Author Topic: What is Prancer  (Read 12297 times)

Offline castortiu

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What is Prancer
« on: August 23, 2010, »
What is Prancer.
Prancer is a sequencing software that allows creating sequences in a very interactive way. With the explosion of channels now is not uncommon see displays with more than 300 channels, if the trend continues soon 500+ channels displays will become a standard, currently softwares manage individual channels on a very short time slice from 25 to 100ms known as “The Grid”, that means the user must select levels of intensity for every channel several dozen times per second, for example a 3 minutes song with 300 channels and with 25 ms frames will have (3*60) * 300 * (1000/25) = 2,160,000 possible intensities to be set. The work may be tedious and may take days or weeks to finish one sequence.

Prancer tries to abstract from “The Grid”, in fact there is no grid, instead the user focuses in "what he wants" and not in "how has to be done", it uses a full 3D engine where the user can set objects called “devices” on a 3D space and select effects for that devices, devices can interact with each other and effects can affect one or many devices.

Sequencing hardware is advancing faster than software and we need software that can handle thousand channels in a very easy way, Prancer goals is to fill that gap and allow creating sequences in a very easy and fun way.

Why the name Prancer?
Always believed to give credit where credits belong, I did my first Christmas show using Vixen, had a lot of fun with it and what better way to show my appreciation than follow the same naming pattern for sequencing software, let’s think Prancer as Vixen’s brother since Prancer won’t do many things than Vixen currently does.

What Prancer is not
Prancer won’t run your show on Christmas, Prancer is a front-end application that creates sequences; those sequences can be exported to other applications like Vixen to run your show.

Why Prancer won’t implement the protocols to manage the hardware.
There are already enough applications that can run sequences, developing time is limited and Prancer focuses on the front-end user experience.

When we will see a first version?
Well, Prancer is focused in the next generation of software sequencing looking in the future more than the present; there are many techniques and proof of concepts currently on development, the expectations are very high so there will be many tries and errors until every piece fits perfectly, when something  becomes complex it will be redone until it is right. So I would not expect see a release any time soon, but keep in tune for the periodic updates.

Cas.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2010, by castortiu »