ML Patching 101

Oh dear. I'm sure I have asked before but (!)

Just getting around to practically patching an ADJ Encore Ellipse 1000 and chose the 11 channel (Parameter whatever) mode. Put simple dimmers on 1 thru 10 and then pointed my "ADJ Encore Ellipse 1000" to start at 11. Excellent. In the old days I would have used faders 11 thru 22 to control the Encore's individual channels (like red, green . . . ). Now, leaving the patch screen I bring up "Live Summary" and at this point run slap bang into a concept wall!

Chans 1 thru 10 are across the top look good. Underneath is CH 11 (Grayed out) and to its right are 12 cells of info (why 12 not 11. Let's leave this for now)

The Problem; Underneath the CH 11 row is a regular table. But it starts with CH 12 at the top left !!! Oyeeee! That CH 12 can't really be pointing to DMX address 12 can it? Wouldn't that override the 2nd parameter in my Encore patch? Clearly the lamp WANTS data from CHANS 11 thru 22 but why is my table showing CHAN 12 available (presumably for other use)?

And if it doesn't GOTO DMX 12 - where the heck does it go? I know I am missing something here. Please make me happy again.

Parents
  • Robert452 said:
    Underneath is CH 11 (Grayed out) and to its right are 12 cells of info (why 12 not 11. Let's leave this for now)

    If a light doesn't have a DMX slot for intensity, Eos adds a virtual intensity parameter.

    In the picture above, if you want the light to be at 50% intensity, you could do "red 50 green 50 blue 50 white 50 enter" OR just type [At] 50 [enter] and that would use the channel's virtual intensity to dim all the colors in the light. The red, green, blue, and white values in the table stay the same but they are multiplied by 50% to produce the actual DMX output.

  • Oh, OK. I've pasted this in my "toDo" list. There are quite a lot of ML techniques I need to get too. I call anything that takes up more than one DMX512 channel a "ML" - though some people call them MH (Moving Head) even if they're not!
  • It's called a Moving Light control because Moving Lights pre-date modern LED colour mixing.
    So even though the feature is mostly used for colour mixing now, the name has stuck.

    Also... You're still speaking about a single light source with multiple parameters. That's not what "Multi-Cell" means.
  • Oh right - was referring to multi cell line in the display. My Bad! I think I was told a Multicell fixture is one that has more then one DMX address by virtue of a optional add on. e.g. a single channel ellipsoid might have an optional motorized GoBo - thus the 'put together' package has two DMX addresses and is referred to as multicell? Right?

    Back to the patching a ML. An odd thing has happened. On my first try I patched a single 11 channel device at 11 and saw the Chan numbers and their Address to the right. The ML at 11 gave an address of '11-21' which was good. But, when trying again the ML address showed up empty. All the rest are as expected. I want to get back to Mike's original display and see the 11-21 in the address column.
  • For info multicell is where you have several individually controllable RGB Leds in a fixture, sometimes you want to command the whole fixture to an intensity or colour but sometimes you want to command a single LED in the fixture. (Explicit multicell support only came in in 2.7 before that you had to patch them as separate fixtures which was a bit untidy especially if there was a common pan/tilt as they were cells in a single moving head)

    Your "single channel ellipsoid might have an optional motorized GoBo - thus the 'put together' package" is a multi part, where as you say two separate DMX ranges are pulled together into a single composite fixture.

    Not sure what you are doing with the patching but if you just in patch screen type 11 @ nn where nn is the address you want it will patch it or tell you you've overlapped addresses. The only other thing I can think you might have done is toggled the display into address rather than fxture display by pressing the format button.
  • Thank you for going over the multicell v multi part. Yep, the patching thing is more difficult to describe then it appears . However, your advice to try [Format] did bring things back and I just found the [Attributes] button! I really need to practice, practice, practice. Still waiting the new board and director wants it running for Mary Poppins in 4 weeks! (may end up an unhappy director - the Element has a heavy back order out of ETC)
Reply
  • Thank you for going over the multicell v multi part. Yep, the patching thing is more difficult to describe then it appears . However, your advice to try [Format] did bring things back and I just found the [Attributes] button! I really need to practice, practice, practice. Still waiting the new board and director wants it running for Mary Poppins in 4 weeks! (may end up an unhappy director - the Element has a heavy back order out of ETC)
Children
Related