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    SmartfadeML User
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Question about Manipulating Patches

Hello all,

I use the Smartfade ML.

A few months ago I came here wondering about how to use patches effectively, and was able to figure this out.  Unfortunately, as other people use my board, at some point in the past weeks some things changed which I was not aware could change.

Previously, I had roughly 20 individual lights patched each to their own channel (on Int A).  I did this manually using each dmx input channel using the patch feature, found in the main menu.  Recently I logged onto the board to see that each dmx input had changed - multiple lights were patched to one channel on Int A, so I figured I would simply repatch them correctly - only to find that the actual dmx input had changed, so that multiple lights are on each input.

Is this something that can be changed from the board or can this only be changed based on how things are wired?  No one knows who changed this so I'm not sure when or why this happened but it seems incredibly unlikely that there was a hardware change somewhere.

Any help would be appreciated - let me know if that was not clear enough.

Thanks so much!

  • in reply to SmartfadeML User

    Hi there -

    SmartFade and SmartFade ML patch DMX addresses to control channels within the console - this is known as a "soft patch". The channel is a "name" you use to collect individual or multiple addresses. Those addresses may correspond to individual dimmers or collectively to the parameters of a moving light. Patches can be fluid things, with users changing them as the show situation requires. If you want to have a basic patch you can return to, I highly recommend making a show and then saving that to an SD card. However, it also sounds like your dimmers have been connected to different lights since you made your first patch. This is known as the "hard patch" and yes, it involves what lights are plugged into which outlets. You should probably determine that the fixtures in your venue are connected to the dimmers you want, then go ahead and sort out the soft patch after that. In a simple system, you may want to leave the soft patch in a 1-to-1 configuration, where the channel number is the same as the dimmer number. As soon as you want to gang multiple dimmers together, or if your dimmer setup doesn't make perfect sense numerically (like you have some small capacity dimmers and others that can control more lights at the same time), you may want to rethink your soft patch so that the numbers make sense for you. There is no right or wrong way.

    I hope this helps, and I'm sorry for the delay. :-)

    Thanks -

    Sarah

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