Specifications

12 LightJockey Help file - (C) Martin Professional 2010
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Another notable exception which is dynamic in expression are the movement macros that moves the
light around in geometric patterns. Although the information to move the light in a circle has a
dynamic expression (the movement in a circle) - the parameters that determine the 'dynamics' are still
static within the scene.
Sequence
A sequence is the cornerstone of programming in LightJockey. A sequence consists of one or more
scenes chained together in a sequential order. If the sequence contains more than one scene, the
sequence can 'animate' the fixtures by executing scenes with different contents, like the film strip with
different picture frames. The default behavior for a sequence when it reaches the last scene, is to loop
back to the first scene to get a continuous execution of the sequence.
A very simplified example is a sequence containing 3 scenes:
Scene 1 instructs a fixture equipped with a color wheel to go to red, scene 2 instructs the fixture to go
to yellow and in scene 3 the fixture is instructed to go to green. When this sequence is played back
in the default loop mode, the sequence will 'animate' the color of the fixture through the 3 colors, and
after scene 3 it will loop back and start with scene 1 and the red color again.
Scene and Fade times
The sequence also contains parameters that dictate how the animation is supposed to take place.
First of all there is the scene time. In the previous example, a scene time of 1 second for all scenes
would have LightJockey advancing through the sequence, with each scene being replaced by the next
scene after 1 second of 'on time'. Scene times can be set individually for each scene in the sequence
with the sequence control, e.g. scene 1 may have a scene time of 1 second, while scenes 2 and 3
may have a scene time of 0.5 and 2 seconds respectively.
The sequence also contains a fade time for each scene. The fade time dictates how long time the
physical transition will take from the position (e.g. color wheel position) programmed in the previous
scene, to the position programmed in the current scene.
Here the film analogy might be used again. A film shot showing a person walking from one side of the
scene to the other side requires 'a lot' of individual pictures in between the two positions to get
'smooth' movement. The way to make making slow, smooth movements like this with LightJockey is
to program the two end points (colors in the example) in two scenes, and then let LightJockey
calculate all the positions (pictures in the analogy) in between the two end points. This is exactly
what using fade time and fading an effects does.
With the previous color example, setting a fade time of 3 second for each scene, would mean that
each color change takes 3 seconds. The way this works is that LightJockey calculates all the
possible positions between the two colors, and outputs these values at a calculated rate so that the
fixture moves the color wheel from one position to the next in one smooth movement taking exactly 3
seconds (note, some fixtures will not allow slow transitions between colors or other types of effects -
this is a restriction of the fixture's DMX protocol, not LightJockey).
Note that in order for an effect to fade from one position to the next, the fade state of that effect must
be set to fade. See off/snap/fade
A sequence does not have to contain more than one scene - in this case, the sequence is called
static sequence. While the scene time no longer is relevant since there will be no progression in the
sequence, the fade time still controls the transition time from the previous effect position (whatever
that was) to the one programmed into the scene.
See also Scene and fade times, Sequence control
Cues
A cue is a construction that contains up to 12 sequences to be executed run in parallel. Although
LightJockey allows playback of single sequences, the cue offers much more flexibility in terms of
dynamic and combination options.