Painting With Light:Tutorials/Controlling With Duration

Duration is a free timeline application for Windows, OSX, and Linux that can be used to control Painting With Light.

In this tutorial we will set up some basic tracks in Duration to synchronise Painting With Light to an audio file and control the visibility of layers.

Download and Install Duration

Duration can be downloaded from http://duration.cc

To get it running on Windows, you might need to install this and OpenAL

Read the documentation for Duration

Start a new Duration project

Click on the "Sample Project" text in the top left of the Duration window and choose "new project"

Choose a filename.

Press the "save" button (to the right of the project name)

Loading an audio track

NOTE: Duration only supports one audio track

Click "ADD TRACK" (top left, under the project name)

Choose "AUDIO"

A new track will appear. At the top right of this track, click on "select audio"

Choose a .wav or .ai file (mp3 and other files are not supported)

For performance reasons, click on "send osc" to turn it off

Connect it to Painting With Light

Painting With Light is listening for control messages on port 10001

At the top of the Duration window, where it says "OSC OUT" and "localhost", change the number 12345 to 10001

Adding a time sync track

To synchronise playback between Duration and Painting With Light, we need to create a new "CURVES" track

Change the track name to "timestamp"

We need to manually set the track maximum value to the number of seconds in the audio

Maximum Value = ( Minutes * 60 ) + Seconds + ( Milliseconds / 1000 )

For example, if our audio is 6 minutes, 44 seconds, and 631 milliseconds long, we set the track maximum value to:

Maximum Value = ( 6 * 60 ) + 44 + ( 631 / 1000 )

Maximum Value = 360 + 44 + 0.631

Maximum Value = 404.60 (rounded down)

Now create a control point at the beginning of the track at zero, and a control point at the end of the track at the maximum value (see the screenshot above for how this should all look)

Adding a layer opacity control

Add a new "CURVES" track

Set the name of this track to "layers/Layer 1/opacity"

Add some control points along this track

In Painting With Light, make sure Layer 1 has its "Mixing Mode" set to "Blend" (in the Layers Window) otherwise the opacity won't change