Simple Lighting Control
The number of times I’ve had clients ask for a super simple lighting control, my answer is always “you got it!…kind of” because most of the time what is desired and what can be easily delivered are two very different things.
The new solution that I’ve found and been able to implement doesn’t break the bank and is incredibly simple…kind of. I was super clear to the client that the presets would be set ahead of time and changing them is not an easy task and this is where the “easy” lighting solution becomes a bot more complicated.
To accomplish the basic and cost effective lighting solution, it takes a very basic concept of DMX channel values. In the case of the light fixtures used, channel 1 is red, 2 is green, 3 is blue, 4 is white, 5 is amber and 6 is UV. Setting the value in the correct string, times the number of fixtures and channels gets you a very basic control of the LED lights.
Companion is an incredibly powerful piece of software that can control hundreds (i’m pretty sure anyway) of AV peripherals. It also has a plug in for Art-Net, a network based lighting protocol. This Art-Net plug in with an Art-Net/DMX interface and now we can control a number of fixtures.
When it’s a single fixture, it’s not that bad to come up with your control. if we want a magenta color with the color numbers listed above, it looks like [1, 255; 2, 0; 3, 255; 4, 0; 5, 0; 6, 0]. (because the values are based on a 0-255 system, 255 = 100%)
But what about 16 fixtures, times 6 channels each, means the text string, including spaces and punctuation, is a possible 864 characters in a string. And if the spacing and punctuation aren’t exactly right, a fixture may not be reacting correctly.
thankfully I have a friend who is a spread sheet guru and let me know about a concatenate function that will take text from cells and put it in a single cell. so once I make the ridiculously long “formula” I can copy the spread sheet and have presets made so much faster. [=A2&”, “&B2&”; “&A3&”, “&B3&”; “&A4&”, “&B4&”; “&A5&”, “&B5&”; “&A6&”, “&B6&”; “&A7&”, “&B7&”;] etc.
