hobbsies
Active Member
Hi everyone, sorry for such a long post, I felt it was important to have the full background as I saw things.
I am the ME for a midsized theatre company in Chicago. I have been having some really funky issues with our lighting system that has boggled my mind. It's a long story, which I'll post below, but the TLDR version is that our Express 48/96 and now an expression 2.x is freezing/crashing. I suspect it's from midi, because sending Midi cues from the sound computer out to the Express will definitely cause it to freeze. We haven't had issues with an expression 3 or 2 until tonight, both of which we've used as backup due to a little accident during tech on the express.
The story:
The venue owns a 48/96 express console. About halfway through tech, some coffee was spilled on the tech table and seeped into the board. No one noticed the spill because it was mostly under the board and we didn't see it until the board starting acting weird. The track pad was engaging as soon as someone typed in a channel number, making it impossible to select a channel higher than 1-9. We took it to a local shop and had it fixed. In the mean time, we borrowed an expression 3 from another theatre, copied the show over and continued programming on that, and kept using it well into the run of the show.
When I got the Express back from the shop, I hooked it up to test it. I noticed some weird issues with the way it interacted with a leppy pack. The practicals (clip lights and bare lamp sockets) wouldn't fade on and off correctly. Instead of fading smoothly, they would jump to 30, 70 then full. There would also be a two second delay when trying to release those channels. This problem occured rarely, but I was able to reproduce it sometimes and wasn't fully comfortable swapping the expression 3 out for our fixed Express. I talked to the shop about the board, but they insisted nothing was wrong with it. So we continue using the Expression 3.
Fast forward 6 weeks or so, the theatre which we borrowed the expression 3 from wants it back to be their backup. Their Ion has failed in the past and they want to have it around incase **** hits the fan, fair enough, I know the feeling now. At the end of the week I tried swapping the express 48/96 back in. I didn't see any of the funkiness with the leppy pack, in fact it seemed to work perfectly. Midi commands were functioning, all of the cues were working, the everything seemed to be fine.
The next show is on thursday, and come thursday I get a call from the stage manager that none of the lights are responding at all. I had him reboot the board, reload the show and finally turn everything off and then turn it all back on. Nothing worked. I head over the to theatre to diagnose the issue, and discover that nothing in the first universe is responding. I try swapping the DMX to the 2nd universe, assign it to start with DMX 1 and we have limited control over the system. The conventional dimmers were working, but some were ghosting and flickering. Two of the moving lights were spinning widely with no control, we had no control over the LED Pars or the Leppy pack. Also, Midi cues sent from the sound computer (a Mac) start causing the board to freeze. I tried reloading the show and restarting the board. We still had no control from universe 1 and uni2 was still very limited. We started the show an hour and a half late with some subs I programmed with the conventional lights while the PM drove to the theatre w/ the expression 3 and got it for act 2.
Once we hooked up the expression 3, act II ran totally normally. Conventionals were working fine, movers were happy, had full control and midi wasn't crashing the light board. We had to return the expression 3 the following day, so I borrowed an expression 2.x from another theatre.
I took the Express 48/96 to a different shop this time to get a second opinion. I described the issues I was having to the tech there and they tested it out. They called me and said they couldn't find anything wrong with it, although they had no means to test the midi functions. I picked up the board, tested it myself, caused it to crash about 10 times by firing MIDI cues to it. I tried deleting the show and reloading it using 3 separate disks, restarting the entire system again, rebooting the board, still crashed.
The Express 2.x has worked great for two weeks until tonight, when it froze several times during preshow. I don't know the details of what happened before it crashed, if midi was tested on it or not. Initially I had the stage manager turn off the board, and turn it back on, but it froze again when we tried to go into the preshow cue. Turning everything off, dimmers, movers, board, leds, leppy, hazer, then turned it all back on seemed to fix the issue. The show ran fine the rest of the night.
Some details:
The SM is running the show from an RFU
The length of the DMX chain is roughly 500'
The device order in the DMX universe 1 chain looks like this: Board <- 2.4k 24 dim sensor rack times 3 (72 dims total) <- 2 circuit, 6 dim 3600W leppy pack <- Radiance hazer <- Design Spot 250 Moving Light <- several LED pars, then a Mover, several more LEDs, Mover and finally several more LEDs. 3 Movers, 10 LEDs, 1 Radiance, 1 Leppy, 3 24 dim 2.4k Sensor racks. not terminated
Second universe operates a projector dowser.
Here's how the midi settings look:
1 - ETC MIDI Channel: 1
2 - MIDI Show Control Device IDs: 1/Disabled
3- reserved
4 - reserved
5- time code input: disabled
6 - time code frames per second: 30
I'm at a complete loss. I don't know what the problem is and I don't know how to fix it. Two shops say the Express 48/96 board is working perfectly, and we haven't had any expression 2 issues until tonight, and zero expression 3 issues through 8 weeks of shows. Has anyone experienced MIDI issues with an express? I plan on calling ETC tomorrow, but am curious if anyone has any suggestions.
