Programming Scanners

[Nathanrs93]

Hey,

I have some scanners on my lighting rig and I'm just in the middle of sorting different setups out via 3D easy view at home. I just wanted to ask a quick question in regards to how you program your scanners??

What do you use to program? FX? Shapes?
What sort of cues do you have? Audience Sweep? Random Room Sweep?

I'm finding it hard to program scanners and what sort of cues to use?
Can you help me at all.

Thanks
Nathan

PS
I want different cues for different songs type of thing, i.e slow, crazy, dancy, random, room sweep, audience sweep? I just don't know how to go about programming as the scanners don't work correctly with the shapes, and it never works the I want it to when I use FX. Cheers

[Kings]

There's a few good books floating around (something like the complete guide to intelligent lights) that lists the most popular chases for moving heads/mirrors. Just google things like 'ballyhoo', 'stabs' etc and it should give you a few leads.

[Kings]

Or watch the video on this page (the chase names are a bit cheesy but it should give you some ideas):

http://www.kingsleymatheson.com/lighting-design.html

[Kings]

I created the movement of the ballyhoo myself from scratch (the trick is to making it look more random is to ensure that one of two fixtures don't actually move between steps of the sequence) and the fixtures are geni shivas with rotating gobos, shutter and separate colour wheel (unlike my Dynamos).

[Nathanrs93]

That's a really good video, Kings. I enjoyed watching it thanks I noticed you had more than one scanner type, what brands of scanners you got. You said you got the dynamos? Acme?

That's the scanners I have, plus some VRXs that I need to have a look at repairing. If you could and don't mind you couldn't make up a few cues for dynamos could you Be really greatful

[Kings]

Well to be honest the dynamos have a better inbuilt chase (sound to light) than I've ever been able to create. They look even better if you line them up and engage dip switch 10 on all the odd fixtures (but not the master with the solid green light...make sure you only do it to the 'slaves'). You probably already know this. The other thing is that I program by attribute using sub masters so I 'layer' a couple of movement, colour/gobo, intensity/strobe sequences together to get the look I want using sub masters. The final thing is that I don't know the DMX start address for your scanners so any sequences I create will probably not work with your scanners due to a mismatch in DMX values.

[Nathanrs93]

Yeah, I've found this when I've used them on wedding discos in sound 2 light. But when I've used them in DMX they aren't great at all, but I've made do with what I've been using them for. I didn't think of that with the addresses so they properly would mismatch.

Thanks for your help, Kings. I'll have a play around and see what works best for me.
Nathan