moving lights

[kingnic]

If you have, say 10 mac 500 (daisy chained in fives) and a pulsar masterpiece 108 and you want to programme five lights to be red and five to be blue, would you be able to or do you need 2 desks?

 

so

 

the desk

 

-

 

output 1 - 5 mac 500 - blue

output 2 - 5 mac 500 - red

 

would that work?

thanks in advance

[GridGirl]

I don't know the desk at all, but you should be able to select the lights individually and change their colours, provided each light has its own DMX address. You don't need two outputs either, I generally run a DMX output to a data splitter, and from there to each chain of moving lights. Do a search on the site though, I'm sure this topic has been covered before.

[robloxley]

if you have, say 10 mac 500 (daisy chained in fives) and a pulsar masterpiece 108 and you want to programme five lights to be red and five to be blue, would you be able to or do you need 2 desks?

A Mac500 needs at least 12 channels (AFAIR) of control, so you can't control 10 completely independently on a Masterpiece 108, regardless of how you use the DMX outputs and do the cabling. This leaves you with options of either setting more than one MAC to the same start address or softpatching on the Masterpiece - which you go for depends on what exactly you want to achieve, but I'd suggest the latter (or a larger/2nd desk).

[kingnic]

each set of five macs would be daisy chained - so five on each chain.

[robloxley]

each set of five macs would be daisy chained - so five on each chain.

But that doesn't matter, what does is how you shoehorn the number of control channels your total number of Macs need into the limited number available on the Masterpiece 108.

[johnhuson]

As Rob rightly points out it's not possible to control 10 MAC 500's independently on a Masterpiece 108 due to the number of control channels they require. The number of fixtures on a DMX line has no bearing on how they are controlled it's all down to the DMX addressing. To avoid repeating information which is readily available, if your asking basic questions like this I would suggest that you have a good search within this forum and also on the internet in general for resources about how DMX works.

 

If you had a console capable of controlling 140 channels (minimum required for 10 MAC 500's to be controlled independently) you would be able to set the colours or for that matter any other attribute to any combination between the fixtures.

 

FYI The Masterpiece only has one DMX output with 108 control channels available.

[ben.suffolk]

FYI The Masterpiece only has one DMX output with 108 control channels available.

 

Actually it has 2, (connected to the same partial universe of 108 channels mind).

 

It also has some odd soft-patching I recall that lets you send a single channel to multiple DMX addresses (thus taking you past 108 DMX channels, but not giving you independent control of more than 108 channels). I think the idea is that you could patch all the, say gobo position, channels together if you were not going to use them separately, then you have more of the 108 channels left to control other attributes of the fixture.

 

Ben

[Jamtastic3]

I work with a MP108 and can see what you mean. I've never used the softpatch on the board but my theory is that you can take say the colour channel from fixture 1, 2, 3 and 4 and stick them next to each other in the DMX channel line so you have say have all the macs on the same DMX address but in the softpatch you have removed each fixtures colour channel and placed it one after another so your last DMX channels would be fixture 1 colour, fixture 2 colour, fixture 3 colour etc (if this is making sence)

 

The MP has 2 DMX outputs equalling to 108 channels. It also has 256(?) PMX which I ain't even going to go there with!

 

p.s. To answer your answer quickly - you'd need a MP216 (red in colour) or a slave 108. The long answer is em long to be honest.

[ben.suffolk]

I've never used the softpatch on the board but my theory is that you can take say the colour channel from fixture 1, 2, 3 and 4 and stick them next to each other in the DMX channel line so you have say have all the macs on the same DMX address but in the softpatch you have removed each fixtures colour channel and placed it one after another so your last DMX channels would be fixture 1 colour, fixture 2 colour, fixture 3 colour etc (if this is making sence)

 

That would not work our right. It would mean you were soft patching the attribute channels on the macs, which you can't do. Each mac would need to be on a different DMX address, but you could soft patch the MP channels so you had all the similar macs attributes next to each other I guess, so channels 1-10 were colour for instance, and 11-20 are gobo selection. Although I'm not sure that would be all that useful.

 

One way to save a few channels would be to use 8 bit movement rather than 16. Assuming you only want them to be moving and not to be abel to line up precisely with an object that should not really be a problem, and given that your using a MP108 I suspect you wanting to use them in a more club style environment anyway.

[MarkPAman]

Don't do lights, but:

 

Set the first set of 5 to DMX address 1,and the other 5 to address 15. Link them all up on the same DMX run. Two sets of 5 lights; one set can be red, the other, blue.

 

Or am I being stupid? :)

[robloxley]

Set the first set of 5 to DMX address 1,and the other 5 to address 15. Link them all up on the same DMX run. Two sets of 5 lights; one set can be red, the other, blue.

Yes, that's one way to do it, but you're then locked into controlling all of the other attributes (particularly pan/tilt) of the Macs together, rather than independently.

I work with a MP108 and can see what you mean. I've never used the softpatch on the board but my theory is that you can take say the colour channel from fixture 1, 2, 3 and 4 and stick them next to each other in the DMX channel line so you have say have all the macs on the same DMX address but in the softpatch you have removed each fixtures colour channel and placed it one after another so your last DMX channels would be fixture 1 colour, fixture 2 colour, fixture 3 colour etc (if this is making sence)

You've lost me: patching on a MP works much like any other console - you can patch multiple DMX addresses to one MP control channel - e.g. grouping your colour channels - and thus enconomising on MP control channels needed when you have a number of wobblies. The manual is quite informative.

The MP has 2 DMX outputs equalling to 108 channels.

The MP108 has 108 control channels which can be patched across 256 (not 512, IIRC) DMX addresses.

If softpatching, it's a useful time to have a screen driver, as using the LED display is a bit tedious.