It's about time for the next update on ZerOS development

[Jon Hole]

What have we been working on? Unsurprisingly... ZerOS 7.14.

We’ve had a two year period of massive updates - five software releases which have introduced the all-new ZerOS Library, built in Fixture Creator & Editor, improved Fixture Search & Fixture Filtering, GDTF support, multicell support, multiple colour emitter support, colour temperature control, referencing colour filters and support for KiNet, Vision.Net & Philips Hue. There have also been improvements such as Move-on-Dark per cue, Phantom ZerOS improvements, Move functionality, increase / decrease syntax and tweaks to how Home works.

Therefore, ZerOS 7.14 is a “spring clean”, focused on simplicity, consistency, performance and stability. There will be over 130 improvements and enhancements. However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be new features. Expect to see OSC (Open Sound Control), DMX and Vision.Net input (over RS485) and a new Fixture Macros interface.

No timeframe for release yet, but we hope to start beta testing within the next month. If you’re not part of our beta test group, and would like to be, do drop us an email!

We’re also excited to announce that this will be the last significant release of ZerOS 7. The next major release of ZerOS will be ZerOS 8 (but more on that another day…).

[kgallen]

Minor heart attack when I misread the last line as ‘This will be the last significant release of ZerOS.’ 🤣🤦‍♂️

Looking forward to playing with 7.14.  Any up-front Release Notes to tease us?

[Davidmk]

6 hours ago, kgallen said:

Minor heart attack when I misread the last line

Me too, then I read the rest of the line, twice, and my heart rate went back to something like normal.

Went back up again, but in a good way, when I read

13 hours ago, Jon Hole said:

Expect to see OSC (Open Sound Control), DMX

 

[Jon Hole]

14 hours ago, kgallen said:

Any up-front Release Notes to tease us?

You’ll need to wait until the first beta release for those, sorry! 

[Flabbe]

Hi, looking forward to use this new release ^^

My external screen will be happy too 😄 because it stopped working since 7.13

Cheers from 🇫🇷

[kgallen]

So Edward, I see you’re turning into a bit of a movie star on the NEO-X training!

For Jon, so is there anything interesting in the Neo software that you think might make it’s way into ZerOS? I’m assuming Neo  isn’t developed in the UK so Simon isn’t the software guy for it.

Just a passing interest, not expecting you to write pages!

[Jon Hole]

2 hours ago, kgallen said:

is there anything interesting in the Neo software that you think might make it’s way into ZerOS?

The two platforms are vastly different in many ways, both from a user's perspective and a development perspective (written in different languages, compiled for different operating systems, etc). Now that we're all one team we regularly compare and contrast the two platforms and share ideas. There's plenty that ZerOS can learn from Neo and there's plenty that Neo can learn from ZerOS. That said, the two systems fulfil significantly different purposes - a benefit which we're keen not to loose - which means Neo has some features that will never come to ZerOS, and ZerOS has some features that will never come to Neo.

 

2 hours ago, kgallen said:

I’m assuming Neo isn’t developed in the UK so Simon isn’t the software guy for it.

Not in the UK, but in the Commonwealth 🙂 Interestingly, the software that Neo was originally based on was exclusively sold by Zero 88 and actually used the old Zero 88 Library, so there's been a full circle! Vari-Lite now own both code sets and employ all the relevant developers!

 

[Jon Hole]

On 3/16/2023 at 12:38 AM, Davidmk said:

Went back up again, but in a good way, when I read

Quote

Expect to see OSC (Open Sound Control), DMX

 

Hi @Davidmk - would be interested to hear what you have planned with OSC. What would you like to achieve? What other tools / software will you be using with FLX over OSC?

[Davidmk]

Hi Jon and thank you for asking.

In order to explain my anticipation for OSC I first need to explain how I operate shows currently (using midi)

So I primarily busk for music gigs. I usually don't know the music and have limited information about what is coming so I need to produce "looks" on the fly. I do this by having pre-prepared colours, positions, gobos & PT FX for moving heads that I combine as required. These are stored in multi cue PBs so that only one state is live at any time and they fade from one to the other. To select the cues I want I use a couple of Novation Launchpad Minis giving me 128 buttons sending midi notes. These fire PBs containing 1 cue each. Most of these are actually empty queues but I use the cue macros to fire the cues in the multi-cue playbacks as required.

