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