Anyone have any luck with scripting a converter for already published and tested fixture profiles that are abundant on come console’s sites, or from manufacturer?
Ive used GrandMA profiles to inform writing beam profiles in text , then just converting the file extension to have it load in Beam and those are the profiles i use on stage now.
But had the idea of using venue’s tech pack info to pre-build fixture group profiles based on the venues rig so i could patch into their fixtures to expand mine. And rather than request each missing one on the forum here or writing myself, figure it could be coded pretty quick yea?
Yes, Beam’s fixture profile and patch formats (.sbf and .sbp) are just JSON files with their own extension, and it should be fairly easy to write a converter to the format that Beam expects.
Let us know if you need any additional details about our formats!
thanks for replying! and yea, if there is new documentation for schema 3 available – I would love to reference it. there are a few things I don’t understand about schema 3 yet.
I figure it’s only a few lines away from making the entire GTDF library available to Beam. Similarly, would be cool to reference the entire library to create a table of channel offsets between 2 fixtures common attributes, IOO making leader/follower control possible between fixtures of a different manufacturer.
ooh and would be amazing if you could ingest a pdf or table from a venue’s tech pack and have an entire beam patch populated matching the venue specs. just a thought , thanks!
We’re dreaming of using an LLM like ChatGPT to analyze a PDF (e.g., fixture manual) and turn it into a fixture profile JSON for Beam. @Luka did some experiments but I think our focus shifted so I’m not sure where the experiments are.
exactly what i have been trying ! Claude has been helpful all around, but havent gotten around to setting up a RAG-type instance with documentation.
Speaking of - i’m having a hard time finding details on schema3 but i could have sworn i saw a page linked somewhere in the forums that outlines how the new beam 2 fixture format works.
Now i just wish there was a clever way to convert a few thousand dimmer automation curves into Midi Note on values and similary a way to convert RGB levels into HSL. I’ve found that using midi notes to trigger my fixtures in beam 2 feels way more snappy/aligned with the audio versus dimmer automation in beam 1
I can imagine that Claude will find this file useful!
As for converting automation curves into notes: you could consider writing some code that changes the Live Set… The .als file is a zipped XML file - you can find some more info on that on Google - so in theory converting automation curves into notes is just turning one piece of XML into another.
(P.S. for other readers: the v3 profile schema mentioned above is currently used in Beam for Max and will be used in Beam for Live 2.0. For Beam for Live 1.x you’ll still need profile schema v1)
