Sidus Link’s Magic Program
Part 2) Exploring Advanced Controls
With the basics of Sidus Link’s Magic Program covered in part one of our tutorial series, you’re now ready to navigate more advanced tools for wirelessly programming lighting effects.
In this article, we’ll be covering the mastery of Continue fixture controls and why they’re important for creating a number of different lighting sequences.
If this is your first time hearing about Sidus Link’s wireless Bluetooth Mesh App, then the best place to start would be our Sidus Link 101 overview.
Similar to our first Magic Program walkthrough, we’ll use 4x MC lights as our fixtures and connect them through a 2x2 matrix. With the timeline clear and our lights labeled, we’re ready to continue from where we left off.
“CONTINUE” EFFECTS CONTROL
By tapping on the Continue icon in the fixture controls area, you’ll be presented with a 3 item tab labeled Continue, Chase, and Effect at the top of the menu. These are the three pillars that make up the Continue control options.
While they live in a similar place, these modes control your lights in distinct ways. You’ll find yourself using them individually or in tandem with one another to create certain effects.
Quick guide:
1) For fade-in or fade-out of lights to black or creating “pulsing” effects use CONTINUE control mode. This mode is also used to maintain light intensity and color settings over long periods of time without change. A light will “continue” the same command until told otherwise.
- Transition time is limited to 20 seconds fade-in/fade-out (With dimming curve adjustments).
2) For color, saturation, or other light intensity transitions use CHASE control mode. This is best used for looped effects or chase sequences and uses 4 different Chase Modes to determine how the transition occurs between settings. Think of Chase mode when you think of a programmed transition between a light's settings.
- Transition time is limited to 100 seconds fade-in/ fade-out (No dimming curve adjustment).
3) For triggering specific pre-programmed effects use EFFECTS control mode. These are similar effects you’ll find in the Fixture Control Menu such as fireworks, tv, and party.
4) For long transitions between lighting effects (like a 10-minute sunrise) use CONTINUE mode combined with A/B range cycle controls.
- We will cover this in part 3 of our Magic Program tutorial series.
1) CONTINUE MODE
Continue control is the best tool for creating a sequence that requires the use of fading light(s) up or down such as a rapid pulsing effect. You can also take advantage of this control to program lights without a fade up or down, instead set a node for them to trigger (and remain) at a certain intensity and color.
Controls:
First, select Continue from the fixtures control menu above the Magic Program Timeline. Be sure Continue has also highlighted green at the top left of the control menu.
When scrolling down the menu you’ll see a few parameters including Intensity, CCT (Correlated Color Temperature), HSI (Hue Saturation Intensity), GM (Green / Magenta shift), Fade-in Time, Fade-in Curve, Continue Time, Fade-out time, and Fade-out Curve.
We’ll start by choosing a color or CCT for your light(s).
- Remember if you want to transition the color of your lights as part of the sequence you will need to use Chase Mode.
While the Sidus Link fixture’s menu keeps available controls limited to a given light’s capability, this is not the case with Magic Program.
Keep your fixture’s specs in mind when making adjustments. Selecting a 10,000K CCT for an MC light won’t result in a 10,000k CCT from a light built for a 3200k–6500K CCT range. This goes the same for the Green / Magenta shift. Currently, the Nova P300C is the only Aputure light with this adjustment available.
Next, we’ll select our Fade-in Time. You can choose 0 seconds if you want the light to trigger at a given brightness without a transition, or select up to 20 seconds for maximum Fade-in Time with 4 different Fade-in curves.
Choose the desired Continue Time (how long the light will stay at a given intensity). You can select between 0–100 seconds or choose “Always” by moving the slider all the way right. Always tells the light to stay on for the remainder of the sequence or until the light has been given an OFF command in the timeline.
Lastly, we have Fade-out Time which follows the same principle as Fade-in Time.
Here we have created a simple pulsing effect to demonstrate a Fade-in Time of 0.5 Seconds, a Continue Time of 0.5 seconds, and a Fade-out Time of 0.5 seconds using a linear dimming curve.
FINAL RESULT
Now let’s dive into something more challenging; transitioning color, intensity, and saturation all at the same time!
