Control/Dimming Reliability of sending sACN directly to fixtures.

[danTt]

Hi Mike,
If you're going fixture to fixture with sACN, you likely won't have an issue. sACN is used on a lot of major tours and festival rigs. And, Elation has gear on a lot of those rigs.
That said, it's probably best to use a quality switch to distribute out to each Truss (or position, or whatever). Most of our fixtures have relays on the Ethernet ports, so that they can pass data even if they lose power. I am not certain if other manufacturers are doing the same.

Can you expand on this? Does the in/out just turn into a coupler if power is removed? If so, is there a delay when power is applied before the "switch" is active? Am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

 

[Ford]

put simply, if the unit has power, it opens the relays, which route the network into the fixture. if the unit does not have power, the relays are closed, bypassing the fixture. in terms of delay... I wouldn't want to have someone quickly turning the units on and off mid-show, but one small hiccup when you restore a fixture mid-show is far better than losing a whole line of fixtures. the bypass is almost instantaneous, so it will not affect the show if/when the unit goes down.

 

[RonaldBeal]

Granted: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but I have yet to see widespread use of ethernet based protocols beyond the backbone networks on even the largest shows. There is already so much existing DMX based infrastructure, that it doesn't make financial sense in the rental market to go to ethernet based "last mile" systems. In fact, most of the big name rental vendors currently have little to no multi-ethernet snakes, or truss based switches.. and the few they have are often for very specific use cases.