[ANSWERED] ELM or Isadora????? Urgently soliciting advice.
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Hello people,
I am brand new to Isadora. I have been a lighting designer for about 25 years. Yesterday I binge watched about 15 Isadora tutorials and I'm wondering why I waited so long to discover it.
I have a project coming up quickly involving strings of WS2811 RGB pixels. For the last few months I was planning on using Enttec's ELM software (connected via Artnet to an Enttec Pixel Octo) to control a matrix of about 190 LEDs.
I am using 20 strands of LED's (50 LEDs each, 2.5" pitch) to create the matrix. The LEDs will be on 10" centers, so I need to skip 3 leds between centers. So each LED string will contribute 13 LED's to the matrix.
The ELM program( which I have NOT purchased yet) has the ability to reorder the patching of the LED's (to accommodate the 10 " centers) , so those in between pixels are deleted from the ordering, leaving me 13 LEDs per strip. ELM also allows me to recreate the matrix shape on the screen using that new order. Then my plan is to input a live camera to affect the matrix.
My questions is: Can Isadora do that also? From the quick researching I have done on the forum and tutorials, I get the feeling it can. I just need to know for sure before I pull the trigger on purchasing one of these programs. I am hoping Isadora can do it, because I see the potential for more creative opportunities with Izzy.
Thank you
Rickus
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Hi there Rickus,
Welcome to the Isadora community forum, glad to have you here. I'm an artist that uses a lot of led pixels over the last years, so I can definelly help you out with some of the questions that you have.
ELM is nothing more then a pixelmapping program (MadMapper, Resolume, etc) can all do the same thing. Isadora 3 can certainly do it, and I got multiple installations at the moment that use Isadora with there pixelmapping posibilities. The only thing that is a bit though with Isadora is that it doesn't has the nice dedicated interface elements that the other programs have. So you have to create your own patch a bit. (At the same time this is fun because you know the ins and outs of your creation), at the other side of the table is that it requires some time. If you have any questions during this setup, you can post it on the forums or give me an e-mail at hello[at]juriaan.me and I will give you a hand :)
Isadora has Art-Net (not sACN) support for up to 4 universes per node on the Network. So 13 * 20 = 260 pixels * 3 = 780 channels of data = 2 universes is perfectly managable with a single node.
Oh and regarding your last sentence, you will become hooked on Isadora.
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@juriaan Thanks so much for the quick reply. That all sounds promising and now I'm definitely leaning towards Isadora. I'm going to run the free version for a bit to make sure. I will probably take you up on your offer to help me set it up. Let me see how far I get before I get stuck. Thanks much!
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@jkrickus said:
I just need to know for sure before I pull the trigger on purchasing one of these programs.
You can also buy an Isadora 7-day Rental License on the online store (fairly cheap) so that you can experiment and save your work in the short-term (instead of working in demo mode and being unable to save your experiments until after you buy a full license).
Best wishes,
Woland
