DMX Controllers

Hey,

Is anyone able to give me a brief overview of these? Like how to connect to light and assign them. Are they just for stage lighting or for lasers and strobes aswell?

Any recommendation with 4-7 channels?

Thanks

I think you should just go with an enttec pro or open and freestyler software as you can fairly easily program scenes that your lighting will perform.

dmx is a protocol very similar to midi, it has 512 individual addresses in a dmx universe, that means you can connect as many lights adding up to 512 in a daisy chain. With freestyler you can use any midi controller to control the program on stage or if you have vdj pro there is a plugin that passes the beatgrid to freestyler and can control it using preset cues in your tracks of which you have 99 to use, so you can create very complex lighting designs before you go to the club and they will play both in sync with the music and the song position, this means you could program a strobe on a build up, of fade to black on breakdown etc... It has amazing possibilities, and the best part is you can run freestyler on a netbook over a network between it and your gig laptop, so no slowing down your cpu ;)

In regard to lights you can use anything that responds to dmx so this does include strobes and non animation lasers. Animation lasers use idla to communicate with seperate software although a lot also use dmx for basic patterns, so check the specs before you buy.

When i get freestylermx it doesn't download on my MAC. Is there a MAC version?Is there anyway to program the programs with traktor? I shall Investigate freestyler.And how would i connect the lights to freestyler?

No unfortunately not, last I checked freestyler doesn't respond with midi clock, sbdj used hid to send the beatgrid through to freestyler, you can use s2l "sound to light" freestyler, but it's pretty shoddy.

To connect the lights you just need a dmx to usb dongle, there are many but the "enttec pro" is the best and it's reasonably priced at around $300, it gives you a failsafe scene so if your computer crashes it will play that scene, you also get 4 dmx universes so 2048 individual addresses and it's supported in everything as it's the standard, The cheaper option from enttec is the "enttec open" it's only got one universe, no failsafe, draws a little more cpu and the support isn't quite as good, I got one off ebay for about $80 a while ago.

If you want to save a little coin on the pro "dmx king" from New Zealand makes a copy for about $100 less and a few different features.