2) CHASE MODE
Chase mode is the second pillar under the Continue Fixture controls and can be selected by tapping the middle button labeled “Chase” at the top of the menu screen.
This mode is best used for transitioning between different colors, saturation levels, or different light intensities at the same time or individually.
- You could use this mode to achieve a similar pulsing or fading sequence like we just showed with Continue mode, but you won’t have the same access to dimming curve adjustments.
Chase mode is arguably the most advanced because it’s often combined with other control nodes in the timeline, but we’ll break this down so you know how best to use it.
Creating color chase sequences.
For our first example, we’re going to create a color transition effect with our lights at a constant output. The lights will remain at 50% intensity transitioning from red to yellow.
First, we’ll select HSI at the top of the menu instead of CCT as we are creating a specific color transition for our sequence.
Next, we’ll select Point for our intensity (INT) and set it to 50%. The Point parameter is telling Sidus Link to keep the light’s intensity constant at a single value during a command regardless of a color change.
Now comes the fun part. Let’s select Range under our Hue setting and slide the two white ovals to frame the areas of the color spectrum we want to recreate with our lights. In this case, 0° for red and 66° for yellow.
We now have 4 different choices for how our lights will transition between these two colors with Hue Chase Mode.
1) Sequential: Red to yellow
2) Reverse: Yellow to red
3)Alternating: Red to yellow, then from yellow back to red
4) Random: Random fade commands
Next, we’ll consider the saturation of the colors. For this example, let’s select Point and keep the saturation at 100% for the entire transition. Selecting Range would give us the option to transition the saturation over time.
Keep things simple, if the control parameter doesn’t need to change, just select POINT and choose an appropriate constant setting.
Lastly, we’ll select our Time for how long the transition will take place (up to 100 Seconds). This means for an Alternating Chase Mode it would take 50 seconds for the light to transition from red to yellow, and 50 seconds back from yellow to red. If we selected a Sequential Chase Mode, it would take 100 seconds for red to transition to yellow.
The Loop Mode will determine if you want this effect to be looped Once or Always (indefinitely). You can make this selection here or also loop the timeline on the main Sidus Link timeline controls depending on your needs.
For our example, we will stick with Once.
FINAL RESULT:
Creating Intensity Chase Sequences.
Hopefully, you’re getting the idea of using the Chase control mode, but we will give you one more example.
We’re going to create an intensity chase sequence without color by selecting CCT, and choosing Range for our intensity to transition between 30% and 100% output. We’ll use Sequential Chase again for a simple effect.
We don’t care about transitioning our CCT so we will select a Point of 5600k.
Lastly, we will choose 5 seconds for our Time and run the sequence Once.
- Due to the difficulty of distinguishing this transition direct in-camera, the example below has been changed to 0% -100% intensity to more easily see the transition. If this were a 30%-100% transition, there would be no fade-in. The light would turn on at 30%, dim up to 100% then power off to black.
3) EFFECT
Effect Mode is a little more simple, allowing users to trigger pre-programmed effects on the Magic Program timeline.
Scrolling through the menu you’ll see familiar icons for effects like TV, Welding, Lightning, Cop Car etc. Each of these effects will be presented with the same parameters to control the effect as you would find in the Fixture Menu.
Controls:
The controls you’ll be presented with will depend on the effect. For instance, Paparazzi has intensity, CCT, G/M, and frequency while Fire has intensity, Warm/Natural/Cooler, and frequency.
There is no way to fade-in or fade-out the effects within this mode, but you can use the A/B cycle transition to help which we will cover in part 3.
Below is an example of the Party effect being triggered using all four lights in Magic Program.
Remember these different control modes can be combined to create more flexibility and creativity in your lighting sequences.
You can use Continue mode to fade-in a light with more precision, then use Chase mode to transition it to a different color at a different intensity, then use Flash mode to flash the light 3 times before it turns off.
The possibilities are limited only by your imagination, and we’ll show a few more techniques in our third and final tutorial Part 3 (coming soon). This will cover A/B cycles, creating Arrays, as well as how to better read and understand the nodes on your Magic Program timeline.
Until then, good luck and light on!
