Moving lights

[Andy!]

Hey, can someone explain to me how you work the moving lights is there like a dial or joystick thing on the desk or do you type in like angles for it to go to. And if you could give me some links to different types of moving lights that would be most appreciated.

[sam.henderson]

Andy,

 

Controll of moving lights varies between desk to desk. On some desk you can use rotary wheels (like on the frog series), on some you can use graphics tablets (like on the pearl) and on others you can use a joystick or trackerball.

It is uncommen for you to input the angles on a desk however the angles (pan,tilt etc.) will be displayed for you (normaly).

 

Have a look at these pages for a look at different boards with moving light capabilities;

 

Zero 88 - Makers of the Frog Series

 

Pulsar

 

Avolites

 

These are some well known moving light manufacturers;

 

Martin

 

Clay Paky

 

High End Lighting

 

Vari Lights

 

 

Also visit A Guide to Moving Lights

 

Regards,

 

Sam Orme

[sam.henderson]

Just to add another controll desk manufacturer;

 

FLYING PIG SYSTEMS

 

Sorry forgot to put it in last post,

 

Sam

[SceneMaster]

Don't forget that you can use standard channel sliders to control moving heads as long as the desk is LTP(Last takes priority). If you are a small school or do not have much of a budget for a show try hiring budget desks which are movers desks but without special interfaces such as LSC's AXIOM (no longer made) and how about some miniMACS for the actual lights if you really don't have a massive budget. I use two plus an AXIOM for a show not too long ago (ok they weren’t the best but for a school with no light equipment apart from 30 year old cables in the roof, a crap ageing pulsar 6ch pack + desk and 4 condemned floods I think they kicked ass. :D

[kalmatthew]

Don't forget that you can use standard channel sliders to control moving heads as long as the desk is LTP(Last takes priority).

The desk does not need to be LTP, HTP (Highes Takes Priority) will work as well just it is a little harder to handle.

[Ike]

Moving lights are almost always controlled via the USITT DMX512 protocol. This protocol allows for 512 channels, each of which can be at any integer value between 0 and 255.

 

A dimmer channel powering a lamp is controlled by a single channel on the desk however a moving light is controlled by many. Often there will be two or three for colour, two for movement and more for things like shutters, gobos, iris, strobe etc

 

One of the channels controlling movement controls pan and the other controls tilt.

 

On older desks and others not designed for the use of moving lights you simply set these values as you would any others. Usually this is done using faders or wheels.

 

On newer desks designed to control movers the desk often allows the use of roller balls, joysticks or a graphics tablet as well as still supporting the use of wheels and faders.

 

If you want to put numeric values in you can put them in as the actual value (between 0 and 255) or more commonly as a percentage. It is incredibly rare to input angles into a desk as these would vary depending on how the lantern is rigged as well as the fact that angles in degrees are not particularly nice to work with IMHO percentages are much nicer (or maybe gradians :D).

 

Ike

[Potassium Neuf]

Some of the larger moving lights often use 16 bit control for pan and tilt, ie the value is made up from two DMX channels, giving a value in the range 0 - 65535.

 

Moving light desks (eg Fat Frog) can handle this quite happily but if you were controlling your fixture from manual faders, you would need to check the DMX channel assignments to dtermine which channels the coarse and fine controls were on as they are NOT always on contiguous channels :D