Well I have spent about 90+ hrs getting familiar, and creating our shows in Compulive, and have come across some wired things. I have my first show using COMPULIVE on SAT hope all goes well, I am bring my SD2CF for backup... I also wanted to mention some enhancements?
Here is the list:
BUGS??
EDIT SCREEN WOULD RANDOMLY MINIMIZE:
When I go to edit a scene (this happened randomly, could not figure out a pattern), after I would right click on a fixture to change the color, the edit window would minimize to the start bar. Once I clicked it on the bar it would open up but not show, I would then have to click it again to have it come back up. This happened soooo many times it was quite an annoyance.
CYCLES NOT SHOWING ALL BUTTONS:
Read my other thread for this on (Cycle Issue) , but the cycle is missing buttons, until you re-size, then all buttons show up. If you click to another page, then it becomes a blank gray window. You have to close, and re-open, which is a pain since you have to restart the cycle from beginning. Also I had cycles get set to the “off” state, and had no way to turn them back on, unless I am not seeing any on/off buttons, I had to remove the “off” steps, and add them back into the cycle.
CHANNEL CONTROL:
When I would edit a scene and wanted to change the channels control (easy time, easystep, dimmer ,on/off…) I could only highlight the channels from left to right, It would not work the other way if I went right to left. Kind of a pain in the but when you are trying to quickly create scenes.
EASYTIME:
This issue was if I were to highlight a time square, and wanted to select a group of boxes that I had to scroll down with, the cursor highlight when jump randomly on scrolling to different times or channels. Also if I was highlighting from top to bottom, and mistakenly moved up a little when try to scroll, the box would then include the mistaken boxes, as if they were the original selection point. This was really annoying.
EASYTIME SHAPES:
In easy step, when creating any shapes and movements for automated fixtures in the shape generator would always forget to connect the points together to make a complete circle, or polygon. The lights would always jump the last two points, making them look “erratic” missing the point for the transition. I always had to add an extra point to make it look smooth.
COLOR MANAGER:
Color manager would always crash, sent output files to Dylan…
EFFECTS GENARATOR:
Would crash a lot, sent output files to Dylan…
ENHANCEMENTS:
Focus Presets!
Please, Please, Please, this would cut out 2-3 hours on my part at shows if I did not have to go thru EVERY scene to update performers locations for different Venues. If I had a preset that all scenes would relate back to, this would save so much time, and make this application more valuable.
UNDO!
It would be AWSOME if you could create an “UNDO”, a couple of time I would be flying thru the programing, and realize… “What button did I just Delete?”
AUTO SAVE!
It would be nice if you could setup an auto save location for hard drive, and also to a secondary backup source (like a flash drive), because you have to remember , it is a computer, and it is running windows….
This would allow auto save however many minutes you specify, and what locations you want to store the copies.FILE REDIRECTION!
Ablity to change your path where compulive stores the archive, and for saving the show. This will allow you to change the path to another folder.
ABILTY TO CHANGE COLORS ON MASTER PAGE.
This might not be an enhancement, But I could not figure out how to change the colors on the master page, still has the blah colors. All other pages changed, but master still has original colors.
COLOR MANAGER!
Ability to “arrange” your lights they way you have them physicaly. I have 6 vertical LED fixtures containing 8 lights each (total of 48), Color manager would only allow them to be setup horizontal, from left to right, not the way they are seen from top to bottom. This really should be available if you want to do text or shapes on a matrix of LEDs. There is no way to be able to scroll things like test or images, if Compulive does not allow you to layout you fixtures with “YOUR” orientation. I am really missing out on this feature, and effects, It would be nice to be able to do text, and images. DARN!!
ABILTY TO RESTORE YOR PAGES LAYOUT, AFTER AN UPGRADE.
It would be nice if you layout was saved when you upgrade to a new version. Both times I upgraded, I would have to recreate my layout of pages, after an upgrade.
ABILTY TO START A CYCLE WHERE EVER YOU WANT
When you run a cycle, it always starts at the beginning. It would be nice to be able to point and click the press start from that selected step.
BETTER SCROLLING IN EASYTIME
Scrolling left to right, up and down is horrible right now, be nice if they could make it a “little more user friendly” this would save a lot of time during programming, not having to worry about fighting with the selection box!
Well that is the laundry list, hope something will come out of this post (after composing this monster post
)