DMX gear what do I need to make this work

I'm new to dmx lighting and i don't know what to buy. We don't have a lot of money to mess with so I need to find some realitivley cheap options we have a Element lighting console and i know that it's dmx capable but I was wonder if I want to be able to program each moving light individually would it work to get a dmx splitter and hook it up to the console and then connect the dmx splitter to the lights using the individual dmx transmitters plugged into the splitter and recievers plugged into the lights them self ? Any help would be great (were a school auditorium with an extremely tight budget)

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  • A few comments

    When you say dmx transmitters and receivers are you talking about wireless devices as you probably want to avoid wireless if you are going to do much with the moving lights - they can be a bit laggy and so most people would recommend using a cable run.  (If you do decide to wireless then you would normally only need one DMX transmitter as they usually support multiple receivers)

    DMX lets you chain the devices together so you'd only really need one cable to the first moving light and its DMX out socket then is connected to the next ones DMX in socket.  So splitters only need to be used if the chain gets too long or its just awkard to get from the out of one chain of lights to the next one or for resilence splitting the runs up.

    Probably one of the main questions is do you have enough DMX addresses available,  moving lights typically use from a minimum of 14 addresses each and a DMX universe is only 512 addresses.   So you may need to have a separate universe (think of it as a separate set of DMX cables)  to run them on - that's not an issue as the console can support lots of universes although you may need something to actually make the connection.

    Probably to help much more we need to know a bit more about the current setup and the moving lights you want to control. 

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  • A few comments

    When you say dmx transmitters and receivers are you talking about wireless devices as you probably want to avoid wireless if you are going to do much with the moving lights - they can be a bit laggy and so most people would recommend using a cable run.  (If you do decide to wireless then you would normally only need one DMX transmitter as they usually support multiple receivers)

    DMX lets you chain the devices together so you'd only really need one cable to the first moving light and its DMX out socket then is connected to the next ones DMX in socket.  So splitters only need to be used if the chain gets too long or its just awkard to get from the out of one chain of lights to the next one or for resilence splitting the runs up.

    Probably one of the main questions is do you have enough DMX addresses available,  moving lights typically use from a minimum of 14 addresses each and a DMX universe is only 512 addresses.   So you may need to have a separate universe (think of it as a separate set of DMX cables)  to run them on - that's not an issue as the console can support lots of universes although you may need something to actually make the connection.

    Probably to help much more we need to know a bit more about the current setup and the moving lights you want to control. 

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