DMX Addressing

renegadeblack

renegadeblack

Active Member
I just met with our director yesterday and am planning some lighting things for the show. Last year, we had to run all sorts of cables through the audience and it was a major PITA. This year, I wanted to get some portable dimmers and run just DMX to them as opposed to the whole bunch of cables from dimmers that we can't afford to give up.

So now I'm wondering about the running of the DMX as she seems to like the idea of the portable dimmer packs. I'm toying with the possibility of wireless DMX, I know that everyone swears against it, but IDK. Also, we have a bunch of dimmers on our rack that for some reason or another don't work. I was wondering if it would be OK to address the portable dimmers to those dimmers that don't work even though they already exist. Yes, no, maybe so? From what I understand it would be fine, but I'm not quite sure.
 
You should have no problem addressing your portable dimmers to the same addresses as your broken dimmers. Your worst case scenario is that they both turn on and do the same thing at the same time. Just to be 100% sure I would throw the breakers on the bad dimmers, so they can not possible work, Just so you do not get any surprises. Since you said you do not know what is wrong with them, that should be a good thing to do safety-wise in the first place.

~Dave
 
Last edited:
renegadeblack said:
... I'm toying with the possibility of wireless DMX, I know that everyone swears against it, but IDK. ...
Click to expand...
"Swears against it" is a bit of an exaggeration.
"Only as a last resort, when a hard-wired solution is impractical or impossible." is more accurate.
 
renegadeblack said:
I was wondering if it would be OK to address the portable dimmers to those dimmers that don't work even though they already exist. Yes, no, maybe so? From what I understand it would be fine, but I'm not quite sure.
Click to expand...

You could do this but why bother? You've got 512 channels on a universe. You should be able to put your portable packs at any convenient dmx address, and patch your console so they show up where you want them to on the console. It's ( usually ) a lot easier to do this than to overlay the address space.

John Chenault
 
I've been running 3 sea changers wirelessly for about 8 months now with no issues. For portable dimming, I really like Smartbars (ETC) but there are other companies making similar products, and some even have built in wireless functionality.
 
JChenault said:
You could do this but why bother? You've got 512 channels on a universe. You should be able to put your portable packs at any convenient dmx address, and patch your console so they show up where you want them to on the console. It's ( usually ) a lot easier to do this than to overlay the address space.

John Chenault
Click to expand...

I don't like playing with the patch table, quite frankly, it scares me, I like my 1-1 patch very much. I'm afraid that I would screw something up terribly. Plus, I'm only going to be using about 8 dimmers so I think that would work OK.

As for the portable dimmers, I was thinking about something like Leviton's D4DMX, but I'll look into the smartbars, these are going to be mounted on trees, BTW.
 
DaveySimps said:
Yes, but not all boards / controllers give you full access to an entire universe of DMX. You are making an assumption about his system that may not be true. Not trying to be difficult, just trying to offer a bit of counterpoint.

~Dave
Click to expand...

If I'm not mistaken, it has two full universes. I have a Colortran Innovator 48/96. The deeper settings frighten me a bit though. I was restoring to a very old show to show some new techies how the cues work and apparently the patch table was much different back then and things got weird very fast. I fortunately had a copy of the show that we did the year before and was able to restore to that. If possible, I'd rather just leave the patch table the way that it is :) However, I'm not entirely opposed to venturing into the unknown.
 
derekleffew said:
One shouldn't let fear prevent one from using equipment to its fullest potential--knowledge can overcome the fear!
Click to expand...

Just wait a few years Derek, until you start having those brain lapses where right in the middle of a show your mind is taken over by Homer Simpson ! ;)
 
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