Wernlund

Hi Colin, I've had a chance to take a look at it now and got it working - this is my setup; Windows Vista with grandMA onPC 2.3.1.1, IP 192.168.1.43 Windows 7 with Capture Polar, IP 192.168.1.31 In grandMA onPC I went to 'Setup' and 'Network master', 'MA Network Control'. There I changed the 'Station IP' to 192.168.1.43 and restarted MA onPC. I went back in there and input a 'Session name' ("Lars") and clicked on 'Start/Join Session'. In Capture, I opened the MA-Net settings, changed to "MA-Net2" and clicked on 'Start'. Capture connected and then listed all universes. At this point, unsure of how to operate an MA, I patched a VL fixtures to channel 1, and then gave it 100%, which was reflected in Capture's universe view. I hope this helps! Cheers, Lars Wernlund Technical Director, Capture Sweden

Great! There's little "marketing material" available for these protocols so it can easily get confusing. A misinformed article could be disastrous. :-) Cheers, Lars Wernlund Technical Director, Capture Sweden

Timmeh, It is indeed great that Art-Net is free and open source and easy to implement as well. Unfortunately it has caused a lot of problems because of its formal IP address range restricitions (and perhaps mainly) because of lack of knowledge of networking and IP technology among many developers. It can be quite tricky to get some systems talking to eachother simply because of IP configuration. Streaming ACN (BSR E1.31) is actually almost quite as simple and straightforward as ArtNet, but features many other advantages. Now I'm not a big fan of the PLASA CPWG (in fact I love to flame the whole thing), but if you e-mail them nicely as a developer you may find that although officially you need to pay for the spec, getting hold of it as a PDF is quite easy and free. You also mention CITP, and being the father of it I can't resist a comment there. The purpose of CITP is mainly to fill out the holes not covered by other protocols, such as transferring encrypted / protected DMX to a visualizer (CITP is not intended for any form of actual show control and is thus not competing with Artnet or ACN / sACN in any way) or video thumbnails to a lighting console (so the very feature you pointed out there is one of the things CITP does) using an open and free protocol (the specs are on www.citp-protocol.org). The whole idea of CITP is to avoid the tower of Babel problem by providing an open show control metadata (data aiding the control of, but not actually controlling the show) protocol. (Just noticing another reference in this thread to CITP as an alternative to ArtNet / sACN.. which is simply not true.. where was this picked up? A magazine article?) Having said that, I still believe Art-Net will prevail because of how simple it is to implement and find the specs for it. I have skimmed through the v3 spec of Art-Net though and completely fail to see how it could be faster than either v1 or v2 though. As far as I can see the changes have got absolutely nothing with speed to do - is it just a marketing trick? Cheers, Lars Wernlund Technical Director, Capture Sweden

Hi guys, Let's sort things out.. Capture on a PC supports MA-net natively, but Capture on a Mac does not. You can use ArtNet on both platforms, but as mentioned that's not available for free. Just as Joe wrote, we try hard to make sure Capture "sees" things automatically so that you don't have to configure anything. MA-net is actually the only exception as it requires a manual connection. Simply right button click in the External universes list of the Universes tab to open the MA-Net configuration dialog where things should be self explanatory. If you want/need to override the IP address Capture uses you can do this in Capture's options. For future reference I can recommend page 20 in the reference manual! ;-) Cheers, Lars Wernlund Technical Director, Capture Sweden