DMX test run

Hi,

Yesterday we hired a nearby hall to do a full test run of the new set-up before our first gig in a couple of weeks time.

I've played with DMX a little bit in the past so addressing and linking wasn't an issue.

We have a Transection 16 channel controller with:

2x ADJ Mini Dekker
2x Equinox Fusion Spot XP
2x Beamz Intiled 300
1x Laserworld RGB400ES.

So I had set 1 Spot XP to Fixture 1 (1), 1 Spot XP to Fixture 2 (17), Both Beamz barrels to Fixture 3 (33), both ADJ Dekkers to Fixture 4 and the laser to Fixture 5...

When I selected each fixture I had full control over each of the channels (great!) and was making so half decent trial run scenes/chases.

The problem I had when I put the Spot XPs and Beamz 300 into sound mode via the DMX channel they'd be doing their own things rather than working together. It'll be odd gobos, colours and movement. Not what I'm after!

Any ideas on how to solve this at all? Does the Master, Slave 1, Slave 2 have any affect when linked via DMX on Sound mode? It didn't seem to yesterday.

Thanks in advance!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DJWilson

Hi,

Yesterday we hired a nearby hall to do a full test run of the new set-up before our first gig in a couple of weeks time.

I've played with DMX a little bit in the past so addressing and linking wasn't an issue.

We have a Transection 16 channel controller with:

2x ADJ Mini Dekker
2x Equinox Fusion Spot XP
2x Beamz Intiled 300
1x Laserworld RGB400ES.

So I had set 1 Spot XP to Fixture 1 (1), 1 Spot XP to Fixture 2 (17), Both Beamz barrels to Fixture 3 (33), both ADJ Dekkers to Fixture 4 and the laser to Fixture 5...

When I selected each fixture I had full control over each of the channels (great!) and was making so half decent trial run scenes/chases.

The problem I had when I put the Spot XPs and Beamz 300 into sound mode via the DMX channel they'd be doing their own things rather than working together. It'll be odd gobos, colours and movement. Not what I'm after!

Any ideas on how to solve this at all? Does the Master, Slave 1, Slave 2 have any affect when linked via DMX on Sound mode? It didn't seem to yesterday.

Thanks in advance!

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You have to remember one key thing with DMX. When the DMX controller is connected, it becomes the master. If you put a fixture into S2L mode, it has to still listen to your DMX controller to stay in S2L mode, meaning it cannot become a master, and can no longer communicate with other fixtures on the cable.

With a DMX controller you either have to program scenes/chases for everything, or you have to accept that when fixtures go into S2L mode, they're on their own and won't link up with others. The possible "cheat" for this is macros - some fixtures have macros that run patterns (or a sequence of patterns) when set to a specific DMX address and usually if you tell two fixtures to start running a macro at the same time, they'll stay in sync and this then saves programming lots of steps into your controller. However... macro's aren't usually S2L.

Julian

Hmm, that's a bit of a :Censored:.

Looks like I'm spending the weekend making endless scenes.

Thanks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DJWilson

Looks like I'm spending the weekend making endless scenes.

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That's the experience of most people with DMX... one way around it is to use software that allows you overlay scenes/chases on top of each other. Then you can create chases that exploit specific features of fixtures (like fading between colours, moving in circles, etc) and then combine them together to create endless combinations. This takes a while to get your head around though and still quite a big investment in creating scenes/chases for all of your fixtures.

Another good cheat is to get software that can run chases in a random order. This can be mean that one simple chase with 20 scenes with relatively simple combinations of movement won't feel like it's repetitive when it's being run for a while.

The plan was to make some nice, slow early evening/first dance scenes with a strobe one and let the rest do S2L via DMX.

I'll have another play around and seeing how much affect turning the controller on and off will have to work around it.

Wish me luck!

Thanks for your help by the way.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DJWilson

I'll have another play around and seeing how much affect turning the controller on and off will have to work around it.

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From experience, turning the controller off may have an unexpected effect :D If you have a single cable with multiple pairs of fixtures on it from different manufacturers (which you do) when you turn the controller off you'll have 7 fixtures that will attempt to all become masters. Usually if you have pairs of fixtures of the same type, they have a way of deciding which one becomes master (and it has nothing to do with which fixture has the cable connected to the "Output" DMX socket), but if you have multiple fixtures all competing on the same cable you'll probably find that one will become master, one *might* become slave and the remainder will all go nuts as they're receiving DMX signals they can't interpret :D

DMX is really all or nothing. To go back to non-DMX S2L behaviour you'd need to pull out cables to pair up fixtures by manufacturer/type.

Julian