Enlighten One Review
I’ve seen many times on this forum regarding picking a lighting console, so I thought I’d throw my $.02 in on the Enlighten by Megalite that I “inherited”. A quick bit of background, I’m the TD at Emmanuel Baptist Church and we run a full conventional rig, with a bunch of American DJ Punch Pro, RGB LED fixtures with no movers at this time. My background is certainly rooted in Theatrical lighting rather than Rock & Roll, I cut my teeth on an ETC Express. During my tenure, we’ve run an Elation Scene Setter 48, NSI/Leviton MC 24/48, and now have an Enlighten One in the Worship Center, and PC Software version in the Activity Center (without control wing). It’s certainly a “cheap” console, so I can see where people might be searching for information on it to get into the lighting world on a small budget.
Technical: The Enlighten One is nothing more than a purpose built PC running Windows 7 on the bottom of the control wing surface. I believe it uses USB to interface with the custom buttons and faders on the top of it. It’s equipped to run 4 DMX universes. The PC version behaves the same in every aspect, without the control wing.
Coming from the “traditional” theatre consoles like the ETC and NSI, the Enlighten was certainly a huge mental shift for me. You can easily see where the designers had moving fixtures in mind from the ground up on this console. In a nutshell, the Enlighten uses “sequence buttons” to control various “playbacks”. You can program each button/playback with multiple steps, somewhat like chases or effects on a traditional console. I tend to think of buttons as cues. Sets of buttons can be boxed into “button groups” in which one button advances to the next on button press, like a traditional cue sheet.
There are multiple “pages”, so you can program an entire set of buttons for each event type. In our application, we use 1 page for the Bluegrass Service, 1 for Contemporary, 1 for special occasional use events (Funerals, etc). The control wing then controls whatever “page” is active. Each fader, go button, and user defined button can be programmed to a submaster or particular button on that page. The rotary encoders are used to control fixture traits when you have a fixture, or group of fixtures selected.
If you have the proper fixture definition, patching isn’t too painful. Each fixture is assigned a number on patching. Since our outlets are numbered by DMX dimmer number, I try to patch all the conventional’s (plus spares for portable dimmers) first so the numbering is consistant. There are also multiple pages of fixtures, so I try to group my fixtures logically as each fixture occupies a square amount of space on the canvas.
Once it’s programmed, playback is relatively straight forward. On each page, I have the first submaster and go button mapped to the primary button group. Then you can advance from cue to cue with just the go button. If service needs change, I simply re-arrange the buttons to match, ie if we have a baptism right after announcements. Unfortunately, you have to arrange the buttons left to right, so if you need to insert a button midstream, you have to re-link every button to the right of it. Buttons can also “replace” (crossfade) or “stack”.
Programming is also not terrible. As I mentioned, I don’t really use playbacks, so each button contains one static look. In those times when I’ve tried to program a multi-step chase, well, let’s just say it was painful and I try to avoid it.
When programming, I usually set the look on stage, then hit “Save Changes As Button”, and give it a name. It then creates the button and puts it in the lower right corner of the current page. If I need to update a button, start with a “Clear All”, load the button, make my changes, then hit update. If you have any fixtures selected when you hit update, the update will only capture those fixtures, rather than recording everything, typical for a tracking console.
Coming from my background, I have to admit, there are more things I hate about this console than love. However, I will say that it’s pretty easy to learn to program and operate, which would make it good for volunteer light operators.
Now the bad:
Enlighten isn’t the most stable software in the world. Rarely does it actually crash while it’s running a show, but during intense programming sessions it can crash, or what’s even more frustrating, not actually write my changes into the cues. I’ve found the only way to fix this is to go to an older backup, and program from that point forward. I also make a habit of yearly wiping the entire show and patch and reprogramming from scratch in order to keep this issue from happening. I suspect something gets corrupt in the database, but MegaLite hasn’t been able to pin-point what.
As I mentioned above, not doing a “Clear All” before changing a cue often results in the cue becoming corrupt. If you’re trying to tweak lighting during a rehearsal, these blackouts are quite annoying to the performers. Compare to the NSI, where I could modify the look on stage, and just hit record and my changes would persist.
Pages also have a theoretical limit to the number of cues on them. It’s not explicitly stated, but I know that if I get too many on a page programming becomes unstable. If the show has an intermission, I make a habit of programming each act on a separate page.
Since we don’t have movers, most of the attribute pages are meaningless to us. When working with fixtures, I have it pretty much stuck on the faders attribute page. It does have a cool DMX color picker, but because the ADJ Punch Pro’s don’t render color accurately, that color picker is also pretty meaningless.
All that being said, it’s a good introductory or volunteer console. Would I choose it again for my dedicated house console where I’m the primary programmer and operator? Absolutely not!
