I completely agree with Alex's and Grog's statement above and will add a few more cents.
The biggest thing I find with moving lights is they save time. Hang, run
power, run data, program. You will have to add accessories to other lights, hang them and the accessories, plus
power and data for the accessories and dimming for the lights. Also, if something changes, you can easily change the programming on the moving lights. If you are using the '
gaff method', you might have to change color, gobos, accessories, focus,
etc etc, all depending upon what you are using and need to do. This might require repeating the whole process above in worst case. And then you might still have to re-program something. Takes much more time.
As I and others have stated as well, movers can be used for more then one thing. Depending on the type, you can have more then one
gobo wheel for morph effects, rotating
gobo wheels for
effect, color wheels,
CMY, animation wheels, zooms, irises, shutters for
strobe effects, and movement. Some movers might have all of these things, cheaper ones pick and choose. The ones I find most important in a
theatre setting are the movement,
CMY, rotating gobos wheel/s, and
iris. The biggest two are probably the movement followed by the
iris.
CMY is a great tool to have, but you can make due with color wheels, and higher end lights will let you replace the dichoic's in them. The
gobo wheel/s are great for texture, and rotating one's just add another dimension to them.
Another thing people seem to be touching on is
color temperature. Well, generally when using spot movers, you are trying to highlight something, and the higher
color temperature helps with this. When you
drop color in it, it will change as well.
Wash movers are generally never white, so the difference in
color temperature doesn't hurt that much. Almost all movers come with at least a
CTO filter in a color wheel. Some come with more then one color wheel, a color wheel and/or
CMY and
CTO variable filter, or a color wheel and
CMY. I find I rarely use the color wheel when I have
CMY in the light, unless trying to make a very dark color, like a dark blue or red, or some crazy shade of green which I use even more rarely then darker colors that
CMY can do. The other time is a UV type
effect. Now if your movers just have a color wheel, and you want to color correct but still use color, put a
CTO dichoric
in one of the slots on the
gobo wheel. If you are lucky, you will have two
gobo wheels so you can still add texture with this trick.