Scroller Patching with Expression 3

[Mschauer11]

Hey everyone,

Could use a quick rundown on how to patch apollo Scrollers in an ETC Expression 3.

Attached to fresnels (dimmer 51-59) ect...I thought i had to input the address of the scroller into a dimmer ? idk if that sounds right or not.

But if you have a rough idea, any info would be helpful at the moment. Thanks a lot.

M.

 

[xander]

The most common way to patch scrollers on an Express(ion) is to just patch them like you would a dimmer. Take the address and patch it to your desired channel. Personally, what I like to do is patch them to the channels that are right under the intensity channels on the screen. So, for channel 51, I would patch the scroller to channel 76, 52 and 77, etc. This doesn't really work if you use flexi mode. Another approach would be to make a personality and use the fixture patch. Really the only advantage of this is that you can then assign the scroller to an encoder, but I wouldn't say that it was really worth it. You can use the level wheel regardless of how you patch it.

-Tim

Addendum: Another thing I like to do is to create a custom dimmer profile to use with single string scrollers. I adjust the profile so that instead of each frame being like 8% (all depends on how many frames you have), it's 5%. This way I can use macros (that I have already written for +5% and -5%) to easily jump through frame by frame.

 

[willbb123]

I second what xander said. I've busked a lot of shows with scrollers on a expression 3. I've patched them both as fixtures and dimmers, and never really found an advantage of patching as fixtures. To call up colors I made a sheet with color names and percentages; then either entered on the keypad, or on a submaster. Also make use of groups.

The custom dimmer profile is a really good idea, that I'll use next time I'm on the console.