Programming intelligent lighting on an ETC Express 125

[jfbach]

So, I've been working on ETC Off-line with a hypothetical I-Beam. I patched it into the system just fine, set up the attributes and encoders fine, and started experimenting with the hypothetical encoders. I was moving my finger around the trackpad which was set to control the pan and tilt functions and I noticed 4 active numbers, two of which moved quite often, and two of which rarely changed. I was perplexed by this until I used the about channel function and found out that the pan and tilt functions were operating in 16 bit mode, as well as LTP.

I think I understand why you would want to run these functions in LTP, but is it better to run them in 16 bit? What advantages will 16 bit offer as opposed to 8 bit.

Also, I found out that you can run the pan and tillt functions via a submaster. If I am running in 16 bit mode, is it necessary to assign each of the individual pan hi, pan lo, tilt lo, and tilt hi channels to their own submaster to control the pan and tilt functions, or should I choose to assign a submaster just to the pan hi and pan lo channels which moved most frequently?

I am asking this because I plan on patching our 1 inteligent light, a Metor ElipScan into our board. I have to create a personality for this light, and I'm not sure whether I want 16 bit LTP pan and tilt channels.

-Jamie

[propmonkey]

well you have finer control with 16bit(i believe...). i know on our strand i have pan and tilt and then fine pan and fine tilt.

[Radman]

Pan and Tilt coarse and fine each take up a channel of their own, totaling 4 channels. Each channel is 8bit therefore has 256 possible values, 0-255. Say an intel has 256 degrees of tilt. The coarse channel would be able to pan the fixture in increments of 1 degree. From a distance this can add up to quite a few feet, hence the fine channel. It lets you control each degree of coarse down to 1/256 of a degree. In other words, the coarse is your base, and the fine adds to that in tiny amounts. You need to imagine now in your hypothetical theatre if the throw distance of your fixture is great enough to require the second submaster to control the fine channels.

[jfbach]

Okay, now I found out that our real board is running software version 2.0, which does not have any inteligent lighting capabilities. I downloaded the software from ETC and tried to load it on to our board, only to have it not work, and almost not be able to load the origanal software back on to the board.

We've found that if you run the remote units disk before, not installing anything, and then putting in the software disk and running it, the software will load. This should have absolutely no corrolation, but it worked that way 3 times.

Any suggestions on how to get the software to load properly? I called ETC... that was no help, the guy was kind of a jerk too.

[Radman]

Follow the instructions scrupiously.(?) Clear any show info and stuff beforehand, and so on. I made the update without any problems. Just make sure you are installing the right software.