I have to start out by saying im extremely new to the world of lighting. I run sound at my church & have been given the task of programming lights for our Christmas Eve service this year and after a week of work im thinking there must be a easier way of accomplishing what I'm working on.

Basically we built huge boxes on stage with LCD lights placed in each box. What I want to do is sync the lights perfectly to the BPM/tempo of the songs.

Since the only grid im seeing is set to seconds or halves of seconds the lights dont line up perfectly with the songs. So i turned off the snap to grid and placed each light in place one by one trying to trim each step to be perfectly on time. As im sure you can guess this took an insane amount of time for 1 song but was the only way i could figure out how to achieve quick light changes on the sixteenth notes of a song.

Im assuming there must be an easier way to achieve the goal. Im told "this isnt how lighting people think" but I dont see why there isnt a way to set up a grid based on the tempo and have each step snap to the grid (just like it does with seconds).

Any help would be a HUGE help.

Thanks!

Heres a picture of the cubes to give you a visual....

If you know the tempo of the music you can set a custom grid size off the Timeline menu [Timeline -> Grid Size -> Custom]. eg. a song with a tempo of 120bpm would give you 2 beats per sec so you could set the custom grid to 0.25secs for half beats.
Unfortunately, it doesn't help if you're working with a live band unless they're working to a click-track/backing track (which you could embed on your timeline so that everything is in sync!)

Cheers,

Richard

I haven't tried them but there appear to be plenty of free BPM analysis tools on the internet depending on what the music source is.
I just tried "BPM analysis" as a search term on Google.

Good luck!

Hi Mike,
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to achieve, but i would try programing the sequence of cues as a multi-step swing effect.

That way you can use the "sync" tap button to align the timing of the lights by the same way you would use a tap delay.

(see the section entitled "Cuelist FX (effects) mode" in the "Using the console hardware" chapter of the manual).

with a live band things will never line up 100%, even if they're playing to a click and the shows sync'd to the click

if they're off by as much as 1/8th of a beat it'll slowly throw the whole show off

your best bet is to learn the songs and do it live, provided you have decent timing yourself (as any good lighting guy should )

If you insert the click track into the Cue and feed the band from your timeline then they shouldn't drift too far (if they're any good! )


I couldn't agree more!