Daslight Forum

Hi I'm trying to get my head around the practicalities of the different interfaces.

At the moment we have a physical controller and several different DMX LED lights. We don't have that many at the moment.

For one scanner we only use 3 channels of maybe a 6 channel light
For another scanner we only use 4 channels
And for the cameo pars we only use 5 of the 6 channels (never strobe)

But with the out-of-the box setup its using up 71 channels, when we're only actually using 21 channels. This is not a problem at the moment so I've never looked any further.

Is it possible with the DVC fun to actually use all the 218 channels and ignore the channels we don't use (e.g. turn of all strobing because we'll never use it, just don't assign it to a physical channel)?

I'm assuming we can assign virtual channels to physical channels and not have any unused and unusable channels in the setup, is that right?

I'm also assuming its possible to tell the software that the 2nd channel in the sequence is R whereas it is the 3rd channel that is R for another fixture.

Hi highab,

Is it possible with the DVC fun to actually use all the 218 channels and ignore the channels we don't use (e.g. turn of all strobing because we'll never use it, just don't assign it to a physical channel)?

It's not possible to set the software to ignore channels you're not using. Even if you used the Scan Library editor to modify the fixture profile and remove the channels you don't use the actual fixture will still use those channels in reality. If you patched another fixture on those channels the second fixture patched would still be controlling the end channels of the first fixture in reality, which would produce undesired results.

I'm assuming we can assign virtual channels to physical channels and not have any unused and unusable channels in the setup, is that right?

It's not possible to set virtual channels in the software. The DVC FUN comes with 128 channels which means you can get a DMX output from channels 1 upto 128, you can't patch any fixtures above 128 unless to upgrade the channel output. The DVC FUN can have the DMX channel output upgraded to a maximum of 512 channels on dmxsoft.com.

I'm also assuming its possible to tell the software that the 2nd channel in the sequence is R whereas it is the 3rd channel that is R for another fixture.

I'm not totally sure what you mean here but you need to patch one fixture in Daslight per physical fixture. To control your fixtures the correct fixture profile and mode needs to be patched in Daslight to match the channels on your fixture on the same DMX address.

Hope that helps, Kind regards.

So you're saying, for example that I'd have 71 channels blocked off and unusable even if I'm only actually using 21 channels?

I can't, say, assign channels 1 2 3 to RGB for fixture 1 and then assign channels 7 8 9 10 11 to intensity RGBA and upwards to the next fixture and so on.... different amounts of channels to different fixtures..

I may be using the wrong terminology. I simply want to know the following:

1) if I can actually make use of the 128 channels or if there will always be dead space in there (e.g. strobe channel etc that I'll never use) so for x fixtures that's x channels of dead space, that's unusable so I'll have the use of x channels less than the 128 channels stipulated so do I get to pack as many fixtures in as I want or am I always locked in to a max of 8 fixtures (assuming the default addressing is 16 channels per fixture and I can't change it)

2) The second question is that I want to know if I can have all the different fixtures selected and change e.g. the red value of all the fixtures at the same time, even though the red on some fixtures is channel 1 and on others it's channel 2 and on others its channel 3.

So you're saying, for example that I'd have 71 channels blocked off and unusable even if I'm only actually using 21 channels?

Yes this is normal as you need to patch in the profile of your fixture to the correct DMX address which would include all the channels regardless of how many channels of the fixture you are actually using.

I can't, say, assign channels 1 2 3 to RGB for fixture 1 and then assign channels 7 8 9 10 11 to intensity RGBA and upwards to the next fixture and so on.... different amounts of channels to different fixtures..

No this is not possible. For the software to communicate with your fixtures you need to patch the correct profile with the full amount of channels for that fixture and patch a profile for each fixture.

1) if I can actually make use of the 128 channels or if there will always be dead space in there (e.g. strobe channel etc that I'll never use) so for x fixtures that's x channels of dead space, that's unusable so I'll have the use of x channels less than the 128 channels stipulated so do I get to pack as many fixtures in as I want or am I always locked in to a max of 8 fixtures (assuming the default addressing is 16 channels per fixture and I can't change it)

You can't remove channels from your fixture profile (i.e. strobe even if you don't use it) so if your fixture have 8 channels then it will use up 8 channels in Daslight 4 as well as reality. If you patched 8 fixtures with 16 channels then this would use up the 128 channels.

2) The second question is that I want to know if I can have all the different fixtures selected and change e.g. the red value of all the fixtures at the same time, even though the red on some fixtures is channel 1 and on others it's channel 2 and on others its channel 3.

Yes if you have different types of fixtures patched you can click on the 'General' tab, click the PALETTE icon, select all your fixtures then move the colour wheel to change the colour for all the different fixtures (see attached image for example).

Here's a link to the user manual which has more information.
http://www.daslight.com/manuals/#/en/da ... uick-start

OK, thanks for making that super clear for me.