csf,
1) This is my second year, I did my first year with Vixen and suffered the pain with only 48 channels, this year is 270 channels (there are also 8 real trees in both sides of the street with 10000 extra lights and they do not appear on the video), so I could not take other year making it with Vixen so I decided to do something or no show for 2010
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2) The visualizer is really the working area, Prancer works on a 3d engine so you are editing and playing the show at real time, basically the working area IS your vizualizer, you move the camera or object anywhere you want, so you can watch the show from any 3d position and decide if the objects will be seen property from there.
Still is an alpha so the objects you see are basic shapes, in the future the shapes will support textures which will give real life appearance to the objects.
3) Because Prancer works on the working area with the audio it can be synchronized to the millisecond precision and effects are very easily expanded/shrink or moved so is very easy to synchronize with the music, after it is exported to Vixen there is a loss of 25 times precision since DMX max frame rate is 25ms, for that reason Prancer support also snap to frame rates to show what REALLY will looks like after the file is exported to Vixen.
4) As Rick said it does not control the lights but instead it export to Vixen. I need to talk later about that with you, since I need a way to control the show from Prancer at real time, since is very useful to map the channels and other things (not to run the show), I need from xLights a way to send a DMX frame through a memory map file/shared memory/pipe or socket or any other mechanism and xLight send this to DMX.
The reason is because I don’t care where I plug the lights on my LE’s (12) and SSR ( 8 ), I just plug the string wherever I can then later I map with Prancer the channels, a lot easier than go outside with a printed paper where the strings should be plugged. But for that currently there is a middle step I need to do with Vixen and the “Test Channel”, so if instead I can do it with xLights from Prancer then setting the Show wires will be a piece of cake. Just go outside plug the string wherever the heck you want and let Prancer do the mapping via software.
Cas.