On the 300 moving lights are pretty easy to deal with (compared to other consoles in that price range). First off, make sure that you have a trackball,
Strand recommends the Microsoft Intellimouse trackballs, but I know that other work (at least the logitech ones do). Make sure, if you get a trackball that you get one that has a USB to PS/2
adapter, as you can't
plug the
mouse into the USB ports on the 300. The
mouse is super useful as the 300 doesn't have a built in trackball. The
Mouse allows you to easily and quickly control pan and tilt of you fixtures. If you get a
mouse that also has a scroll wheel and a bunch of buttons you can control other attributes with it, one at a time.
1. If you daisy chain two MACs together, can you still operatre them seperatly, or do they copy each others moves?
You can
daisy chain the units and as long as you assign them unique
DMX addresses they will operate individually. The
address is set via the
LCD screen and buttons on the side of the
fixture. If you are only running one
universe of
DMX then you need to set the
address of the fixtures above the highest number
dimmer you have. So, if you last
dimmer is 200 then you would set the first
MAC to be 201. The second
MAC you would have to set to be above the first, I don't know offhand how many channels the 250+ needs, but for this example lets just say that you set the second
MAC to
address 251. This ensures that none of the control channels for the second
fixture overlap the first.
2. On desks (Stand 300 if possible) can you set up a basic chase with the lantern, or do you have to program lots of differnt ques, and change through them.
You can set up effects by going into the effects editor on the
console Press the "FX"
button. Here you can add steps and tell the
console what each step will be. Once you write the
effect you can load it into a
cue or load it into a sub. The 300 also has built in "shape" channels for moving lights. These are pre-programmed movements. When you patch the
fixture, you can tell the
console to add the shape channels. They work pretty well as long as the
fixture is not pointing straight down. When you use the shape channels, the higher you make the
level of them the bigger the shape gets.
3. If i was to patch them in seperatly one of them will be channel 50.* what would the other one be??
You can patch your fixtures to any
channel you want. The whole number
channel becomes the
intensity followed by attribute channels which are indicated by decimal points. The key is that you need to have the
fixture profile for the
MAC 250+ in the
console, and you may have to write that yourself. To check the
fixture library on the 300 hit:
[MORE] {NOTES DISP} {LOAD FILE} {FIXT. LIB.} (I believe it is load file, it is something like that, can't remember off the top of my head) On the
screen you will see a list of fixtures. Scroll through and see of the
MAC 250+ is there, if it is, remember what number it is, if not then
send me a note and I will tell you how to write the
profile, it si just long and detailed to post at the moment.
As for the actual patching. Lets assume that you addressed the fixtures like my example above. Lets also assume that the
profile for the
MAC 250+ is number 15 (as described above). So, in the patch
screen, to patch the first
fixture to
channel 50 (like you said) you would hit: 201 [@] 50 {@ FIXT} 15 [*]. That will batch all of the attributes of the
fixture to the appropriate channels and put the
intensity on
channel 50. For the second
fixture, if you wanted it to be
channel 51 then you would hit: 251 [@] 51 {@ FIXT} 15 [*]. And you would be all set to go.
4. Any help would be great, if anyone knows any userfriendly guidelines or books...
The
Strand 300 user
manual would be invaluable to you, if you don't have it, you can download it from their
website. Please feel free to
send along further questions. There are a few of us here who work on
Strand consoles every day and would be happy to help you out.