gyro_gearloose

So if I understand you correctly, you can pan your fixture one and a half times (540 degrees, which is two times 270) but the software reports the movement range as 0 to 270 degrees? I'm sure you know this, but DMX is only made up of numbers between 0 and 255, or two consecutive channels can be combined to give a range of 0 to 65535. The lighting software knows that your fixture has a movement range of 540 degrees (-270 degrees to 270 degrees) and it will map the degree value to the DMX range. It sounds as though the personality/profile/definition of your fixtures has not been created correctly. It thinks 0 degrees should have a DMX value of 0, but -270 degrees should actually be DMX 0. You'll need to edit the fixture definition so that the Pan range (-270 to 270 degrees) correctly maps to the DMX range. If this seems a bit daunting, send me a copy of your show file and I'll have a look at the fixture definitions for you. Edit: These fixtures?

Does any part of the system actually work as expected? If the Arc light is off then one would assume that the wall panels, which communicate and are powered via the Arc port, won’t work, but you are saying one panel does work? If the rest of the wall panels don’t work then I’d suspect a cabling fault between the first working panel and rest of the panels. If the system doesn’t work at all then the Symetrix master unit may have lost its programming. I’m not sure why you’ve got a Dante equipped DSP unit just to handle distribution of your show relay. Seems like overkill to me, or people don’t know how powerful that system can be. A quick look at the Symetrix Radius spec. sheet suggests that your show relay mics would plug into the Radius’ analogue inputs, the signal to each speakers amplifier would come out of the analogue outputs, and the wall panels would be daisy chained together from the Arc port. Be careful with the Arc cabling. It contains 24VDC which might not play well with anything else that also uses CAT5, like IP phones, computers, etc. Remember, CAT5 is just a cabling standard which says nothing about what those cables are actually used for.

£1500? Ouch! You can get a 5 user Eartec UltraLITE HD setup from ShowComms for £750 here. From what I can tell you’d only need the setup you’ve linked to if you want more than five wireless headsets. As for real world experience, I’ve only used the setup I linked to once on one show that came to our venue. The headsets are comfortable, especially since there is no belt pack or headset cabling to get in the way. The mic is muted by raising the mic boom, which did take a bit of getting used to, but overall I was impressed with the system. Apparently the headset transmission range is good enough to use on large outdoor gigs, according to the crew who brought the system with them.

Any material will look totally black if you look at it in a pitch black room :) Seriously though, can you manage the lighting so as to reduce any glare from the prop?

You'll first need to find the make and model of the original COB LED. Given that your fixture is at the budget end of the spectrum, the manufacturer most likely used an off-the-shelf LED. However the LED market changes quickly, so you may find that the LED you need is no longer available. Your best bet is to cannibalise one of your fixtures and harvest its working LEDs. Something I did notice in the fixtures manual is that it somehow manages to produce 180 Watts of output while consuming only 20 Watts of mains power. One or both of those numbers might be wrong! :D

Paul, how well do your LEDs fare when creating pastel colours? I know RGBW LEDs are great for saturated colours like you'd use on a rock and roll show, for example, but how well can they create convincing paler colours? I've always thought that the output from multicolour LEDs can be a bit too 'peaky', with a bit of a gap between each individual colour.

Would sine wave dimmers solve the problem of having dimmed and hard power on the same cable infrastructure? Not cheap, but presumably it won’t damaged electronic power supplies in intelligent fixtures?

It’s not that vague really. The other thread was about LED profiles and Fresnels, so it’s probably safe to assume that this one is too. I don’t know what cabling arrangements you use in Australia, but here in the UK dimmed power usually uses 15A plugs, while hard power for movers/LEDs/etc. use 16A Ceeforms. If you use the same type of plug for dimmed and hard power then you run the very real risk of plugging intelligent fixtures into dimmers, which is probably what has damaged your fixtures. As for what damage has been done, hopefully it’s just the internal power supply. If you have a working fixture identical to the damaged ones, I’d try swapping over power supplies, if that’s possible, to narrow down exactly which parts are damaged.

For flexible led tube, Neon Flex is the phrase to search for.

Black Sharkstooth gauze over the front of your panel should give you the effect you're after.

A mechanical solution might be a better idea, especially since its got to run for up to 9 months. Keeping the air from escaping might be a bit of a challenge, as will creating your own DIY airtight 'lungs'.

The trouble processing existing video is that you're going to need to transfer the data off the CCTV system and onto a computer. 11 cameras for a week will give you a Terrabyte or two of data, which will take time simply to move across to the computer let alone the amount of time it will take to process said video. The limiting factor in the data transfer speed will be the fact that the CCTV system will still be writing to the hard drive(s) while you are trying to read from it/them. You might want to bring a book or two to read while the files are being transferred :)

Are you looking for software to analyse existing video, or do you want to only record when a camera detects movement? Many CCTV systems can be set to record only when they detect movement, but I’m not sure if any can process video that you’ve already recorded. Have a look at Xeoma. It has many modules that can do all sorts of video analysis so it may be able to process your video for you.

How steep is your stage, and does the auditorium have a balcony? The reason I'm asking is that theres no point putting a lot of time and money into the dance floor if no one can see it that well. For example, our stage is slightly raked so anyone sat in the stalls would be able to see that something was happening with a lit dance floor, but they wouldn't be able to see any kind of video display that well.

If you are worried about your sleep patterns, may I suggest blackout blinds and a sleep mask? Tampering with the councils streetlight is really not a good idea. Taping a piece of gel to the front of it, and thereby reducing the light output, does count as tampering. There may well be a reason they've put a brighter LED streetlight near your house. Have you tried asking them about changing to a warmer type of LED? I suspect their answer will be a firm 'no', but it doesn't hurt to ask.

