Hello all,
As many of you know I have been working on my own custom LSP export tool. This tool is intended to export sequences created with LSP 2.5 to xLights and Conductor file formats. In addition it can also be used to combine a set of smaller sequences into one larger sequence. This particular use case can be very handy if you are using very high channel count shows. Some users have reported issues with LSP running out of memory when working with many thousands of channels and video transitions. Some of us work around this by breaking a song up into 20 second segments and then exporting each segment and recombining those segments into one final sequece to display. As you can imagine that was a long and tedious process.
I created the Light Elf to make that particular workflow easier to perform and potentially help anyone that wants to use xLights or the Conductor to run their show.
I do not have a conductor yet myself (probably arrive on Monday) but at least one user with access has tested the conductor file format to great success.
When you export a file per the instructions below the tool will generate your .xseq file. If you have configured your xlights networks to be 16384 channels then it will also generate the conductor file (.seq). It is important to note that if you change your network configuration in any way that increases the total channel counts you will need to reconvert your sequences to make sure xLights is looking in the right place for channel Data.
How to use:
First the Pre reqs:
Install python 2.7: You are not allowed to view links.
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LoginInstall wxPython: (Direct Download) You are not allowed to view links.
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Login Install xLights and define your xlights network layout : You are not allowed to view links.
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LoginExtract the file "light elf.zip" (Attached)
launch a command line prompt in the directory created by the extraction (shortcut: in windows 7 hold the left shift key and right click on the directory. select "open command window here" from the resulting menu)
issue the command:
C:\python27\python.exe "light elf app.py"
Usage:
under sequences menu chose add sequences.
add the sequences you want to convert (If you plan to combine only add the files you want to combine, make sure they are in alphabetic order)
under options you can pick individual sequence conversion (each file becomes its own file) or combine (all are made into one file)
when all the sequences are converted you can go to file export.
Under Options->settings you can specify a none default directory for where Xlights holds the information specific to your comupter. You can also specify a directory used for the storing the extracted versions of your LSP sequences. This can make it easier to cleanup the excess files created from extracting the LSP sequences.
If you are in combine mode you should get a pop up to select the media file you want to use.
If you select combine it should be the selected option when you restart the app.
The app will spawn sub processes 1 per cpu core you have in your system. Each process will convert one sequence to use as much processing power as possible.
There you go. I hope that people find this tool useful.
Best Regards,
Frank