Pan Tilt speed

[Manuel1975]

Hi There,

 

Been working with DMX and lighting for years now but never came to know what this Pan Tilt Speed Parameter thingy does!?

 

Anybody care to enlighten me?

 

Thanks,

 

Manuel

[AfroAlex]

It controls how fast the moving head pans and tilts.

 

Alex.

[niclights]

Uses fixture timing instead of console. The idea is you can get smoother fades internally on a fixture without being restricted by DMX resolution etc. Often you will find timing options on other channels such as colour, beam or intensity. I don't know how often these channels are used - they are more complicated to program than using console functions and not always going to be accurately simulated in visualisers. The only exception might be intensity timing on LED fixtures which sometimes help avoid 'steppy' fades, often at the expense of being able to snap.

[Shez]

Was it partially a hangup left over from the 8 bit days? A head with a pan range of 540 degrees controlled by an 8 bit value will have a resolution of just over 2 degrees per step - a slow pan controlled entirely by the desk is bound to be rather jerky whereas if you let the head deal with it, it'll be much smoother. Is it still useful now that most fixtures have 16 bit control?

[gyro_gearloose]

Letting the fixture handle the pan/tilt speed is probably most useful when busking with moving lights. Lets say you've got a bank of moving heads rigged up stage pointing straight down and you want them to slowly tilt to sweep across the audience, but you want the sweep to be nice and slow. You've got the 'Point at the stage' and the 'Point at the audience' positions recorded on two subs, but with the default (fast as possible) pan/tilt speed recorded on them as well. Hitting either flash button will get the lights to move into position as fast as they can, but you want the lights to take several seconds to move to the 'Point at the audience' position. To do this you'd set the pan/tilt speed in that sub only to something other than the default. So now if you hit the 'Point at the stage' button the lights will move to that position as fast as possible, but when you hit the 'Point at the audience' button the lights will slowly move to that position.

[timsabre]

Letting the fixture handle the pan/tilt speed is probably most useful when busking with moving lights...

 

Most consoles will do this for you nowadays. In the "olden days" it was useful as you say for controllers which would otherwise snap to a new cue.

[gyro_gearloose]

Most consoles will do this for you nowadays.

True, but if your desk can't then its useful to know that the fixtures can.

[Manuel1975]

Great!

 

Thanks for the insight guys!

[numberwrong]

I always thought it was to make things easier on theatre or TV productions where you may only need the lights to move in to position before they are on.

 

I thought slow P/T speed reduced noise. Then you don't have to worry about setting P/T fade times on each cue.

 

Fast P/T for clubs?

[kitlane]

Let's say you have two position palettes, SL and SR. If you 'crossfade' between these positions over, say, 10 seconds the lighting desk will generate the required DMX data to interpolate between the two positions over that time.

 

If you now try to 'snap' between those positions the moving head clearly cannot instantly jump from one position to another but the desk doesn't care. So the mover has to determine for itself how quickly it should move. There may be an advantage (less noise, for example) to limit the speed of that move to something lower than the maximum possible/allowable speed of the pan motor.