My background is more R&R than theater, so maybe I'm missing something dumb here that you can fill me in on.
We joined a church a few months ago and I'm replacing an Express 250 with a Martin M-PC/M-Touch//M-Play, which will allow us to use LEDs and movers in the near future. Last night I spent some time on the new board trying to find all the dimmer channels, and the only things that are sequential are the house lights. Everything else is scattered everywhere.
The room has 2 Sensor+ racks and ~192 dimmers. There are 3 above-stage electrics, plus a square cat walk system. In all of these places, it seems like there are 2 or 3 dimmers next to each other, then it jumps an arbitrary number of channels to numbers quite far away. For example, one section is something like 21, 22, 37, 41, 130. The whole room is like this. The dimmer racks themselves are similarly random - one module says 81 82, the next is 129 130.
I understand the theory of balancing load on the electrical phases and I suppose I understand balancing load between the two dimmer racks, but this seems unnecessarily complicated to me. I forgot to take a picture of the lighting plot - I will grab that when I'm there on Sunday and post it.
This isn't going to be a particularly significant problem as we will work with groups of fixtures 99% of the time and will hardly ever have to go to the fixture patch directly, but I'm curios as to what the thought process may have been. Am I missing something here?
We joined a church a few months ago and I'm replacing an Express 250 with a Martin M-PC/M-Touch//M-Play, which will allow us to use LEDs and movers in the near future. Last night I spent some time on the new board trying to find all the dimmer channels, and the only things that are sequential are the house lights. Everything else is scattered everywhere.
The room has 2 Sensor+ racks and ~192 dimmers. There are 3 above-stage electrics, plus a square cat walk system. In all of these places, it seems like there are 2 or 3 dimmers next to each other, then it jumps an arbitrary number of channels to numbers quite far away. For example, one section is something like 21, 22, 37, 41, 130. The whole room is like this. The dimmer racks themselves are similarly random - one module says 81 82, the next is 129 130.
I understand the theory of balancing load on the electrical phases and I suppose I understand balancing load between the two dimmer racks, but this seems unnecessarily complicated to me. I forgot to take a picture of the lighting plot - I will grab that when I'm there on Sunday and post it.
This isn't going to be a particularly significant problem as we will work with groups of fixtures 99% of the time and will hardly ever have to go to the fixture patch directly, but I'm curios as to what the thought process may have been. Am I missing something here?