My show file is attached but, to explain...

My Launchpads have 8 rows of 8 buttons it is difficult to label them (you can't write on them and most self adhesive materials that you can write on simply don't stick) but you can set their colours. As I need to be able to pick the correct unlabelled button quickly and correctly the 8th column is reserved (more on that below) leaving me 14 buttons. The first two rows of the first Launchpad are used for colours on our LED pars with the button colours representing the colour it sets. I have 12 colours plus White so one of my 14 buttons is spare.

• PBs 1 through 7 and 9 through 14 are for LED colours. As described above, these each have a single, empty, cue with a macro that triggers a cue in PB 128.
• PBs 8 (row one, button two) & 15 (row 2 button 7) have empty cues but no macro as they are unused.
• The cue macro in PB 16 (row two, button eight) releases PB 128. This 8th button is used for the same purpose in other sets of buttons.
• PB 128 contains cues that set all LED PARs to a colour (again Red, Pink Magenta, etc)

All the buttons on the 1st Launchpad and the first few rows of the 2nd operate in this manner controlling colours of the even numbered PArs only, the colours of our MH6 moving head washes, the colours of our MH7 hybrid moving heads, PT positions of the moving heads plus gobos, zoom and PT FX of all MH6 & MH7 moving heads,

The last few rows of the 2nd Launchpad work differently. The PBs matching these have actual information in the cues and the macros are not used. Typically these control things like strobing or scanning the audience with moving head lights. When I want these I press and hold the relevant launchpad button.

Now all that works nicely if used carefully but there are problems.

• First there's the issue of labelling the launchpad buttons, I have to use cunning colour coding and even then I have to rely on memory a lot.
• Setting it up is clunky, the launchpads can only be set up with musical notes (not note numbers) and that takes ages and is prone to error (which is why my early mistake of starting at note one instead of zero which resulted in the last button of the 2nd Launchpad being unusable remains uncorrected)
• This clunkiness means it is risky to modify anything on the fly so I stick with it even though I could be using empty buttons for gig-specific effects. In fact I only do modifications when I find something wrong or when I have several days to make changes then manually check and debug them
• I have found, to my cost, that sending midi commands too quickly can result in the desk locking up.
• The 1-to-1 relationship between midi notes and playbacks means I have to leave PBs unused and take up the first 5 and a bit pages with PBs for midi triggering (i'd much prefer to have them all at the end rather than the beginning). It also means I have to change o lot of stuff on the desk if I wish to re-arrange my buttons as well as running the Launchpad editing software.
• Not being able to trigger a specific cue in a specific PB using notes means using a lot more PBs than is ideal

It should be noted that I did, initially, try ordinary macros fired by the cues - this was even more clunky, less maintainable and, because macros use the command line, fraught with problems because they are slow and can fail or mess up other things if you are doing anything on the desk while they are running.

So, I'm hoping OSC might provide a smoother way of achieving the above. I've used it before with a software lighting control (QLC+) and Touch OSC (both have moved on somewhat since then so I'm not sure if what I used to do would still work - even if I could remember the details).

My dream is that I could use Touch OSC (or something like it) to create a control surface with buttons. Each button being configured to trigger a specific cue in a specific PB (i.e. transfer the T128/1 from my dummy cue to the OSC control). This would be easier to create & maintain, could even be customised to particular shows (or genre at least). An Android tablet (running Touch OSC) would be smaller & lighter to carry and quicker to connect up although I would miss the tactile nature of the Launchpad buttons.

OSC won't help if, like midi notes, the relationship between controls and playbacks is fixed and I will probably stick with midi if that is the case.

Beyond that, it will depend on how OSC is implemented. I don't really want fader controls through OSC - they are the reason why I bought a proper desk with proper physical controls (having tried both QLC+ and Martin M-Touch - now Onyx Touch from Obsidian - however things like Speed Override or Programmer Time could be candidates for fader controls.

 

 

 

 

Stables Default 2023 03 27.zos

[kgallen]

@Davidmk Wow, my head hurts now! Hats off to you. Makes what I do seem like child’s play!

