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    mplighting
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How to create a strobe effect?

I have a bunch of LED fixtures (Altman Pheonix 3.5 Profile) that do not have a shutter strobe. I thought I could create an effect in eos to replicate a strobe but I'm struggling.

What I tried was a linear effect, and then I drew a square sine wave with a short on time and a long off time. Made the cycle small, like 0.2 and scale at 100. I've tried loads of cycle time and scale combinations but still can't get it to look like a strobe.

The lights do flash on and off, but it doesn't look anything like a strobe. More like a flicker; hard to describe. Does anyone have this effect already and could share the waveform? Ideally I'd like a linear effect so I can apply it to any of our fixtures that don't have a shutter strobe, but if it needs to be a step/absolute effect so be it.

And I'm still very new to EOS and effects in general.

thanks

p.s. I'm using an ion xe.

  • 0

    Make a step based effect, this should work. But don't forget about the DMX timing , this can cause problems on hand made strobe effects.

  • 0 in reply to sstaub

    By DMX timing you mean a delay it takes for the DMX signal to be sent and processed by the lights or something else? Is this something you can take into account somehow, or just live with it?

    For the step-based effect would you use two steps, one to to turn it on and one to turn it off, or is it just one, where you specify the correct STEP, IN, DWELL, DECAY times.

    Based on the attached picture, I would think I might only need 1 step, with a STEP time of 1 second, an IN time of 0, DWELL of 0.5, and DECAY of 0, which would be a half on/off square wave?

  • +1

    Not only relative effects (and linear is one of this family of effects), but also absolute effects are independent of a predetermined channel selection. It would work on any fixture that has the parameter used in the effect.

    it could look something like this:

    By setting Time to 0 you will get a square waveform, Dwell is the time for how long you want to stay at that level.

    You can leave the Params column empty, it will default to Intens if you don't use it on a different parameter at the time of starting it.

    One of the limitations (which I think is what sstaub said) is that the DMX protocol (and the network protocols as well) only send a certain amount of values per second. That means the very fast speeds will not be possible. In your example with a linear effect with a cycle of 0.2 you will only get around 9 DMX values sent, assuming your system uses maximum DMX speed. So depending on the curve you drew some values might now have been sent because the value got changed again before it could be sent.

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