Attributing one light to another

[Ynot]

Basically if I assign DMX CHANNELS 10, 13, 25 and 432 to desk channel 1, then desk channel 1 will bring all four of those DMX channels (and the dimmers assigned to them) to the same level when you pull up the fader, or hit 1 @ FULL.

Or with a proper desk, proportional to the pre-set patch level and the channel level. That said, I too think the question and subsequent amplifications are as clear as mud...

Huh? I thought my explanation was crystal there, Andrew... <scratches head> ;)

[burgesg]

Thanks everyone

[Just Some Bloke]

Just to add, for the sake of completeness, that there are two diffrent types of patching: hard patching and soft patching. Hard and soft refer to hardware and software.

 

Hard patching is taking a 15A/16A plug and physically putting it into a dimmer's 15A/16A socket. Thus you'd patch a plug with, say, 6 on it (corrsponding to socket 6 at the end where the lantern is plugged in) into dimmer 1 for instance.

 

Soft patching is saying "yes I know I patched it into channel 1 but I now want to control it from channel 25 on the desk." So you tell the desk that when you bring up channel 25 on the desk it actually controls dimmer 1.

 

Thus you can plug things in whereever is easiest at the time, then control them from whatever desk channel you want.

 

Hope that helps.

[AndrewR]

is it me is the OP just asking why the desk doesn't know the difference between one DMX channel and another?

 

I'm guessing that it just a matter of:

 

its very handy if the other channel has a scroller or WHY, not a dimmer on it. Just a weird and not very helpful oddity otherwise. (unless you have run out of channels but have lots of free attributes on a strand)

 

Also handy if you for some reason want to run dimmers in LTP.

say if you are mad or something.

but a good question =)

[Tomo]

I think you may mean the idea of assigning 'intelligent' or 'moving light' attributes/parameters to an existing desk channel.

 

On a Strand 500 series, moving light attributes are considered 'point channels' - so channel 1.1 thru 1.99 would be various attributes or parameters on the moving light such as pan, tilt, colour, gobo etc.

 

On a Congo, there's no conceptual difference between moving lights and dimmers, so you can assign moving light attributes to a desk channel as well as the intensity DMX channel.

 

You are able to patch the dimmer component of the desk channel anywhere you like.

 

This means that with scrollers or (eg) VL5 fixtures, where you have an 'intelligent' component stuck on the front of a 'normal' dimmer, you can simply select the desk channle and have control of both the dimmer AND the moving-light attributes on your encoders.

 

Without this feature you would have to patch the dimmer and scroller to different channels, and remember that scroller 101 is on the front of dimmer 1 (for example).

Which may lead to confusion...