Another question. how do i patch these scrollers into the
Express 72/144 and how do i "dial in" the color that I want?
Each
scroller gets a unique
DMX address, which is set on the
scroller via three knobs (assuming
Apollo SmartColors). One knob for the 100's, one for 10's and one for 1's. You will need to set an
address with these, which I will get to later.
First off, you need to figure out where you are going to feed data from. Are you going to passthrough from your dimmers? Are you going to run a second
line right from the
console? Are you running a
DMX splitter?
If you are daisy chaining out from your dimmers then you would need to set the
address of the first
scroller above the
address of the last
dimmer. So, if you have 96 dimmers, you could set the first
scroller to 97 (or anything above 96). This also applies if you were taking one output from the
console and running to to a splitter and then to the dimmers and scrollers as they are still on the same
universe. In this setup the
scroller addressed to 97 would correspond to "
dimmer" 97 in PATCH.
However, your
Express supports two universes, so you could run a
DMX line from the second output on the back of the
console to the scrollers. You also need to make sure that in the
system settings on the
console you have that port turned on and set to output 513-1024. Using this method of
hookup you could
address the first
scroller as 1, which would correspond to "
dimmer" 513 in PATCH.
Once you hook up your scrollers you can patch them the same as you would any
dimmer in the patch
screen. Normally, on a
console like the
Express where channels don't have attributes I would patch the fixtures to channels 1-12 and then the scrollers on those fixtures to channels 21-32. Why? Because the
Express displays channels in 20 across so the
intensity channel would be right above the
scroller channel. You don't have to do it this way, I just think that it makes life easier.
To figure out where each color lies, you would take 100 and devide by the number of color frames in the
gel string less one. So, if you have a 16 frame string you would think: 100/15=6.66. So every 6.66% that you move the
fader you will be (theoretically) centered in the next frame. Since you can't do partial percents you may just find that 07 or 06 is where you need to be for frame 1 and then around 13 for frame 2,
etc. You can also record each color as a group and then
call the groups up instead of having to fumble with faders or the keypad each time you need to change color.
