This post falls under several catagories so I decided to put it in the general Freestyler section and just waffle on.
Firstly it goes without saying that
. I was looking for a low cost lighting solution as I was running a talent show for charity (so the less money on bits, the more money went to the charity) and to find something this well featured that is freeware is amazing.Anyhoo, I did however have a major problem on my first usage that I couldn't fathom. As the night wore on, the system started responding less and less to the sequences. First one of the lights, failed to respond, then two, until finally I had to abandon the sequences and work it manually (wow, was that a panic laden night!). No idea why as all of the lights worked fine if you controlled them directly, they just didn't respond to the set sequences.
Could this be a bug or was I doing a Noob mistake somewhere?
The second and third runs went a lot better, but I didn't have any sequences per se, because these were disco type events it was sound to light all the way. Couple of things of note though.
1) My Martin RobocolourIIXs (four unit model) would only sound to light on 2 of the 4 lights, the other two didn't react. Maybe that's because of the way the fixture is made, with two lights being controlled as Gobos rather than colours...
I wonder if you could create them as individual lights (with the shutter on the first fixture) as a workaround?
2) The gain on the sound to light module kept setting itself too low to hear the beat. (I think this is due to it getting a db in that's louder than normal now and then). But as long as I monitored it and put it up if it dropped this wasn't a problem.
Anyhoo, apart from these probs (the first one sounds like a biggie but I bet it's something I'm doing. I'm a computer person not a lighting one) the software works like a dream. Most impressed was I.
Oh couple of things while I remember.
1) Is there a way to put the units into pre-heat through the S/W? My current method is to manually set each unit to an appropriate level manually (unfortunately my dimmers are el cheapo soundlab ones so no pre-heat there). I was wondering if having the ability to set minimum levels on channels would be a good idea. So even hitting blackout would take the channel to say 60 (so the par can was too low powered to be visible, but still enough to keep the bulbs warm).
2) It'd be really great if the DMX 400 could take an odd number of channels, and/or you could add channels to it rather than doing "4 starting at channel 19". Well the greatest thing would be for the DMX400 to be a virtual fixture so you could have more than one. but lets not go mad here!
Well, that's my waffling done. As you can see it was a bit all over the place (sort of like me really!)
I'm putting on another show in july that will need sequences again so expect to see lots of "How do you?" type questions heading your way!
See you around the net...