Hello all,
I'm new to controlling lighting, it's something I've gotten into recently after buying a couple of tripars to add a bit more lighting to the band setup.
It's kinda snowballed. Before I knew it I'd downloaded QLC+, got a interface and was plugging lights together and making scenes, chasers etc.
I then watched Massimo's tutorials and saw the benefit of a linear RGB matrix to add control over my lights - there aren't hundreds - there are in fact 12 of varying quality.
I really struggled getting just 6 of my best lights (QTX/ ADJ) to work. The ADJs worked fine but the others wouldn't. I couldn't see a problem with the fixture profile as I could control all the parameters easily enough in scenes and chasers - I'd even remembered to reset the simple console after I'd been checking channels etc. to make sure I wasn't manually overriding.
I nearly gave up.
In the end I took the last ditch to look exactly at the fixture definition for the ADJ fixture that was already in the database. I saw one difference between that and my other lights, that I had to make profiles for, and found it was down to fixture settings. In my naivety I had set the colour channels as colour changers, given them a name and set the range that I needed - I'd even made sure that the icon was the correct colour!
This was the problem. If you're new to this, and have made some definitions to fit your hotchpotch of lights that you've accrued, and finally want to control them, look carefully at how you are building the fixture definitions.
Remember to set the colour channels (RGBUV etc.) to be "Intensity' and then from the dropdown menu (it defaults to Generic) select the colour that channel represents. Once I did this it all worked brilliantly and it has opened up a whole host of options for me now through combining RGB with chasers and scenes in collections etc.
Win!
Win 2 follows:
I was amazed at the cheapest set of LED PARs I have (used around the drums as a wash) through the settings and shady manual that came with it said it had 2 channels - speed/ effect. Not great when I'd want to control RGB etc. but I just muddled them in with the rest of my scenes to do the best they could. However, I found that playing around with the simple console that this 3 channel LED PAR actually had 'hidden' features it looks like this:
1: Intensity
2: Speed
3: Effect
4: x
5: x
6: Green
7: Blue
8: Red
A quick edit in the fixture editor (using the right channel labels!!) suddenly unlocked 2x LED PARs to work perfectly within a RGB matrix! I was SO close to picking up another set of TriPARS to just have more functionality, I'm glad I didn't.
This may all seem like über simple stuff to you guys; I feel like I've just cracked the meaning of the universe. Haha.
I hope this helps anyone who is really new to this stuff and is having problems and would like to problem solve a little longer before posting!
Q Light Controller+
Official forums of the QLC+ project