Thanks so much
I am the ME for a midsized theatre company in Chicago. I have been having some really funky issues with our lighting system that has boggled my mind. It's a long story, which I'll post below, but the TLDR version is that our Express 48/96 and now an expression 2.x is freezing/crashing. I suspect it's from midi, because sending Midi cues from the sound computer out to the Express will definitely cause it to freeze. We haven't had issues with an expression 3 or 2 until tonight, both of which we've used as backup due to a little accident during tech on the express.
The story:
The venue owns a 48/96 express console. About halfway through tech, some coffee was spilled on the tech table and seeped into the board. No one noticed the spill because it was mostly under the board and we didn't see it until the board starting acting weird. The track pad was engaging as soon as someone typed in a channel number, making it impossible to select a channel higher than 1-9. We took it to a local shop and had it fixed. In the mean time, we borrowed an expression 3 from another theatre, copied the show over and continued programming on that, and kept using it well into the run of the show.
When I got the Express back from the shop, I hooked it up to test it. I noticed some weird issues with the way it interacted with a leppy pack. The practicals (clip lights and bare lamp sockets) wouldn't fade on and off correctly. Instead of fading smoothly, they would jump to 30, 70 then full. There would also be a two second delay when trying to release those channels. This problem occured rarely, but I was able to reproduce it sometimes and wasn't fully comfortable swapping the expression 3 out for our fixed Express. I talked to the shop about the board, but they insisted nothing was wrong with it. So we continue using the Expression 3.
Fast forward 6 weeks or so, the theatre which we borrowed the expression 3 from wants it back to be their backup. Their Ion has failed in the past and they want to have it around incase **** hits the fan, fair enough, I know the feeling now. At the end of the week I tried swapping the express 48/96 back in. I didn't see any of the funkiness with the leppy pack, in fact it seemed to work perfectly. Midi commands were functioning, all of the cues were working, the everything seemed to be fine.
The next show is on thursday, and come thursday I get a call from the stage manager that none of the lights are responding at all. I had him reboot the board, reload the show and finally turn everything off and then turn it all back on. Nothing worked. I head over the to theatre to diagnose the issue, and discover that nothing in the first universe is responding. I try swapping the DMX to the 2nd universe, assign it to start with DMX 1 and we have limited control over the system. The conventional dimmers were working, but some were ghosting and flickering. Two of the moving lights were spinning widely with no control, we had no control over the LED Pars or the Leppy pack. Also, Midi cues sent from the sound computer (a Mac) start causing the board to freeze. I tried reloading the show and restarting the board. We still had no control from universe 1 and uni2 was still very limited. We started the show an hour and a half late with some subs I programmed with the conventional lights while the PM drove to the theatre w/ the expression 3 and got it for act 2.
Once we hooked up the expression 3, act II ran totally normally. Conventionals were working fine, movers were happy, had full control and midi wasn't crashing the light board. We had to return the expression 3 the following day, so I borrowed an expression 2.x from another theatre.
I took the Express 48/96 to a different shop this time to get a second opinion. I described the issues I was having to the tech there and they tested it out. They called me and said they couldn't find anything wrong with it, although they had no means to test the midi functions. I picked up the board, tested it myself, caused it to crash about 10 times by firing MIDI cues to it. I tried deleting the show and reloading it using 3 separate disks, restarting the entire system again, rebooting the board, still crashed.
The Express 2.x has worked great for two weeks until tonight, when it froze several times during preshow. I don't know the details of what happened before it crashed, if midi was tested on it or not. Initially I had the stage manager turn off the board, and turn it back on, but it froze again when we tried to go into the preshow cue. Turning everything off, dimmers, movers, board, leds, leppy, hazer, then turned it all back on seemed to fix the issue. The show ran fine the rest of the night.
Some details:
The SM is running the show from an RFU
The length of the DMX chain is roughly 500'
The device order in the DMX universe 1 chain looks like this: Board <- 2.4k 24 dim sensor rack times 3 (72 dims total) <- 2 circuit, 6 dim 3600W leppy pack <- Radiance hazer <- Design Spot 250 Moving Light <- several LED pars, then a Mover, several more LEDs, Mover and finally several more LEDs. 3 Movers, 10 LEDs, 1 Radiance, 1 Leppy, 3 24 dim 2.4k Sensor racks. not terminated
Second universe operates a projector dowser.
Here's how the midi settings look:
1 - ETC MIDI Channel: 1
2 - MIDI Show Control Device IDs: 1/Disabled
3- reserved
4 - reserved
5- time code input: disabled
6 - time code frames per second: 30
I'm at a complete loss. I don't know what the problem is and I don't know how to fix it. Two shops say the Express 48/96 board is working perfectly, and we haven't had any expression 2 issues until tonight, and zero expression 3 issues through 8 weeks of shows. Has anyone experienced MIDI issues with an express? I plan on calling ETC tomorrow, but am curious if anyone has any suggestions.
Thanks so much
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