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View Full Version : DMX - Did i make a mistake and waste money?



Johnnotestine
03-07-2012, 03:13 PM
I recently purchased the Enttec Pro DMX interface and downloaded freestyler. My questions is: Can I do what I want to do with this setup?

I am using: 1 ADJ Megapixel LED, 1 ADJ Galaxian 3d, 1 Revo 4, and some par can LED's.

What I would like to be able to do is during a live gig have my par cans fading and be able to switch them to sound active at some point. Also, during the live gig I would like to have the ability to blackout, strobe, and set my other fixtures to sound active when I want.

Basically I would like to be able to change what my fixtures are doing on the fly, without programming scenes.

Is this possible with what I purchased? Did I make a mistake and should I have purchased a hardware controller, or am I going to be able to do it all and more when I learn freestyler?

Synaxis
03-07-2012, 04:04 PM
How else are you going to tell the fixtures what to do without "programming" them.

You can simply just slide the faders in Freestyler to change the DMX values, but wouldn't it be easier to set up a scene, which you just need to simply click, instead of messing around with the faders during a show?

"Scenes" are static, as in, they don't change. If you program a scene to set all your par cans to blue, you press that scene button, and they all change to blue, and stay that way until you turn the scene off, or select a new scene. Don't confuse scenes with "shows" or "programs," which consist of several scenes to make a light show.

You can have one scene set to "blue," one scene set to "red," another set to "sound active," and then simply just press the buttons to activate/deactivate the scene at will.

If your par cans have a built in fading program, you can set a scene to have them fade. Otherwise, then you would have to create a show.

Johnnotestine
03-07-2012, 04:28 PM
Synaxis -

Thanks for the help. I am a DMX newbie, so I guess I will have to be more specific until I understand the lingo :)

Do you program scenes for individual lights, or for groups of lights? For example: if I want to run my Par cans to fade every 10 seconds and also run the megapixel and revo in sound active and have all my other lights blacked out can I make a one button scene or is that programmed with a show?

I am used to using an American DJ UC3 controller, and would like to be able to control individual effect lights in a similar manner.

Is it difficult to control individual lights in this manner or do I just need to setup shows and scenes where I can have any combination I like ( say just revo and pars, or galaxian, revo, and pars)?

I hope this made sense!

Synaxis
03-07-2012, 07:35 PM
Of course you can program multiple lights together!

Let say you have 4 lights, all par cans, with three DMX channels each of RGB. You can set your first scene to include all four lights. There are 512 DMX channels in a DMX universe, and a scene will store all 512 individual values.

So, if you want to set all the par cans to blue, you would set channels 3, 6, 9, 12 all to 255, which is the sliders very most top position. Since each par can in the example is three channels, each would have thier DMX channels set to 1, 4, 7, 10 respectively. So, DMX channel 1, would control the R channel of par can 1, Channel 2 would control the G channel of par can 1, and channel 3 would control the B channel of par can 1.

I'll try to illustrate it.



1--2--3-|-4--5--6-|-7--8--9-|-10-11-12-|
R--G--B-|-R--G--B-|-R--G--B-|-R--G--B--|
-Par 1--|--par 2--|--Par 3--|--Par 4---|

Somewhere within Freestlyer, you would have to figure out how to select multiple fixtures, then you can change their values at the same time. Or you could do each fixture one by one while programming them, but if you want all the par cans to be the same color, select them all and changing the values will affect all the selected fixtures.

To have a light blacked out, you simply keep its DMX values all down at 0.

All of what you are asking is possible. If you have 8 lights, you can have one scene which activates only four of them, and another scene with activates the other four, and yet another scene which activates all 8 of them.

I've never used freestlyer, but it may also be possible to "stack" scenes. As in, the previous scene will not be shut off when you select a new scene, but instead will apply the attributes of the scene to the current scene. For example, back to the 8 lights. Selecting scene 1 will trigger the first four lights, and when you select scene 2, the next four lights will also activate, but the first four will remain active until you shut off scene one, or another scene overwrites the DMX values.

Good Luck!

Whines
03-08-2012, 02:21 PM
I've never used freestlyer, but it may also be possible to "stack" scenes.

Yes, this does work, just enable 'Cue Multiselect' in the Freestyler preferences.

Dave Daschofsky
03-14-2012, 03:46 AM
I'm planning on getting the entec controller. I'll be using my Morgan nanopad to trigger scenes.