I finally got a DMX controller its a gvg-600 a clone of the whatever the stairville DMX master is a version of lol

well i did a lot of reading before hand so i understood the dip switch settings and i soon got my constella astra moon scans paning and tilting and selecting gobos and i connected my fx labs diffraction laser up and i am surprised at the different patterns you can get on that compared to sound to light that's built in it does a different effect with the centre part spinning and the outside dots stationary. I'm saving up for some LED par cans now the Thomann par 56's. After reading up so much it was much easier than i thought ..so far only had it 2 hours

well chuffed the best £59 i have spent on lighting products ..this dmx lark isnt as scary or difficult as i had thought ,I am no expert by any means but anyone thinking about having a go i would say ..go for it..i am really looking forward to my Halloween party now!

Yay!

Sometimes i wonder if a physical DMX controller would be better than a software operated one... I'm using Freestyler with the very slooowwww Velleman USB DMX convertor...

Where did you get it from?

EDIT: Probably Ebay I'd say (just searched google and found one had gone today for 59 quid in Manchester!). Bargain!

David

£59 is a bargin

Thinking of pitching a telly program DJ gear bargain hunt lol

second hand bargains are everywhere at the moment! just a lack of funds stops me buying all the goodies i see ..I sold an exercise bike on ebay within 1 hour on Tuesday ,it went for its buy it now price, personally delivered the bike yesterday.then had the dosh to buy the controller ...proper wheeler dealer lol

so i have bought for £120 from ebay recently Two DMX scanners in transport cases AND a 192 channel DMX controller !!! Bargain!!

I'm the reverse. With my first ever rig I jumped straight in the deep end and bought a DMX controller and learnt how to program it. Then realised I was never going to be able to program it as good as the built in ones so now my controller is being done away with and I run the built in programs controlled by sound to light.

To be honest being able to point the scanners exactly where i want and not at the crowd i can see being useful and also one of the gobos is a love heart so i can see that looking good on valentines or weddings etc but for normal party sound to light is just as good..what i want the controller really for is the LED parcans i am going to get so i can colour mix and get exactly the wash colour i want.

but your right some sound to light programs are very good and if it aint broken don't try fixing it , but for me its the things you cant do with the built in programs that i am trying to achieve.

I DMX my dynaroll for Slow Dances (basically a slow roll - aka mirror ball effect). However, I've not really made full use of it for my LED based lights.

I tried a PC based Dongle, and whilst it worked fine I didn't want to drag a PC around.

All good stuff though - but DX is right, the built-in patterns on my LED fixtures are pretty good and I've never really found any impressive chases. Should look great with Scanners though.

Jas

You can do some great stuff with them. Like setting a red gobo and slow movement for the smoochies. I might be wrong but to keep the lights away from the crowd would require reprogramming at each venue and that will become tiresome very quickly. It isn't no 5 minute job either.

What would make freestyler better (for me) would be some sort of external controller with faders to make life a bit easier.... Sorta same thing applies to having a controller for your software to make mixing/cuing tracks easier ..

DMX can be addictive! Before long you'll be digging in your pockets for even more exciting effects to add to your show. Are you at the stage yet where you stare at the lighting rig in your local nightclub just to glean ideas? Or is that just me that does that?

it is very addictive! and yes im a geek when it comes to looking at other peoples set ups lights and audio ..you learn so much that way


PS superstardeejay did you get my pm?

I'm guilty too! :)

David, fiddling with Freestyler DMX !



Oh and what would make DMX much easier / better is full wireless DMX protocol. but obviously this'll add a premium to all fixtures. Will save that mad tangle of DMX cables, and termination "fun" etc. Although no doubt one manufacturer will do it slightly different to everyone else and break the whole standard...


David

It think it is possible to use a Midi controller for this. Something like Korg midiKontrol would be great I would have thought.

Yeah was thinking along the lines of something midi-based. The thing is it needs to be rack-mountable and max 2 or 3u high.

Half of me wonders whether its just going to a full hardware-ish controller (one of the chinese-made rebranded 192 channel dmx desks with a joystick).


Oh I *finally* got around to manage making some chases for par cans etc, with separate cues for changing the gobos vs pan & tilt (gobos don't matter so much when you're audio-triggering), wheras pan&tilt look better synced to audio - esp if the rest of the lighting goes to the same beat..

Should be interesting this afternoon/evening !

Cheers,

David

All comes down to your controller. The more you spend on the controller the less you have to do.

I use a Zero88 Diablo which is designed for intelligent fixtures. The movement macros are already built in and you can simply adjust the area with the joystick live. The same applies to all other fixture attributes. The ripple function is very time saving, meaning you can offset functions to create a scrolling rainbox across the fixtures without having to make a step for each change. I have used an NJD Merlin 256 also which is quite flexible.

I used a Dmx Operator (which I think is rebranded as everything under the sun now including the one mentioned here) at first years ago and understand this can be a nightmare, especially when it comes to pan/tilt programming & fades. Its a good base though as you can understand the workings, then later on when you have higher end controllers that do the difficult bits for you, when you need to go back to roots for fault finding (such as I did the other day when a moving yoke was getting a reset command continously when on the DMX chain) you have the knowledge.

I've also got more into DMX with the freeware FreestylerDMX, also now that I've a half-decent USB interface (Enttec OpenDMX), it works *so* much better. All I need is some proper scanner type lights now :)

I use the flash / override buttons quite a lot (got these mapped to flash the par cans for example, all-on, etc), and have also got the hang of cues, so now my lights do something syncronously rather than sorta-random (although the random dmx was better than each fixture on their own sound-to-light mode!).

Cheers,

David