The Avolites Discussion Forum

After busy festival weekend found a strange behavior of shapes when using "block all" shape - i had a program, that contained "block all" shape for 1 fixture. When this playback was risen, everything happened correctly and it did stop all running shapes for that particular fixture. When I tried to turn on playback containing shape while this "block all" playback was on, all other running shapes did stop and I was able to run one shape at a time. If I turned off that playback with blocking shape, I was again able to run shapes normally. Temporary solution that I found was to keep that block all shape in programmer - that didn't interfere with any playbacks containing shapes.

But later I found second issue - when I was running some fast P/T shapes, it did change blocked fixture position in strange way - it started randomly jiggling around its position - it seamed that console started giving out random P/T data for that fixture. This happened only few times so hard to say what was the cause.

Also - first time ever I noticed a serious Titan software slowdown - flash keys started to be very non-responding - hitting them fast (pressing and momentarily releasing) didn't work at all, and sometimes after releasing flash key, program did run for additional half a second.
Slowdown problem could be solved by turning off some running programs - it seamed that main problem might have been some fast LED chases - they were for decorations and was running all the time. We had 32 'RGB + Virtual' dimmer fixtures and chases were mostly 20-30 step, 0,04s step time, no fade.

I will try to examine these problems more carefully in few days and post about results.

Re. slowdown, I am inclined to think this is not directly related to the chases as I regularly run very fast chases over more LED units without trouble. However, I have experienced similar symptoms once recently on a more basic rig. I suspected the cause was more likely something that occurred earlier or cumulatively during programming. Typically this was not my console and so I was unable to capture the logs, but if you have access they might be useful to devs.

Restart software fixed.

I'll check out the block shapes issue. Although I wonder if the 'jiggling' might be related to the slowdown problem.

Well that sure is strange Batman.

I can reproduce the problem with 'Block All'. But if you use the individual block shapes everything is fine, even if you overlay all of them. So I guess that's the workaround for now although it doesn't make much sense to me why at the moment.

I also noticed that fixtures don't return to their correct phase on removal of the block. It would be nice if they did.

I couldn't reproduce the jitter even with a silly fast shape.

It seams like restart (reloading show on freshly booted console) did solve slowdown and jitter problem because i can't reproduce it neither.

I've just been searching the forums and this thread seems the most relevant - I'm at a festival at the moment and it seems that when I've got several shapes going (pan/tilt on movers, and colour shapes on a load (~96) of LEDs) all the shapes sloooow down noticeably.

It's a Pearl Expert running titan v4.0. Other than this slowdown problem, it's the first time I've used Titan for any length of time and by and large I like it - it's easy enough to extend my 'old' knowledge to include the extra stuff.

Anyway - I can't quite believe that the slowdown is a design feature, but am willing to hear that it's been fixed in a future version. In the meantime, is there anything I can do about it? All I'm doing at the moment is limiting the number of simultaneous chases on the (fairly modest) rig...