Author Archives: Will Frostick

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Tip Of The Day #062

Sequencing on a single screen computer can be a real challenge in xLights … there are so many things you want on the screen at the same time. This is where the play controls on the House Preview window and the auto show/hide of the house preview can really help. On the settings menu: Auto…

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Tip Of The Day #061

While we offer several ways to specify start channels and they all work just fine in my view a combination of the #universe:startchannel, >priormodelname:1 and output:startchannel methods are the most resilient in the face of change. So at the risk of starting a flame war here are the principles I use for start channel numbering and…

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Tip Of The Day #060

While there are lots of ways you can structure your folders I believe there are better and worse ways. It does somewhat depend on your requirements. I am going to assume you want to keep your folders separate year to year. I also am going to assume you want to keep holidays separate (although you…

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Tip Of The Day #059

Some effects really care about the order of the colors you select in the color panel … here are a couple of them. Faces Effect 1. Mouth 2. Eyes 3. Outline Piano Effect 1. Main keys 2. Sharp/Flat keys 3. Main key pressed 4. Sharp/Flat key pressed 5. Main key separation line

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Tip Of The Day #058

xLights has a random effects feature that basically fills your sequence with exactly what the name suggests. To use it … lay down some timing marks … with a reasonable separation … say 5 seconds. Now click and drag to highlight a range of cells. You can select several models in this process and even…

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Tip Of The Day #057

Ever wanted a star when you only have a matrix … in fact pretty much any model when you only have a matrix. With the power of submodels it is possible to turn a matrix into any sort of model … you just need to choose the right nodes. Some time ago I built this…

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Tip Of The Day #056

If you are working on large sequences then the autosave function kicking in every 3 minutes can be a real pain … generating a noticeable pause while you wait for us to write the .xbkp file to disk. On the setup menu you have the option to change the interval that the autosave function kicks…

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Tip Of The Day #055

Using the text effect on groups of say matrices or trees will rarely give you what you expected. The reason this happens is because when the render buffer is created for a group we look at your positioning of your model on the screen and overlay a matrix … this doesn’t generate the same tight…

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Tip Of The Day #054

Ever needed to just shift everything in a sequence slightly left or right … maybe because the audio file you have is slightly different to the sequence you imported. The Edit Menu Shift Effects function is for you. It will allow you to shift everything in your sequence by a specified number of milliseconds. Use…

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Tip Of The Day #053

Sometimes you just need to see the stats … and the Tools menu Export Effects has a bunch of stats about your sequence including: – A full effect by effect listing in table form including: o Start time o End time o Duration o Effect description – if you entered one o The model it…

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