Help needed with Moving Lights

[parky27]

Hi all,

 

I am looking to hire for my school 2 X Mac 250's with a Fat frog desk. Obviously the cables will come with it but do I need to hire anything else with it? DMX distribtion (which one)? What Amp socket do I need to power them?

 

Does it work like this-

Moving Light > XLR cable > DMX Distribution > Cable > Lighting Console (Fat Frog)

 

If I follow the manual and various other bits of info and spend a good amount of time, will it be easy enough to programme the moving lights?

 

If you have any advice or places to get info, that would be great!

[prolightdesigner]

Hi.

 

If you've never used moving lights before - good luck. The included manual might tell you how to program the desk, but depending on what you need the movers to do, you may have a difficult and frustrating time. Efficiently programming movers to run sophisticated programs requires much experience.

 

Normally, DMX is run from the desk to the first unit, out to the second, from the second to the third, and so on until you end with a terminator. I've never used a Fat Frog before, but if you're referring to the DMX output, yes, you start there. For only two movers, I don't see much of a need to use other devices in the chain (like a splitter).

 

Not to discourage you, but as many on this forum recommend, if you have little or no experience using movers (and there's no one around to teach you)- don't. For a school application, movers are usually not necessary.

 

-Jeff

[Genus]

I'm sure when you said XLR cable, you mean DMX cable (which is confusingly called the same thing (I think) as the audio stuff.

 

Lighting Desk --> 5 pin DMX cable --> Mover 1 --> more 5 pin ---> Mover 2 with terminator. However if you're using DMX dimmers you'll probably want them in the chain as well.

 

Make sure you address everything right and test it all before any plots/techs.

 

Fortunately, the fat frog is fairly straightforward for movers. However know what you want to do with them first, and then spend some time experimenting and having a go at achieving certain effects.

 

To counter the wisdom present on the board whereby a lot of people will tell you not to bother with them. I say go for it, if you've got the time and the school is willing to stump up the money. It's really hard to get experience with movers, with there being a huge catch 22 problem of employers not hiring people without experience and people with no experience never getting the opportunity to learn.

 

However, strictly speaking, the majority of members who suggest steering away are right, from the point of view of the show, but maybe not the young people desperate to learn how to use this technology.

[HobitLight]

Are they original MAC 250s? If they are, you'll need a 5pin M - 3pin F adapter before going into the first MAC and a 3pin DMX cable between the two MACs because the originals have 3pin XLR connections on them, not 5pin.

[Genus]

Good point HobitLight. However, one would hope that the hire company supplying the kit will supply the correct cabling solution.

[Alexb_01]

Hiya,

 

I was in a pretty identical situation to you for a musical (Wizard of Oz) we did at school a few months ago. We had 12 movers (6 Mac 250 Entour and 6 Wash) connected to a fat frog desk.

 

Like everyone else has said in terms of cabling you usually just put all the lights in a chain and seeing as you only have two it shouldn't be such a big problem cabling-wise.

 

Unfortunately you haven't specified what kind of show/event these are for but I'll give you a few hints and tips I found when programming for our musical with movers:

- It takes a bit of thinking to get all the cues right, thinking about the moving lights moving while dark.

- Read both the manuals for the lights and desk thoroughly! In particular I found it useful to print off the pages from the MAC manuals which have all the various DMX codes on it for the not so obvious functions including turning the lamp on/off, resetting, various different strobe functions, rotating gobo wheels etc.

- I found it easier to programme with the desk downstairs in our theatre (rather than in the tech box suspended from the ceiling) because that way it's easier to get an idea of where the lights actually are - making it easier to control them and efficiently move them to a new position.

 

I can vouch from experience that if you read the manual and read up on the internet (I found http://www.onstagelighting.co.uk had some quite helpful tutorials) then programming movers with the fat frog become pretty easy.

 

Finally, remember to make the most of one of the best features of the desk - FROGGER! Press (I think it was) F1 + F2 and enjoy :)

[Just Some Bloke]

Don't forget that hired Macs often come with 16A plugs so you'll need 13-16 jumpers if you're plugging them into a domestic socket (which will work just fine, BTW). The hire company will almost certainly throw these in free of charge if you let them know you'll need them. If you don't mention it, though, they won't supply them as professional hirers often have 16A distro or 16A non-dim sockets on the rig.

 

Afterthought: also, as you're hiring both the desk and the heads, why not ask the hire company to patch the Macs into the desk for you so fixtures 1 & 2 already come set up as Mac 250s? That's one less job to learn! In fact, if you know the channels you want them patched to you could ask them to do that as well. For example, if your school has 36 dimmers then ask for the Macs to be patched from channel 37. That'll take less than 5 minutes for the hire company, but if you've never done it before, it could take you an hour to work it out.

[parky27]

Thank you very much for your help people!

 

I think I'm just going to go for it because I want the experience with moving lights and I'm lucky enough to be given the opportunity to learn first hand.