Old 07-03-2015, 07:25 AM   #1
mschnell
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Default Reaper as a light controller

Hi Reaper pros.

A friend of mine (with help by myself and hence by this forum) has been decently successful in the process of realization of hardware and software support for making Reaper a very advanced Stage-Light controlling engine.

The goal is to use an existing standard Reaper Audio/Midi sequencer project and add means to control the stage lights of a (real or virtual) Theater or Concert performance.

He uses a little box (called "ADMX") he constructed (and is going to sell) that is attached to the Reaper PC by Ethernet (a future version might also allow for USB docking) and provides one or more DMX output(s) that can control the light equipment. (Colors, moving heads, ...)

Right now, you can draw "Envelop" curves that are used as the source data for the light movements.

Several FX-plugins are provided that allow for defining Light "devices". An example is a device that controls a three color light and does morphing between four colors that are predefined via FX-local sliders and are morphed via two envelop traces. Another example is a group of moving heads that all follow a two dimension trace. We also think about a "Device" that uses audio as an additional input (Pulse, Stepper, ...). Obviously many such devices can be invented (and can even be scripted by a potential end-user).

Additionally to the pure "drawing" of the envelope curves it is planned to support controller boards (such as BCF 2000) to allow for recording the light control data. Maybe using a dedicated light mixer via DMX-in could make sense, as well. Of course during the life performance a manual intervention with such a controller will be allowed to override the recorded traces.

On top of all that the said "ADMX" - box is able to take and store the rendered audio and the light control data that are generated in parallel and do an unattended playback for "Diorama" type of applications.

There is no business model defined yet, but as it obviously includes Reaper, maybe someone here might be interested in any way.

-Michael
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Old 07-03-2015, 09:35 AM   #2
cyrano
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Have you had a look at QLC+?

http://www.qlcplus.org/

Seems like a bit of a waste of time reinventing fixture formats as these guys seem to have a large part of the market covered...
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Old 07-03-2015, 09:47 AM   #3
mschnell
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Of course we do know QLC+

The goal is to have full integration in an affordable DAW (aka Reaper)

In fact, as the ADMX Hardware is already existing (as a p til now just used as a stand alone audio+DMX player) and most of the necessary software is provided by Reaper, the effort is decently limited.

-Michael
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Old 07-04-2015, 02:25 AM   #4
moliere
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Sounds cool. subscribing to this thread. I do some basic stuff already through Reaper Midi tracks -> QLC -> DMXKing -> lights, but have roped in a very technical lighting/video guy recently who has taken over our lighting for that particular project. I'll still be wanting to do my own small scale lighting stuff for other projects though, so keen on hearing more.
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