is to group these lights by dimmer and bank. Once I do this I need to cycle halogens by 10 - 15 minute increments, LED's and lasers I can do whatever I like, strobes and fog are NA.

Here's my question though...

Can you use DMXorcist to turn on and off dimmers? I'm guessing you can, I just never played with it. Got the board, DL'd the software and was waiting for my skull.

DMXorcist triggers your routines....VSA is what controls your DMX....Are you talking about DMX dimmer packs?.....That's what you would use to dim your lights and it gives you individual control of each channel......If you have the Entec box, the VSA program, and a dimmer pack, I would start playing around right now with your lights so you can get a feel for how it works.....You don't have to use DMXorcist right away if you don't want to....Like I said before, it only triggers your VSA routines....VSA is where your going to do your programming and where you save your routines.....ZR

Yeah those are the dimmer packs I'm using. Time to start planning...

I'm interested in what your lighting you wish to do entails. I do programming for lighting (concerts, raves, theater, etc) and depending on the complexity or length you may want to avoid vsa completely for lighting. If you are using a fair amount of channels, want to do complex chases, color fades, want the ability to quickly tweak the show, etc etc etc you are much better off using a lighting controller or software based solution ( I personally use Hog3 but for free+cost of enttec pro you can use magicQ which is a fantastic solution for the cost ) and use a relay to trigger the vsa/exorcist ( have it and it's great)/monkey basic routines. This is by far your best option I believe, just from experience.

I'd be glad to help you in any facet, and wish you the best of luck. Thanks!