PixelMad with moving heads...

[RobF]

...is pretty simple!

Did a demo last week using Pixel-Lines and Ayrton Eyecolor moving head head LED fixtures.

The Eyecolor is a 10-channel 16 bit mover with an LED "eye".

They were addressed on the fixtures as 1, 11, 21 etc.

The colour is controlled as RGB on channels 5,6 and 7.

I patched them in PixelMad as single RGB fixtures placed in the DMX preview in position between the Pixel-lines which were arrayed on a grid of truss.

On PixleMad I had Outputs 1 and 2 patched full with 9 Pixel-lines in 54 channel mode.

Output 3 had the 10 Eyecolors.

They were patched at 5, 15, 25 etc. leaving gaps for the DMX movement.

My DMX control came from a Hog with the PixelMad layers on universe 1 and the Eyecolors patched in normal 10 channel mode on output 2.

I fed the DMX ouput 1 from the hog into Input A on the Ether-Lynx box as per normal.

This Input was set to universe 9 to avoid conflicting with any of the possible 8 outputs of the PixelMad version I was using (PixelMad 4).

I fed the second universe from the Hog into Input B of the etherlynx.

I set this to input 3.

Because the Ether-lynx processes inputs with the same address as an (HTP) (highest takes precedence) merge the effect was to combine the colour info from PixelMad output C with the colour and movement info coming from the desks output 2.

If I set the desk control of colour for the eyecolors to zero all the control would come from PixelMad giving me the freedom to control all the LEDs in the rig from one piece of video.

Similarly for some looks I could black out PixelMad and control the colour in a normal "by channel" way from the desk.

Most pleasing of all this required no extra equipment on top of the normal PixeMad setup of DMX desk, Macintosh, software and Artistic License Ether-lynx box.


Rob Fowler

Projected Image Digital