Moving Lights with ETC Express

[vinntec]

Hi all. I will be lighting a musical at a venue with an ETC Express 48/96 as its main desk for 96 conventional dimmers. I would like to consider using moving lights, scrollers, and possibly LEDs as part of the design but haven't tried using an ETC Express for such things in the past. So the question is a simple one - could the ETC Express realistically support a mixture of conventionals and automation, or should I be seriously considering bringing another desk into play for these?

Thanks - Peter Vincent, UK

[stevendrums24]

Hi all. I will be lighting a musical at a venue with an ETC Express 48/96 as its main desk for 96 conventional dimmers. I would like to consider using moving lights, scrollers, and possibly LEDs as part of the design but haven't tried using an ETC Express for such things in the past. So the question is a simple one - could the ETC Express realistically support a mixture of conventionals and automation, or should I be seriously considering bringing another desk into play for these?

Thanks - Peter Vincent, UK

 

 

If you don't want a very big headache then bring in another desk. The express is great for generics but and absolute pain for movers. Just have a good read of the manual and that will give you a good idea what it is like.

 

Regards

 

Steve

[ryandell]

Hi Peter,

 

PM Sent.

 

Ryan

[drsound]

I've done it but it was a massive ball-ache. I put four Mac 250 Entours and a load of LED pars onto one last year. I didn't have personality files for them and it doesn't seem to allow you to edit or create them on the desk (or at least not very easily, I really didn't have time to play). Ended up just having to programme 'Old Skool' by entering DMX values directly to create a load of scenes and then busk it. It worked fairly well but it took me a couple of hours to programme what would have taken about 15 minutes on a more suitable desk.

 

Still, it was character building.

[Wol]

It can support movers without too much faff, and I've used some before on it. Can support focus points so things like gobos and colours can be preprogrammed as indexes fairly easily and isn't too hard to program. Personalities have to be created offline and then loaded onto the desk via floppy disk though.

 

The trouble is that theres only 96 channels of control. For example, if you had four movers at 10 channels each, and 8 LED fixtures at the minimum of 3 channels each, youve just used 64 channels of 96! Depends how much kit you're trying to control and how much you can double stuff up.

[drsound]

I can't remember the last time I bought a new PC with a floppy drive in it. Can you even buy a laptop with an internal floppy these days? I just hope my old knackered IBM holds out for a few more years.

 

I'm going to buy shares in a company that make USB floppy drives, have you seen the price of them?

[tokm]

OT I know.. but could be helpful to others in the future when dealing with older desks that still use floppy for showfiles & fixture personalities.

 

Ebay.. USB Floppy drives. Fair few on there for well less than £10. Stuff like this I don't mind if it comes from Hong Kong..

 

T

[niclights]

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148896

[vinntec]

As a follow on to my original post, I have been trying to define likely ML into the Express 48/96 offline editor and whatever I do it insists in using only channels 1 to 192 which don't go very with 96 real dimmers using half of them before I start. However the blurb seems to imply I can make use of 1024 DMX channels. If I really have only 96 channels available for automation (this is a musical) then its a no brainer and I need to bring another desk in - but would appreciate help from anyone who knows how to unlock the extra channels, if its possible.

Peter Vincent, UK

[Wol]

As far as my experience of that desk for the last 4 years has got me: the soft patch on the desk can support up to DMX addresses of 1 to 512 on universe 1 and 2 just not individually control them. You can patch any number of DMX addresses onto the 96 internal channels on the desk. E.g. you could have channel 1 controlling DMX 1-1, 1-45, 2-345, 2-510, channel 2 controlling DMX 1-2, 1-34 , and so forth, but you can only get up to channel 96. So there are only 96 different channel values you can have, but each can control whichever DMX channels you need. Its not an "unlockable" thing.

 

Remember not to mix up DMX channels and channels. They are two different things completely!

[darkwarior]

the soft patch on the desk can support up to DMX addresses of 1 to 512 on universe 1 and 2 just not individually control them.

 

The ETC Express (I use a 72/144) can handle 512 address per universe, but you need to set the start address accordingly. IE: Universe 1 starts 1 (and goes through 512), while Universe 2 starts at 513 (and runs through 1024). The problem becomes addressing. If you wire all your intelligent fixtures on universe 2, the first fixture's physical address (at the unit) would be 1, while at the board it would be 513.

 

Also, you can increase the number of channels you can control. The problem is you can't control them from the faders on the board, you need to manually change them (CH xx AT yy). I've run my 72/144 with 200 channels, and I'd dump stuff that didn't change much at 145+.

[Tomo]

The Express 48/96 tops out at 192 desk channels - the first 96 can be on the faders, while the remainder are indeed only on the keypad.

 

In the Setup menu you can choose how many channels are enabled - be careful if you reduce this number, as it deletes all cue information about the channels you're removed.

 

The output patch can cover the whole of the two universes.

 

As for the original post, Express does have some support for moving lights, including 'Focus Points' for palette functions, but it's not a console I'd recommend for controlling more than a small number of them.

 

I'd suggest patching RGB LEDs as three dimmers as it has no support for 'virtual' intensities - this way works pretty well, especially if you can spare the faders.

 

For scrollers it's pretty good, but I wouldn't want to control very many moving lights.