Ce samedi à ne pas manquer 20.30 à Uhrwiller (F) un beau concert pour tous ceux qui préfèrent remettre leur comptabilité à la semaine prochaine ;) et les autres évidemment!

Chameleon + OSCulator + Qlab + TouchOSC = Incredible power wand of the gods.

I’ve worked with Chameleon for a year now, I really love how this is made, simple, fast and efficient. There were a few issues in terms of how to use it in my workflow though. Sometimes I work alone in this venue, 150 seats, 30 PAR lights, 20 PC and 5 Profiles and a fixed structure that you can reach with a lift. Installing is ok, but focusing WAS a drag.

I also use Qlab so I can fire up audio or midi cues to recall settings on a digital desk, make fades, recall FX presets… with a Korg Nano Control MIDI controller. The great thing would have been to be able to send MSC or some control changes to Chameleon to fire up the next light cue. But Chameleon does not respond to midi input for now - the devs said that they’re looking into it. Chameleon however is really good with keyboard shortcuts so I thought, what if I could fire up a keyboard combo with a MIDI message.

But what if I could use OSC ? that would be even neater because then I could send messages from my mobile device to virtually any software… I’ve tried a few solutions that were working with my nano control but there was too much latency (0.5s) to be reliable. I could not measure the latency properly but I suspect it was not constant. Moreover nothing could handle OSC messages. So I did a quick lookup no the internet again (well it took me the afternoon tbh) and found OSCulator and this was actually it. P e r f e c t. !

Tested on a macbook (white) core2duo with OSX 10.7.1

Whatcha need

• OSCulator : http://www.osculator.net
• Chameleon : http://www.maclightingsoftware.com

This will be covered in another post :

Qlab : http://www.figure53.com

TouchOSC EDITOR on the mac : http://hexler.net/software/touchosc

TouchOSC on you iPhone iPad : checkout the appstore.

What you need to know about

• MIDI
• OSC messages (not too much, OSCulator does most of the things for you)
• Applescript (just a little)
• Patience =)

Configure your system

• Go to System Prefs > Universal Access and tick “Enable Assistive Devices” like so
• Install the apps

Chameleon + OSCulator

• Launch OSCulator : first we need to configure the app like so
• Click on parameters > I/O and adjust the midi input to your midi controller and OSCulator(8000)
• Now we need to make it learn a few things. I will only show you the tricky bit since you can very easily figure out the rest for yourself : let’s automate the Cues Helper.
• First we need to make the Cue Helper appear go to : Parameters > AppleScript and make script called cham cue helper. Then copy this bit of code and compile (click on the hammer).

Applescript Code - cham cue helper:

tell application "System Events"
tell application "Chameleon" to activate
tell process "Chameleon"
    click button "Cues" of window 1
    end tell
end tell
end tell

• Let’s script the other keys.
• Make two more scripts called cham cue helper go and cham cue helper reset and paste the following code.

AppleScript code - cham cue helper GO.

tell application "System Events"
tell application "Chameleon" to activate
tell process "Chameleon"
    click button "GO" of window 1
end tell
end tell

AppleScript code - cham cue helper reset.

tell application "System Events"
tell process "Chameleon"
    click button "|<" of window 1
end tell
end tell

• The last two keys that can be reached for now on the helper are the > & < for previous and next cue. These ones are pretty easy to make. Click on Key Combos and add a new combo with the + sign at the bottom. Then a small popup window appears : press the left arrow on your keyboard and close the small window with the mouse. Select the target application and add a memo (this is important because as you’ll quickly see, this window will get crowded !) Voilà, you just need to repeat this step once and press the other arrow when prompted. (Of course you will have to do that once for each key you whish to control with your MIDI controller.

Now it is time to get some MIDI input

• Close the parameters window.
• If you already have a few messages that appeared in the window delete them.
• Now press your selected “cue helper” key on your controller. The midi message will be interpreted and will appear in the window (if you already have a few, a green square lights up before the message you’re currently sending so you can easily spot it)
• Assign an event type in this case AppleScript
• Select the AppleScript you which to launch : cham cue helper

That’s it now you should be able to make Chameleon’s Cues Helper popup appear.

Repeat operations for the other controls

I’m saving the best for next time.

I can make available a shortcut file if you need, just ask.

-Matthieu Zisswiller-