I feel like the biggest burn of time when programming in Beam is having to manual set individual automation points for parameters I dont want to change later.
My situation - I have stems and loops in ableton clip view. I program my lighting looks and enevelope triggers into midi clips that fire with the ableton scenes.
So lets say I program a look for SONG 1. Generic fixture with 16 properties. 2 Lfos with 8 properties each.
If I then want to program another look for SONG 2 using the same channel. I have to manually set automation points on every single property for at the very least, the final clip of the previous song, to ensure I am not overwriting programming.
whenever there are drastic changes between clips, all automation points for all channel devices need to be manually set.
There needs to be a button that creates an automation point for every fixture paramater, at that state. This would save so much time. Madmapper has this feature when programming cues - ‘KEY ALL’
I have tried to find M4L plugins that do this - ‘variations’ in ‘Performance Pack by Iftah’ should this by saving snapshots but it does not work for me as it does not write actual automation points.
This is a topic I think about an unhealthy amount =) Namely, how to program and recall ‘looks/scenes/cues’ in Beam. I’ve tried automating all parameters of a fixture device the way you’re describing, and I find it very brittle.
My vote – create a track for each look. So if you’re got 3 looks for a fixture, create 3 tracks, with a Beam device customized for that look. I end up grouping these tracks together and then wrote a m4l group crossfader that smoothly fades the volume of the selected look track up, and the vol of the other tracks in the group down, with an adjustable delay and up/down curve. Then I automate just the “track #” parameter of my m4l crossfader, and I get smooth transitions between looks.
I also take that a step further. If I have a look for song 1 that includes let’s say 5 fixtures, then I’ll create one look track for song 1, and in the track I’ll put a rack with 5 chains, with a Beam fixture device on each chain set to the desired DMX fixture. That setup gives me smooth crossfading between sets of fixtures.
If you don’t care about smooth transitions between looks, then it’s even easier; all you need to do is automate the look-track volumes, or the speaker on/off, and you’re good to go.