Patch: Who's the boss? Show file, Simulator output, RDM discovery?

Community theater environment.  I was asked to set up rented lighting in a local school where the installed equipment includes resistance dimmers and overhead incandescent lamps with 3-color roundels, I.e. old stuff, hence the need for rental equipment, consisting of a ColorSource  20 and 10 Prolights ECL Profile FS RGBL fixtures, to be mounted on two floor-standing poles.  I'll have one evening, with muscular help, to set up the hardware, so I'm trying to do as much as possible before it arrives, including using the Simulator to set up a patch and some  playbacks for an operator who, like me, has never seen this equipment before and will have minimal time to learn.  The fund-raising performance will run 3 days, then vanish into history.  I have no experience with these fixtures, the CoilorSource 20, or RDM, though I've done a LOT of reading and watching of videos over the last few days.

In the Simulator I set up a patch for the 10 lights in 5CHRBGL mode, with a starting DMX address of 10 and spacing of 10 channels and got the expected results: Ch1 got DMX addresses 10-14, with 15-19 unpatched, Ch2 got 20-24, etc.

But DMX starting addresses can also be set at the fixture.  Does this mean I'll have to set a matching DMX first-address at each fixture?  I think Yes, which will take precious time.  But what about using RDM?

Since I don't have access to the actual fixtures, I can' t experiment with RDM discovery and patch, so I'll have to consider the possibilities

Let's assume that each fixture from the rental shop will have a starting DMX address of 1 (or perhaps a random address 1-512).  Will RDM replace that with the next available DMX address when the fixture is discovered, accounting for the 5-channel mode, based on my manual patch (and loosing the requested spacing)?. OR might RDM first look at what I manually put into the show file (or imported from Simulator output) and use that data to obtain mode and starting address for each fixture that matches my Manufacturer/Model entries?  Nowhere did I find documentation on "setting up your fixture to use RDM", my hope being that the answer is "you don't need to do anything; the magic will happen."

This will be vanilla DMX/RDM; no splitters, protocol changes, wireless, etc.

Some explicit questions here, along with lots of implied ones.  I'll appreciate help from anyone who can help with answers or pointers to documentation (hopefully shorter than the RDM Specification!).  Load-in is 17 Oct 2022.

Chris Beall

  • Hi Chris,

    When using ColorSource Console you can patch fixtures like you have for pre-programming (like you are doing).  Then when you your fixtures connected to the console you can reconfigure the fixtures via RDM.  From the ColorSource console you can change the mode and address of the fixture, then patch it to the same channel, then Remove the original instance of the fixture you used to program with.  This "transfers" the pre-programming data to the RDM fixture.

  • Hi Seth,

    OK, I get the idea.  Just one detail.  After I change the mode and address of the fixture, the only thing that distinguishes my original patch entry from the RDM one is the channel number.  If I then change the RDM channel number to match the existing one, the two patch entries appear identical.  At that point, does it matter which one I delete to resolve the duplication?   (I suspect not, butt it depends on how the software works.)

    (I found one place where it matters.  The RDM patch creates a new channel box on the layout display, in the upper left corner .  If you remove the original instance (which seems to always appear above the new one in the list when you patch the channel to match), you'll have to position the new box on the layout.)  Found on the Simulator.

  • You can technically delete either one.  In Patch, the RDM one will be in yellow font while the manually created one will be in white font.  If you delete the RDM one then it may pop back up after a reboot and warn you of duplicate addresses.  As you noted it will create a second channel tile, so if you have created a custom layout this may require some tweaking there if you delete the manual patch and keep the RDM patch.

  • Thank you.  I think that clarifies it.  I've realized that what I was doing in the simulator did not exactly match what I expect to do in the field.  Because I have no actual fixtures yet, I was attempting to simulate a fixture 'discovered' by RDM by adding a new device, changing its assigned channel to 0, then, after following your instructions, merging it with an existing manual patch, in essence merging two different manual patches.  That does not result in any transfer of programming that I could detect (I used just color values), but instead reverted the merged channel to the home value (all emitters at 255).

    So I will wait a few more days and retry using RDM with actual hardware.

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