Hi, so I’m the light designer at my church. I’m new to it, so when they installed the lights, I wasn’t involved in how it got done. But now I’m in charge of the lights and the software and all that.
We have LED ellipsoidals and half of them are run through DMX relays (again I’m new to programming but honestly I didn’t see the need to make relays instead the regular way of patching)
The person who patched everything assigned the “relay group” to a fader and told us to never put the fader down when doing a service. So I took it upon myself to lock that fader so that nobody would replace that fader with some other cuelist or group.
What’s been happening for quite some time is on the screen, the relay fader keeps going up and down, even though the MV fader is perfectly still. And the relay fader is the only fader doing that. So I don’t know if it’s a fader issue, a relay issue, software, etc.
Tough question to be honest. There are some possibilities:
- You do have a faulty fader. When you say the fader is moving on screen can you actually see this for yourself in the virtual console view? How much is it moving by? Is it “jittering” a small % and passing through the point at which the relay turns on/off? Does it do this jitter continually? If the answer is Yes, you possibly have a bad fader. This can be fixed.
OR 2) does the fader move and stay there, for example move from 100% to 0% or Vice versa? If this is the case I would suggest it is console programming / fader gating behavior that is exhibiting this symptom.
You could actually test both of these theories by moving your relay cuelist assignment to a different fader. Does the problem follow the cuelist, or is it isolated to the specific fader assignment?
Feel free to submit a support request with the answers to these questions. We can officially pick it up from there.
It’s good practice to power off your LED fixtures when not in use. This saves the PSUs dying over prolonged use… and so on. DMX power relays can offer an easy way of managing this.
Would I personally assign a power relay to console fader, especially in a (assuming) volunteer led scenario - absolutely not ! But that’s totally up to you . Things I would potentially explore:
-
Remove the power relay cuelist from a playback fader.
-
Could this be a two cue cuelist ? Cue 1 power on, cue 2 power off? You can set the cuelilst to fire cue 1 on loading the show (within the cuelist properties). You then have to explicitly go hunting to fire cue 2 to power off when you want to shut the fixtures down. This would arguably be much harder than accidentally pulling down a wrong fader. (also set this cuelist property to "ignore release all) .
-
What are the options on the DMX relay? Does it have a "when DMX lost " mode? For example, there might be an option to power off the relay on DMX loss after X minutes. This would be the best option in my opinion. If something like this could happen what I would do is - Not use a relay cuelist at all. Default the home preset (defualt) value to be “power on”. Then when you shut down the console, after X minutes the fixtures will automatically power off. ( I would also hide the fixture icons from any layouts )
Jack
1 Like