As far as I’m aware, the whole point of omega brackets is that they fit pretty much all Martin fixtures. I know you can rig Mac Minis off just one single bracket, and 250s, 300s, 500s, and 600s off two, so I’d be amazed if you need specific brackets just for the Krypton range.

As someone once said 'they all do that, sir'. We've got some Strand Prelude profiles and Fresnels, some Strand Cantatas, and some CCT silhouette Fresnels which all have the same problem with their reflectors. In fact some of the CCT reflectors actually partially melted! The problem is that the reflectors are Chrome-plated Aluminium, and both metals expand at different rates when they are heated. This eventually leads to the problem of the reflective coating looking very rough. You could, if you are lucky, find some new old stock reflectors, and if you aren't using the lights that much then the new reflectors should last a while before ultimately failing as well. A better, but very costly, solution would be to get some Chrome-plated steel reflectors made. These should cope better with the heat. I've got a pile of old Berkey Colortran reflectors which are made that way, and they look perfect once I wipe the dust off them. They won't work in the Strand lamps though as they are too big/the wrong type of reflector. I like the sound of the LED conversion. However you might struggle to find an RGB or RGBA COB LED of sufficient brightness for stage work. You will also struggle to find a high power (more than 50 Watt) LED driver off the shelf that dims smoothly all the way to 0%. Higher-power drivers may say that they can dim, but all of the ones I've seen don't seem to dim well, if at all, below around 5-8%. Mechanical dimming, of course, will work for every type of light source ;) The other thing you'll need to consider, if you go down the LED route, is how you are going to initially capture the light from your LED. You can just put an LED inside your profiles, and you will get light out of the front of them, but it won't be anywhere near as bright as having some sort of primary optics very close to the LED. You could either go down the traditional route of creating your own Kohler illumination condensing setup consisting of an aspheric lens and a plano-convex lens. This is what our ADB profiles use, as do our Coemar moving lights, as well as many others. You could also look at the hybrid silicone reflectors that are being made for LEDs. They claim to be up to 85-90% efficient, but I don't know how well they'd work in a profile. They might be better suited for retro-fitting LEDs to Fresnels. Hope this information is of some use. If you do fit LEDs, let us know how you get on.

The term to search for seems to be 'door frame lighting'. Also, the company name 'Thrisdar' pops up more than a few times when searching for this type of light. It would be interesting to see what one looks like on a hazy stage. It would certainly be far less dangerous than a laser. My gut tells me that the LED might not be bright enough, but I'd still love to have a play with a few of them. Maybe an idea for Big Clive's next YouTube video? :)

I can't comment specifically on QLab or MagicQ, but let me share some of the things I've learned when setting up OSC with our ETC Element and my iPad. I sometimes use a remote control on my iPad to control our lighting desk. The iPad uses TouchOSC to send and receive OSC messages to and from the Element via a wifi router which is used only for that purpose. To get both devices talking to each other I need to manually tell them both what the network address is of the other device, as OSC appears to have no way of automatically discovering devices on the network. To make life a bit easier, I have set up the router to give the lighting desk and my iPad their own static network address. A quick word on network addresses. It seems to be a good idea to use the 10.x.y.z range of addresses for show control situations rather than 2.x.y.z. Artnet uses 2.x.y.z for its address range and other manufacturers seem to have followed suit, but this can cause problems with modern devices which understand the internet. For instance, when first setting up TouchOSC with our Element I used the 2.x.y.z address range because I was also using Artnet for another project. With this setup, I couldn't get my iPad to talk to the Element. It was only after switching over to the 10.x.y.z address range that everything worked as it should, so keep this in mind when setting up your network. Alongside the network address of each device, you also need to tell the devices which ports to use to send and receive messages through. Usually its 9000 and 8000, so you would set the transmit port on one device and the receive port on the other to 9000, and vice versa. Once that is done you should be able to send OSC messages between MagicQ and OSC. Like I said, I have no specific experience of using OSC on QLab and MagicQ, but once all the hard work of setting the network up is complete, actual OSC messages are quite straight forward. For example, to trigger 'Go' on playback 1 the OSC message in QLab would be '/pb/1/go'. Hope this helps.

Have a look at the PTSP menu setting. It controls the pan and tilt speed, and has 3 settings: fast, normal, and slow. Make sure its the same setting on both fixtures.

The OP might be better off looking at some of the ultra short throw projectors on offer these days. I'm assuming that the idea of a video wall was decided on so that the actors don't cast shadows on a projection screen? Using a short throw projector will help with this as the throw distance can be surprisingly short. One Dell projector I've seen claims to be able to create a 100" image with the projector a mere 4" from the screen.

I wouldn't have thought so, given that Mac 250 Entours are moving head fixtures. Its probably the 'studio mode' that Andy mentioned earlier that is causing the problem. Studio mode was added in version 1.5 of the firmware, according to this thread from 2010.

What interface are you using for the Onyx software? If its one of the Martin USB DMX interfaces, then you can use that to update your fixtures. The software you need is the Martin Companion firmware tool, and one of the supported Martin DMX interfaces. Edit: Elation now sell re-branded versions of the Martin DMX interfaces. Have a look here. Maybe one of those would work with the Martin Companion software?

3/5 sockets on fixtures are very useful for when I’ve ‘borrowed’ a mic cable after running out of long bits of 5 pin DMX cable, but let’s not re-open the question of using mic cable for DMX :D

Another option for wireless DMX could be the SmartShow Wifi/DMX bridge. I haven't used one myself, but I know others on here have used SmartShow kit before with good results. Just hook it up to a 12 volt DC dimmer, and a 12 volt / 100W lamp that Brian linked to, and you're good to go. eldoLED make some DC to DC constant voltage dimmable driver which take a DMX input.