Daslight Forum

I presently use both Daslight 5 and LightRider and have really appreciated how much time I have saved in DL5 by being able to make a change to a fixture profile and simply “update” the fixture profile in DL to incorporate the profile changes without having to re-add the fixture and re-do all scenes that use it.

Is there any similar capability in LightRider? Re-adding a fixture to update the profile presently requires adjusting all presets to re-integrate it and it’s very time-consuming.

If you mean the new Light Rider, not the Classic version, it won't automatically replace a fixture with an updated version. It's a fairly simple task to delete the current fixture and then re-patch the updated version.

However, the fixture is part of the project, not the presets (i.e. different presets cannot contain different fixtures). Only settings are stored in a preset - effects, dimmer values, etc. So unless the fixture was significantly different - e.g. differing numbers of beams, different properties of the beams, the presets should produce the same effects.

I was referring to the new LR (not Classic).

I don’t know how others typically use LR, but I generally don’t want all fixtures used in every preset, because I feel like it makes the light show boring. To have a preset only include a subset of fixtures or beams, I exclude the ones I don’t want to be active by either closing their shutters, setting their dimmers to zero, or setting their RGB channels to zero by manually overriding the corresponding faders. With 50 presets, re-configuring all of that after updating a fixture profile by re-patching the fixture takes substantial effort. In addition to simply excluding fixtures, any other over-ridden fader settings associated with the fixtures being re-patched are also lost.

Based on the fact that DL5 allows “updating” profiles without re-patching, I presume that the same would be possible to do in LR.

How does the Nicolaudie team recommend that users exclude fixtures (or beams) from presets in LR? Is there a better approach than the one I described above?

It sounds like you have a rather complicated show set up, so I can see why it would be a pain to go back through all your presets again. Although how often do you change the profile? Is there something in the way you set it up that requires to the profile to be changed frequently?

In terms of how you do your configuration, for Light Rider, the way you have done it (presumably using channel overrides that are saved into the presets?) is the best way to achieve what you want. Unfortunately, as you have discovered, the channel overrides are lost when you delete a fixture so need to be reconfigured with a new fixture. There is also the possibility of changing the sub-dimmers in the preset, which will act on all fixtures of the same type.

in Flame, which has actually been ready for beta testing for a couple of months, but is waiting on the Light Rider Tools app (similar to WTools for the Wolfmix), you can use "snapshots" (similar to "live edits" on Wolfmix). These allow you to group multiple channel overrides into snapshots, and enable or disable them on a per-preset basis. Again, though, the overrides won't re-link to the channels of a new fixture.

In my case, the fixture profiles change a lot whenever I get a new fixture, since a lot of trial and error is required (in my experience) to optimize the fixture profile to best enable LR to control it. I find that LR works best with very traditional fixtures (ex moving heads) that have standard channel mappings (RGB per beam, plus shutter, plus dimmer), but work poorly with less traditional types of fixtures like lasers or UV lights. That’s why I’m trying to switch to DL5 — to get more control at the scene level rather than having to warp the profile to fit LR’s view of the world. However bugs in how DL5’s color effects map to color wheel-based fixtures are making DL5 impractical for me to use at the moment.

I’m excited to read more about Flame!