I’ve seen many times on this forum regarding picking a lighting console, so I thought I’d throw my $.02 in on the Enlighten by Megalite that I “inherited”. A quick bit of background, I’m the TD at Emmanuel Baptist Church and we run a full conventional rig, with a bunch of American DJ Punch Pro, RGB LED fixtures with no movers at this time. My background is certainly rooted in Theatrical lighting rather than Rock & Roll, I cut my teeth on an ETC Express. During my tenure, we’ve run an Elation Scene Setter 48, NSI/Leviton MC 24/48, and now have an Enlighten One in the Worship Center, and PC Software version in the Activity Center (without control wing). It’s certainly a “cheap” console, so I can see where people might be searching for information on it to get into the lighting world on a small budget.
Technical: The Enlighten One is nothing more than a purpose built PC running Windows 7 on the bottom of the control wing surface. I believe it uses USB to interface with the custom buttons and faders on the top of it. It’s equipped to run 4 DMX universes. The PC version behaves the same in every aspect, without the control wing.
Coming from the “traditional” theatre consoles like the ETC and NSI, the Enlighten was certainly a huge mental shift for me. You can easily see where the designers had moving fixtures in mind from the ground up on this console. In a nutshell, the Enlighten uses “sequence buttons” to control various “playbacks”. You can program each button/playback with multiple steps, somewhat like chases or effects on a traditional console. I tend to think of buttons as cues. Sets of buttons can be boxed into “button groups” in which one button advances to the next on button press, like a traditional cue sheet.
There are multiple “pages”, so you can program an entire set of buttons for each event type. In our application, we use 1 page for the Bluegrass Service, 1 for Contemporary, 1 for special occasional use events (Funerals, etc). The control wing then controls whatever “page” is active. Each fader, go button, and user defined button can be programmed to a submaster or particular button on that page. The rotary encoders are used to control fixture traits when you have a fixture, or group of fixtures selected.
If you have the proper fixture definition, patching isn’t too painful. Each fixture is assigned a number on patching. Since our outlets are numbered by DMX dimmer number, I try to patch all the conventional’s (plus spares for portable dimmers) first so the numbering is consistant. There are also multiple pages of fixtures, so I try to group my fixtures logically as each fixture occupies a square amount of space on the canvas.
Once it’s programmed, playback is relatively straight forward. On each page, I have the first submaster and go button mapped to the primary button group. Then you can advance from cue to cue with just the go button. If service needs change, I simply re-arrange the buttons to match, ie if we have a baptism right after announcements. Unfortunately, you have to arrange the buttons left to right, so if you need to insert a button midstream, you have to re-link every button to the right of it. Buttons can also “replace” (crossfade) or “stack”.
Programming is also not terrible. As I mentioned, I don’t really use playbacks, so each button contains one static look. In those times when I’ve tried to program a multi-step chase, well, let’s just say it was painful and I try to avoid it.
When programming, I usually set the look on stage, then hit “Save Changes As Button”, and give it a name. It then creates the button and puts it in the lower right corner of the current page. If I need to update a button, start with a “Clear All”, load the button, make my changes, then hit update. If you have any fixtures selected when you hit update, the update will only capture those fixtures, rather than recording everything, typical for a tracking console.
Coming from my background, I have to admit, there are more things I hate about this console than love. However, I will say that it’s pretty easy to learn to program and operate, which would make it good for volunteer light operators.
Now the bad:
Enlighten isn’t the most stable software in the world. Rarely does it actually crash while it’s running a show, but during intense programming sessions it can crash, or what’s even more frustrating, not actually write my changes into the cues. I’ve found the only way to fix this is to go to an older backup, and program from that point forward. I also make a habit of yearly wiping the entire show and patch and reprogramming from scratch in order to keep this issue from happening. I suspect something gets corrupt in the database, but MegaLite hasn’t been able to pin-point what.
As I mentioned above, not doing a “Clear All” before changing a cue often results in the cue becoming corrupt. If you’re trying to tweak lighting during a rehearsal, these blackouts are quite annoying to the performers. Compare to the NSI, where I could modify the look on stage, and just hit record and my changes would persist.
Pages also have a theoretical limit to the number of cues on them. It’s not explicitly stated, but I know that if I get too many on a page programming becomes unstable. If the show has an intermission, I make a habit of programming each act on a separate page.
Since we don’t have movers, most of the attribute pages are meaningless to us. When working with fixtures, I have it pretty much stuck on the faders attribute page. It does have a cool DMX color picker, but because the ADJ Punch Pro’s don’t render color accurately, that color picker is also pretty meaningless.
All that being said, it’s a good introductory or volunteer console. Would I choose it again for my dedicated house console where I’m the primary programmer and operator? Absolutely not!
