Workarounds Virtual Dimmers + FX Engine + Colors

[FranzH]

Hey everyone,
while I understand a lot of people like to use Daslight for simple shows, I am really curious how you solve these major (for me) issues when doing a show with Daslight.

1. No virtual dimmers (and there will never be one in Daslight 4 according to the official sources)
What do you do with RGB(W) fixtures? There's no way I can programm every strobe, flicker, chaser, etc in every imaginable color...

2. No way to create symmetrical effects between groups of fixtures. If I have 4 moving heads on the left and 4 on the right, there is no way to have them run symmetric effects. So even the very standard "beams crossing" scenes aren't at all easy to achieve.

3. No way to copy colors / use palletes or copy any channel values.
How do you make sure you find the correct colors when you need them in a new scene? Manually typing in channel values is not an option for bigger projects. PLUS, you can't even type in values but have to move the faders by hand which is even slower..


Any advice is really appreciated.

[djcode]

Yeah FranzH,

I can only comment on issue #2 & 3 here. Sadly there is no way to easily make any symmetrical effects in DVC4, even when using the grid or sine wave generator. Every time you stack an effect with the direction going opposite the dots representing the beams will always bee off time no matter what you do. I have no idea how others have achieved this for their supposed large concert/dance shows. Right now lets hope in DVC5 they will have this fixed so effect generation will actually be useable for more than the basic stuff.

For issue #3 I wish the same here. Having auto pallets that generate and import into the live screen for use would be super helpful so we dont have to write every single parameter manually. The only ones I want to write are mover positions and dimmer effects/strobes, and have the basic ones just import. Also the ability to select a specific fixture to change its parameters in show like color ahead of time before an effect happens would be super helpful when busking shows so it doesn't looks quite jank.

[John Koster]

Hi FranzH,

We have asked the team of Daslight if they can implement virtual dimmers, but unfortunately this is not possible.
This is such an important feature for professional use of lighting controls (no matter if it is hardware based or software based).
I can imagine that this will have an influence on the stability of Daslight 4 and that it is perhaps not possible to implement.
Sorry Daslight I am a happy user of your software for certain projects, but in my opinion you will loose in the end the majority of clients if you don't find a solution for this.
To be honest and I don't want to offend anyone on the forum, but the majority of users here will run shows that will not have the most expensive fixtures and the big quantities of them, otherwise you will probably step up to an equally expensive hardware based system like MA, Highend or Avolites (to name some).
For programming you don't want to make separate chases step by step for every color scheme.
You want to have your color pallet separated from the virtual dimmer / shutter channels when working with RGB(WAUV) fixtures that don't include build-in dimmer/ shutter channels.
On one side you make the color schemes and for each chase variety you only make this once.
Push a button with a color scheme and push a button with the specific chase is all you would need.
Another big issue is that we can't easily add fixtures to a show or just take some out when the show and / or the quantity of fixtures need to be changed for whatever reason.
For now my opinion is that Daslight will work best in fixed installations or when always traveling with the same set-up of lighting which is fine if that is your way of working but with regards to flexibility and programming options it doesn't do the job yet.
The other side of the story is that for a small budget you get software that has lots of features and can be helpful to a lot of us.
Those credits I have to give Daslight!
The software has had and still has bugs and crashes occur very often specifically during programming, but as we all run on different computers this gets complicated to solve compared to hardware based system where the computer is always the same and is optimized for the job.

Hopes my message helps and I wish you all the best.

Kind regards,

John

[djcode]

If you want a cheap much more flexible solution go and get this artnet node and pair it with Chamsys MagicQ. You get way more functionality there than with daslight and is much cheaper too than daslight as well in the long run.

V-Show 8 port Artnet DMX Controller - 3 PIN DMX Splitter XLR Input and output, 4096 DMX Channel 8 Port Signal Amplifier for Stage Lighting Shows https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FP8NN17/re ... UTF8&psc=1

[s.broeer]

V-Show 8 port Artnet DMX Controller - 3 PIN DMX Splitter XLR Input and output, 4096 DMX Channel 8 Port Signal Amplifier for Stage Lighting Shows https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FP8NN17/re ... UTF8&psc=1

This controller is not available at the moment und it seems like that Chamsys MagicQ needs also a specially USB-DMX interface for output. Also, the GUI of the Mac Version, isn't really good. For me it seems to be very "unsorted".

But thanks for this information.