What's the best setup for controlling a handleful of lights?

[orbita]

Hi,

I've been playing with Avenue/Arena demo. Made some fun visuals and really enjoyed how it works. I've also got a couple of ChauvetDJ scan110 lights and plan plan to buy a few more and see that the arena supports DMX although I'm not sure to what extent.

Whats the simplest way to control my lights with Resolume? What hardware do I need? I don't really want to buy a desk. I've got various midi controllers I could use already that I started mapping the visuals too.

I'm using a macbook pro.

I saw a couple of cheap DMX controllers online such as:
- http://www.velleman.co.uk/contents/en-uk/p310.html
- https://www.dv247.com/en_GB/GBP/Enttec- ... 011945-000
- https://www.dv247.com/en_GB/GBP/Enttec- ... 005090-000
- https://www.dv247.com/en_GB/GBP/Showtec ... 016709-000

But on this forum I saw this post saying USB-DMX is no longer supported.

https://resolume.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15220

Will any of those hardware options work? Do I need to look at something else?

Can Arena control the motion of moving head lights as well as colour? Are there and demos/examples of how this is done?

Many thanks, Tom

[Grimm90]

Well even it's possible to control your lights fully with resolume, i still would recommend looking at dmx software like QLC+ , Onyx , Chamsys ..
These are designed for the task and will work way more fluently, and also will work with some USB DMX devices like you listed.

But to come back on your question , you will need a Artnet-node and a router and some cat5 cables.
You hook up your node & your pc to the same network using the router , configure your artnet-node and it should show up in your advanced output of Arena. Make sure it's in the same IP/subnet range as your pc.

Then you need to configure your fixtures in Resolume. It's in the manual somewhere.
For the rest think of it as DMX, just using artnet as a protocol to get transported.

You can control movement and colour but it's not as straight forward as a light controller or dmx software.
As Resolume bases itself on intensity to give a dmx value to a channel , you need to have clips / sources in resolume playing going from black to white, and send that data to the right channel.
White = 255 max value in a dmx channel.

So quick example , on layer one you have a fading strobe black to white. If you assign the intensity channels of a lamp fixture to this layer, it will follow the intensity.
If you would assign X pan channels to this layer, it will pan to 100% when the layer hits 100% white.

But take something like a simple RGB led can, you need to configure it properly in the resolume fixture editor, so the channels in the fixture profile correspond with your physical light's channels.
The fixture will then be added to your advanced output as "one pixel", which will take the average color of where it's placed on the canvas. It will translate this value into 3 DMX channels to make the right color on your fixture (Dmx1=red100 - Dmx2=blue20 - Dmx3=green220) .

Hope it makes sense, resolume is great for controlling colors and led pixel tape stuff.
Controlling moving heads is just not so easy with it.

[orbita]

Hi Grimm, thanks for your response.
I think for my needs I'll check out the software you suggest first.
Kind regards, Tom