[Davidmk]

@kgallen It's a bit mad I grant you but it works. I'm really hoping OSC will let me simplify it. Maybe even do more with it.

[Jon Hole]

It's led me to think about our Macro's window, along with the size of the soft buttons in that window, too.

[kgallen]

19 minutes ago, Jon Hole said:

It's led me to think about our Macro's window, along with the size of the soft buttons in that window, too.

I think I can smell the burning from here 😁 (although admittedly I'm not that far away from you!).

[Muller Light]

So, if I understand it correctly, Davidmk wants to trigger lighting cues from something external.

I would want to trigger sound cues from the lighting desk. (A Solution) e.g. 'Lightning' on Solution triggers 'thunder' on PC.

So OSC to PC running 'OSC Keypress' and Soundplant. 

Will the proposed OSC implementation be able to do that?

[Jon Hole]

3 hours ago, Muller Light said:

Will the proposed OSC implementation be able to do that?

For now, it's our intention to receive OSC, not transmit. This aligns with our other triggering protocols such as MIDI and Vision.Net.

[Davidmk]

4 hours ago, Muller Light said:

Davidmk wants to trigger lighting cues from something external

@Muller Light I already trigger cues using midi. I'm hoping I can do the same, more simply using OSC.

 

5 hours ago, Muller Light said:

trigger sound cues from the lighting desk

Perhaps you can do it with a different media player that can be controlled using DMX (ideally via ArtNet or sACN) to play the files. There are, I think, Raspberry Pi solutions like this but you'll need to do some research.

[Jon Hole]

The other option would be a piece of show control software, such as QLab (although that’s macOS only) which can play the Thunder sound effect and automatically trigger the Lightning lighting effect over OSC.

[Muller Light]

I was hoping that the lighting desk would be the 'Master' device and the sound player (or other PC program) would be the 'slave'.  So you would just keep pressing the 'go' button on the lighting desk and the sound cues (or other cues, e.g. powerpoint slides) would play automatically along with the lighting cue.

DMX controlled media player is an option (via sACN or ArtNet), but limits you to that particular program.  The 'OSC keypress' program allows you to trigger any PC program that needs a keypress to do something. (according to it's blurb. I haven't tried it)

Maybe this will be in ZerOS 8! 

Until then, it will be one hand on lighting desk and one hand on PC keyboard.

[kgallen]

3 hours ago, Muller Light said:

I was hoping that the lighting desk would be the 'Master' device and the sound player (or other PC program) would be the 'slave'.  So you would just keep pressing the 'go' button on the lighting desk and the sound cues (or other cues, e.g. powerpoint slides) would play automatically along with the lighting cue.

…

Until then, it will be one hand on lighting desk and one hand on PC keyboard.

+1 from me too. 

[Jon Hole]

On 3/15/2023 at 10:58 AM, Jon Hole said:

we hope to start beta testing within the next month. If you’re not part of our beta test group, and would like to be, do drop us an email!

The first beta release of ZerOS 7.14 has been released to our beta test group. Once again, if you'd like to be part of this group - drop us an email.

[Ed75]

At the moment I am in a setup triggering cues by midi from qlab. They need to go spot on with sounds. 

Right now these cues are in my playback 0 as this is the playback I run the rest of the show on (manually) .

I discovered putting these cues in another playback only works if this playback is viewed.....which is quite annoying.

I tried to figure out making an macro which changes playback views, but didn't succeed. Is there a way of doing this? (it doesn't record the holded "view"key when recording the macro)

If this would be possible it would be very nice. And easy.

 

 

[Edward Z88]

1 hour ago, Ed75 said:

I tried to figure out making an macro which changes playback views, but didn't succeed. Is there a way of doing this? (it doesn't record the holded "view"key when recording the macro)

If this would be possible it would be very nice. And easy.

In ZerOS 7.14 software, Macros will capture "press and hold" messages of keys. This would allow you to record a macro of "press and hold VIEW and tap GO", for example.

Hope this helps.

[Ed75]

Thanks Edward ! Looks like 7.14 will be a nice update anyway! I'm running a show now on flx, so maybe I won't try the beta now, but asap.

best regards!