basic par can dmx rig. HELP!

[soundmanjim]

Hi everyone.

I'm involved in a small festival locally this year, and the organizer has given me £300 to go toward setting up reasonable stage lighting; ;D
the stage is a 40ft lorry trailer and so i thought 10 par56 across the front would suffice;
what i am wrestling with at the moment is loading and dmx control, I'm thinking of ordering 10 par56 short cans with 300w medium flood bulbs and 2 showtec multidims (botex) which is about all i can get out of £300 without going too mad . I will still obviously need the dmx desk and dmx cable.
The organizer said we can keep the lights to use at our club as long as every year he gets to use them, which i think is a good deal!
He also says what we can't get out of the £300 he will just hire, although we may just buy the dmx desk anyway out of our takings.

What i need to know is this:

the showtec controllers are rated at 5 Amps per channel, and its a bit tight but i reckon i could run two cans off of each channel (the showtec has two iec's for each channel) and use the second showtec to control some spare cans we have at the club. Will this work? Or is it better to spread the load among the dimmers? (IE red yellow green blue on each separate channel on each dimmer as opposed to pairs into one dimmer)
Colour-wise i was thinking of using red/green/blue/amber and white, the white aimed centrally to the stage to light up lead singers and assist in changeovers etc.
The desk i was thinking of buying was the botex dj mingle as its cheap and seems to cover all we need for par cans and the odd smoko machine, is it just a simple matter of sending a dmx lead from it to the stage, into the first multidim, then dmx out to the next one and terminate it the other side? Sorry but I'm not eu-fait with dmx really, i just need to know soonish as I've got to order the lights shortly as the gig is 2nd July.

any thoughts?

cheers in advance!

[jim the soundman]

please?

[Gadget]

Hi Jim, The DMX is as you said ..daisy chain all dimmers from controller giving the first in the chain a starting address of 1.. usually set by dip switches. If the pack is a 6 way dimmer, the next pack needs a starting address of 7.. and so on. The controller will then send information to each pack in turn so the sliders relate to the channels. the above will give you a 12 way dimmer rig. having both packs set to 1 will give you a 6 way rig. A cheap controller to use is the behringer 24 channel on as it can be programmed with scenes to give chases as well as use as a manual 24ch desk.. I dont know about the Botox stuff as I use my own build dimmers with a demux unit. Get the par 56 cans with short nose and lamps with wide angle to give good spread of light. 300w lamps are not that bright esp behind blue filters so chose gels for not too strong a colour.

check out for desk
www.behringer.com/LC2412/index.cfm?lang=ENG

www.moving-lights.com/main.htm
For info on all things lampy !
Hope this helps
Gadget

[jim the soundman]

thankee very muchly mr gadget!! most helpful! 'gets out credit card' time to get spending!!

[John Bell]

Hi Jim,
I get most of my lighting equipment from www.terralec.com and www.sololighting.co.uk
As I have my hands full with the sound or drumming, I use the 2x Ryger DX403's and DX403PRO. They are great for semi-automated control of my 20x par56 cans and 2x NJD Quartet colour changer floods.
Both companies have cheaper kit and are worth a look.

[soundmanjim]

hi john

yes they are just up the road from me....but they couldnt compete with thomanns in germany for price!!! A Eurolight LC2412 was £212 inc VAT; Thomanns was £122 in VAT!!!!! . Also they were cheaper for the par cans too; i bought 10 par 56B short nose for £9.30 each ex bulbs, and the bulbs themselves were £10.29, and terralecs were £12.96!!

Also i ordered the gear last saturday and all the stuff turned up tuesday afternoon; not bad going i think!!!

I also have a couple of rygers at the club, 403's and a ryger touchlite which is built into the wall; but it keeps going onto standby by itself after a while so i think theres a fault there somewhere. ho hum.

I now have 2 (count 'em) showtec multi-dims, 40 metres of dmx cable, a eurolight 2412 and 10 par cans. Only thing i have to do now is cut the 5 pin off the dimmer end of the dmx cable and fit a 3 pin xlr on there as the only long cables i could get from germany were 5 opin, which the eurolight uses, if only three pins.

The only thing is, i thought there was meant to be a terminator in the dmx desk box; it mentions it in the instructions but i couldnt find one anywhere. Do i really need to terminate the dmx line after the second dimmer?

[soundmanjim]

AAAAND just when i thought it was still going to look a bit lame on the stage at the other festival im doing (Horndon Live festival) look what the local dj shop is lending us!!!

8x Par56 Cans
8 x Martin Robocolor I
4 x Martin Robocolor II
4 x Showtec Space Beams
1 x Smoke Machine
1 x Martin 2308 Controller
1 x 4 Channel Light Controller (For parcans)

that should look pretty good, no?

[John Bell]

Hi Jim,
I am not yet into DMX, as all of my dimming is currently done by the controllers. I park them in the DJ booth at the Rayners and all of the Bulgin cables are suspended by the T-bars and trussing, to keep them well away from the PA.
I was looking into upgrading to 3x 8 way, rack mounting dimmer packs from Ryger, but they never came into production. I was going to run them from a 24 channel lighting desk, using a spare multi-core channel.
I thought, in the end, it would be too much to handle on my own and I like the way I can use bits of my present rig for smaller gigs.
I have an outside, (marquee), charity gig coming up in July, with Release The Peach. I hope that there is enough power available.
Your borrowed rig looks like it will put on a spectacular show.

[soundmanjim]

it certainly did!

erm...the lighting truss i bouight off ebay the other day is now nicely installed in the venue and the light spread is just what we were lacking before; so nice to be able to fade the lights in and out. Problem though....ive got absolutely NO IDEA how to program basic chases into this flipping Eurolite 2412. the manual is extensive but i still couldnt work out how to program a basic chase into it. I'll pay for someone to record their chases onto a memory card and send it to me!!! can anyone help here? Ive played with it for hours and i still cant get the b*gger to work!
if you have a eurolite 2412 and have saved chases to a memory card...sell it to me or let me borrow it so i can burn it into this one!! is there anything on the net that could help me here?