Moving head issues

[hennez]

Hello everybody
I use Daslight DVC4 to control my lighting system as a mobile DJ. My main setup consists of the following components:
• Stairville CLB4 RGB Compact LED Bar 4 (4 LED spotlights)
• Cameo Superfly XS (2-in-1 derby effect and strobe)
• ADJ Stinger II (moonflower, strobe and laser effect)
• Cameo Thunder Wash 100W (strobe, blinder and wash light)
• Antari Z-350 Professional Fazer
And optionally from:
• Cameo HydraBeam 4000 RGBW (4 individually controllable 32 W RGBW quad-LED moving heads)
• Cameo NanoSpot 300 (mini moving head)
For the CLB4 LED Bar I manually created scenes with color changes that change according to the music beat (midi clock). I trigger the derby and moonflower effects in the internal, music-controlled programs. I am quite happy with that.
My problem are the moving heads:
1. The movements cannot be controlled according to the beat of the music. When creating the scene (the movement), very small movements are created between the steps (see also point 2). So the moving head only moves in slow motion in live mode. So far I have controlled the speed of the movements of the moving heads in live mode manually with a slider on the midi controller.
2. The purpose of compression is very difficult to understand, and the settings cannot be reproduced.
3. After creating a (motion) scene (generate button), the settings for compression and effect generator are reset. This means that a reproduction of the same setting cannot be restored.
4. The window to set the movement pattern is very small and makes it difficult to position the moving heads precisely.
5. The movements of the moving heads are not limited. For example, the moving heads also move backwards against the wall. This problem is very well solved in the lightrider app.
The last update of DVC4 is now over a year ago. Can you expect an update regarding the points mentioned here (is more a question for the developers)? Or do you have a solution for one or the other point?

[TomHat]

Hello,

The movement effect control in Dalight4 has been thought a little differently from the one in lightrider. The control itself doesn't really show the position of the light, but more the DMX values. It has been made clear since then that this was not the way to go, and we shall make changes for next versions of our software solution.

Now, about synching your movement effects : you might want to generate your movement effect without using the effect generator on this one. The generated effect will be made of a bunch of steps ; probably even too many for your taste. This just doesn't work well with midi synch, as you can't control precisely the amount of steps you'll get once the effect is generated.

Steps compression really just removes the steps containing the same DMX values. For example :
If you have a pack of 10 steps of 1 second each generated for an effect, and steps 3 and 4 both contain the same dmx values, one of them will be deleted, and their durations will be merged (1sc + 1sc). In this example, instead of having 10 steps, you will only have 9 after compression.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

[hennez]

Hello TomHat,

thank you for your reply and sorry for my late reply.

Unfortnately it doesn't help, yet. So what procedure do you recommend for programming movements of moving heads? Or is daslight even suitable for controlling the movements of moving heads?

You wrote, that you planned changes for the next version of daslight? When do they will released? Is daslight then suitable for controlling the movements of moving heads?

Best regards,
Björn

[TomHat]

Hello,

Sorry, I will try to elaborate more :

1. In order to better control the movements of your moving heads, I stand by what I wrote earlier and recommend that you create the steps yourself, instead of with the effect generator. You will get a better control over your steps duration.

2-3. Compression only merges identical steps. You might want to use it, but I'm not sure there is a point in trying so hard to reproduce the exact same compression between 2 scenes.

4. We understand this point. This is another reason to use steps and not effects, actually. If you chose to use steps, you can edit your values from the P/T grid, but also from the sliders in the "faders" view. That's much more precise.

5. Daslight4 doesn't have this feature, sadly.... We're thinking of it for next versions.

Also, if you wish to run your scene faster or slower, you can find a speed slider on your scene button in live mode. Maybe this can help too ?

Regards,