Comments on: LED Light Control – DMX Controllers for LED Stage Lighting

By: David

David — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 10:50:36 +0000

Up until now, I have played my own music shows using 40 par 56s and six scans. I ran my lighting control from 40 MIDI triggered 300w dimmers allowing me to perform with a cheap but sophisticated looking light show in complete syncronisation to the music.
Wishing to update, I have just purchased 6 LED stage floods, each with 24 3w LEDs. These have several DMX settings, the largest being 27ch (24 individual faders for the LEDs, 1 master fader, 1 strobe and one internal program selector).
My problem is finding a desk (with MIDI) which will allow me a minimum of 114 channels of DMX (4@15ch 2@27ch) to be recalled with some form of HTP crossfade facility. I am currently trying a unit which offers 480ch of DMX and many functions – offering individual control of up to 20 heads, but it does not seem to have this basic function as an option even though I can label each fader as a “Dimmer”.

Surely there must be a desk out there which can handle my needs without costing thousands. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:52:51 +0000

Don’t forget you can use most LED PAR units in stand alone mode and you wouldn’t need a desk then. Might be worth looking at that first – you might save a lot of money. You could also look at PC based control with a USB/DMX dongle – I’ve never used it and lots of people don’t like the reliability issues associated with that but you never know – might be worth looking at

Matt

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:18:40 +0000

Cheers, Matt. If you or anybody else have other suggestions, please let me know. Thanks in advance, Martin

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:38:07 +0000

Hi Martin,

It sounds like that controller would be great for your purposes. If it controllers 12 fixtures and you are buying 16 then you will need to pair some of your LED PAR64s but then that’s fairly normal anyway. To pair them up just set the DMX start addresses as the same for two fixtures. It’s worth noting, before you buy your DMX cables that the article you’ve linked to seems to imply that the output is 3 pin DMX and not the standard five pin. It’s worth checking what your LED units have too – if they are all 3 pin then you obviously don’t want to buy 5 pin cables. If you find that you have a mix of 5 pin and 3 pin then you need to find some converters (they’re very cheap) – I’d recommend tails rather than barrels if you have the choice – the barrels tend to be quite fragile.

Good luck with it all!

Matt

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:49:17 +0000

Hi,
I’m a newbie in stagelighting. But our band (7) want to buy our own lighting kit, so that we only had to rent some special fixtures if needed. As a start we thought about 16 par64 cans LED, mounted on 4 tripods with t-bars. The question is about controlling them. We thought about a cheap Stairville dmx-master I (http://www.thomann.de/gb/stairville_dmxmaster_i.htm), which is acutally made to controll moving lights. It can controll 12 fixtures with 16 dmx-channels each. Do you think it’s worth trying this controller for a start? Another problem I see is, that it doesn’t have any main sliders. Probably I just should order it and give it a try…
Thanks in advance for any information you have,
Martin

By: Owen

Owen — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:03:00 +0000

In reference to all those with Frogs – I’ve found the easiest way to control large numbers of LED ParCans or similar is to create your own fixture profiles using their Fixture Editor. This allows you to do all kinds of weird stuff, such as controlling 4 fixtures from one fixture on the board. Not ideal, but saves lots of faders.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:14:13 +0000

As usual – very helpful. Have to admit I’d have been lost with out OSL over the past few months! Don’t suppose you know if IPA will do any harm if I clean a greasy projector lens with it?!

Matt

By: Rob Sayer

Rob Sayer — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:29:29 +0000

Matt – You can use the Frog “dimmer” channels (faders – not actual dimmers) to control LED fixtures but remember that each LED unit uses at least 3 dmx channels so can use up faders.

You could alternatively use the intelligent fixture controls (as you say, up to twelve different DMX start addresses).

Either way, don’t forget that you can save faders or fixtures by setting multiple LED units to the same DMX start address and controlling them in unison. Just work out which ones you can “pair up” and still have an acceptable level of control flexibility. Using this method, you could control all your dimmers, 6 Mac250s and still have 6 ways of LED control with an whole load of LED fixtures connected.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:27:35 +0000

I am looking at getting hold of a Zero88 Fat Frog desk quite soon and some of the team want to introduce some LED Fixtures to our arsenal. Can anyone tell me if the LED fixtures will go on my normal dimmers or are they controlled from the part of the desk that is used for intelligent lights? It’s important because we want to get some MAC250s in the near future and the Fat Frog only runs 12 intelligent lights – if LEDs and MACs all count as intelligent then we need a bigger lighting console.

Thanks

Matt

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:07:03 +0000

Hi Nick

Setting up your LED fixtures with the ETC Express is probably easiest if you patch the LED DMX channels as dimmers as suggested here. You need to know:
How many spare channels you have on the desk.
How many DMX channels the LED fixtures use.
Which channels you need to adjust for Red, Green, Blue and possible the Dimmer Channel.

The ETC console has a playback stack and submasters but for CABARET, I assume that you will record your scenes in a stack of memories and the replay them during the show. When recording your scenes, just add in the LED fixtures where you need them and save them with the other dimmer settings.