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    Stuart Sampson
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This is a thought that applies to all consoles - Patching a multicell as a virtual moving light

Patching a batten or ‘rail’ fixture to make use of all its capabilities can only be done by creating individual colour mixing channels for each cell, which can be very greedy if channels are limited in some way. My thought is generic conversion software to patch the batten as a single virtual moving light channel and create effects on it as non-intensity parameters. For instance Pan could govern the position an intensity beam along the batten with Tilt determining the width of the beam. Certain intensity and colour pattern effects could be achieved with Gobos, all under much closer control than the ‘Macro’ choice offered by some battens using a reduced DMX count.

  • The thing is you'd need the fixture to have those features as the number of DMX channels used is determined by the fixture not the software driving it. 

    The only other way is to persuade someone to make a "channel saver box" that could take DMX in from a console eg pan and tilt and turn it into a load more DMX channels that would connect to the fixture.  But I suspect if anyone made one they'd charge money for it and it might then be cheaper and more flexibe to just buy the licence for the extra channels on the desk. 

    ETC did double the channel count at the low end recently so if you had a 512 Nomad it became a 1024 Nomad. 

  • in reply to Mike A

    It’s not the number of DMX channels to be saved, it’s the device count. As I say, it is a ‘console’ agnostic suggestion, so might be more relevant to consoles whose device count might be limited, but even on a high-end console it would be good to reduce the device count to reduce congestion on magic sheets, direct selects etc,, and perhaps make some effects easier to programme.

  • in reply to Stuart Sampson

    ok I understand that its console agnostic but does have to be implemented in the console. 

    On a console like EOS the licence limits are dmx chanels rather than fixture count anyway.

    Also with multicelll support on EOS it can appear as a single fixture and you can apply effects across the cells if you want but also command it as a single thing ie chan 1 at full makes of all it come on chan 1.5 out kills cell 5 etc.

    So possibly they've already implemented (most of) your idea :)

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