Advice for Music Festival Setup

[The Paranormal Unicorn]

In your OP you say you have 80+ intelligent lighting fixtures... are you controlling these or is somebody else controlling them? And the video - is that you? Or multiple people?

 

30 of the fixtures will definitely be controlled by me. As for the rest, I suppose I could control them, though I think that it is a better idea to leave this to someone with more experience. I've only used RGB clusters, stripes and spots, I don't have experience with moving heads and would feel safer with someone controlling them who has had experience.As for the video, there will be 2 visiting VJs per day. They will play their own content with whatever kit they bring with them (often just a PC with Resolume or Modul8, though some have more intricate analog setups). So no synchronization between the LED wall and anything else is needed. Thank you top-cat for taking the time for those illustrations, I've attached something a bit closer to what I'm thinking of here. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have certain lighting cues that I can control (for example, if my software is creating a strobe effect, that I could override whatever it is the lighting is currently doing and have the fixtures strobe as well). I don't know if this is unrealistic or overly complicated though (doens't sACN have some sort of embedded priority information?).

 

 

Why do you need to use a lighting console?

 

What purpose do you envisage it having? It sounds to me like you're running all the control from your own systems, which are outputting DMX - why does it need to go anywhere near a lighting console?

 

As I said above, I have no experience with moving heads and am not sure if I would be capable of controlling them. I've also never controlled this many devices at once and don't know if I would be up to the task. And as to for vidiot thing, I was not aware. I work in Austria and have never heard that term here before. The more you know!Thank you so much for your advice already, quite a few things have been cleared up for me already.

[kerry davies]

Vidiots, humheads, sparkies and lampies are fine as in-house joshing around.

 

A real insult would have been to call you a drummer.

[dbuckley]

My suggestion would be to have the visiting lightist be presented with something familiar and common in the world of busked light, so probably an Avo desk, and let him roam free over the movers and stuff. Someone will have to set the desk up in advance so that all the fixtures are configured in, and pallettes built.

 

I'd further suggest you build some stuff in Max to listen to DMX, and have some patching that "pretends" (see below) to be one or more common "fixtures", and that this "fixture" is configured up like the other real fixtures on the lighting console.

 

The lighting op will then simply include your "stuff" as though it were just another mover(s), and then when he (for example) selects all movers to go red and do circles then you'll get that information through your virtual fixture as DMX values, and you can act upon that to "influence" your displays. Of course, how you set the patch up will determine how much influence you care to take from the lighting desk, and as you know Max then you'll know its just a matter of receiving the data, and applying variable multipliers and offsets to convert what you get to what you want. And maybe using some fader surface you can easily manipulate those multipliers and offsets in real time so you can drift from being a slave of the lights to be independent of them, and all shades in-between.

 

The advantage of this approach is that its easy to do, and it lets the lighting folks just "do lighting".

 

The reason I recommend that you pretend to be one or more real fixtures is that if you choose to be (say) a MAC250, then the channel layout for that is well known, so you can build it in the Max patch in advance, and test and tune it with any old bit of lighting software, for example, the aforementioned Chamsys. And you'll know that the (hired?) desk will already have that fixture in it (a "personality") so no-one has to go writing custom personalities on the day to match what you've set up in the abstract.

 

Fascinating project, keep us posted!