Fast console but slow dimmers

[lights11964]

At my school we have an etc express. and very very old color tran dimmers.

Heres what happened... We had been doing the show jesus christ superstar and our second to last show all of our stage lights turned of in the middle of a cue. but all of the intels stayed on. at the time we were using an expression 2. with wisiwyg. so i restarded the comp and the lights turned back on. no harm done.

That night was our last show. so i set the preset and when to greenroom. came back got the cue to take out the house so i did. then the first cue for stage lights came. i press go and nothing comes on. i restart the comp about 5 times with no results.finaly after a bout the first 3 songs our directer goes into the house and stops the orchestra. and stoping the show.

we ended up doing the show by getting lights to turn on with the stage managers pannale. then it frozee up. so we did the whole show by turning on and off the breakers.

finally we did figure out that the board we were ussing are too fast to talk to our dimmers. so we changed the runnign mode of our board and then it workedl. every thing worked right.

has any one ever ran into a type of problem that we did at our school.

-lights11964

[DMXtools]

Actually, it's kind-of a common problem with really old dimmers regardless of brand. When DMX-512 first came out (1986), a lot of manufacturers cheated on what were some very tight timing specifications. They figured that nobody'd ever come out with a board that fast. In 1990, the USITT technical committee revised the DMX-512 spec., relaxing some of the timings, but some of the older gear doesn't even meet the slower (1990) timing.

John

[Inaki2]

Cheaters cheaters....
I did have that happen to me once, but we dodn't need to correct it, someone beat the crap out of the dimmers (no not ME!!) and eventually burned a whole slot so we just replaced the dimmers. Thats a good thing about rental stuff, you can change it if it doesn't work!