Patching Some Fixtures

Edward Updated by Edward

Below is the magic sheet diagram of the fixtures used in the examples showing their types, relative positions and channel assignments:

Channels 1-6 are conventional incandescent luminaires connected to dimmers and used for area lighting.

Channels 7-10 are Vari-Lite Cantata LED Fresnels used for washes.

Channel 11 is a Vari-Lite Aurora LED Strip used for the cyclorama. This fixture has 12 independently controllable cells.

Channels 12 & 13 are VL2600 Spotlights. These are movable fixtures and can be aimed at any part of the stage. They have other programmable features such as color, gobo wheels, iris, zoom and frost.

The following steps will patch the fixtures shown in the magic sheet:

[PATCH] – Pressing this key will open the patch window, replacing the Live display:

For a detailed description of this window, see Patch Window.

NEO Notes & Tips: The columns in the Patch Detail Pane above have been reordered from the factory default to show the relevant data for this tutorial.

By default, a new show is created with a 1:1 patch of all channels defined by the system (default: 1000 channels). Patching fixtures will overwrite this standard patch.

For this tutorial, Channels 1-6 will be left patched as is. However, information will be entered later in the “Position”, “Purpose” and “Color” columns to aid in selecting fixtures in Live Mode.

Next, the 4 LED Fresnels will be patched. The model is “CANTATA LED FC (SOCC)”.

First, the fixture model must be selected from the “Fixtures Pane” in the lower right quarter. This pane contains a list of all makes & models included in the current fixture library. There are a couple of ways to select the desired fixture:

  1. Use the 4
    Encoder wheel to position the list to the make entry (“VARILITE”). Pressing the encoder wheel will open the highlighted make to show a list of models. Use the Encoder wheel to position the list to the desired model (“CANTATA LED FC (SOCC)”) and press again to select.
  2. Tap the “Fixture Make/Model” edit box at the bottom of the pane and start entering the model using the physical or on-screen keyboard. As characters are entered, a list of matches appears above the edit box. Keep typing until the desired model appears in the list. Tap on that entry to select the desired fixture. In this example, typing “cant” will bring the “CANTATA LED FC (SOCC)” model into view.

Next, a DMX address block must be chosen to accommodate the functions of the fixture(s) to be patched. In this case, Each Fresnel needs 18 addresses. For this example, a starting address of 11 will be used. If the fixtures are addressed sequentially, the following key sequence will patch all 4 Fresnels to Channels 7-10:

[7] [THRU] [1][0] [@] [1][1] [ENTER]

NEO Notes & Tips: The physical fixtures would be configured to respond to the correct starting addresses. For this example, Fixture 7 starts at 11, Fixture 8 at 29, Fixture 9 at 47, Fixture 10 at 65.

In a similar manner, the Aurora LED Strip (model: “Aurora 12 (SOCC Group 12)”) will be patched at address 101 and the two Vari-Lite spots (model: “VL2600 Spot (16bit)”) starting at address 251.

[1][1] [@] [1][0][1] [ENTER] – Patch LED Strip at 101 (uses 149 addresses).

[1][2] [+] [1][3] [@] [2][5][1] [ENTER] – Patch 2 spots, starting at address 251 (each uses 37 addresses).

The resulting patch is shown below in the partial screen capture:

After the fixtures were patched, the columns “Position”, “Purpose” and “Color” were filled in with pertinent information that will allow selecting fixtures in Live based on the entries.

How did we do?

Creating a New Show

Live Channel Control

Contact