#Connecting lights to lightkey mac

QLab also supports instruments with more than one parameter. Conventional lights, controlled by dimmers, have a single parameter: intensity. Each instrument has one or more parameters. Your workspace will therefore need one instrument for every lighting fixture, DMX-controlled accessory, and dimmer in your plot. In QLab, an instrument represents a single physical DMX-controlled object in the world.

You can also define light groups which behave as shorthand for collections of instruments. There, you create instruments in the workspace and map them to the Art-Net/DMX addresses of real lights or dimmers in the physical world. You do this for each QLab workspace in the Light section of Workspace Settings. The Light Patchīefore you can use lights in Light cues, you need to tell your workspace which lights it will be controlling, and what DMX addresses those lights are using. You cannot plug such a device straight into an ethernet network and expect anything to happen. It’s important to keep in mind that while the connector is physically identical, the language being “spoken” is not ethernet or Art-Net. You will sometimes encounter DMX-controlled devices which use RJ-45 connectors, which are the type of connector used for ethernet. Levels in DMX range from 0 to 255, although most equipment represents that range on a percentage scale of 0 to 100. The dimmer will ignore the data for the rest of the DMX universe. If the cable that carries this DMX data is plugged into, say, a rack of dimmers that are addressed as 1 through 24, then that frame of DMX will set dimmer 1 to 50, dimmer 2 to 75, dimmer 3 to 8 and so on up to 24. In this frame, address 1 is set to 50, address 2 is set to 75, address 3 is set to 8, and address 512 is set to 0. (The … represents the rows for addresses 4 through 511.) You can imagine a frame of DMX like this: Address The status of the entire group of 512 channels is broadcast every 23 milliseconds or so that’s called one frame of data. One universe contains 512 channels, and each channel is simply an address paired with a value. DMX is generally transmitted using five-pin XLR cables, with one cable carrying a single universe of DMX. A Very Brief Introduction To DMXĭMX, which is short for Digital Multiple X, is a venerable, reliable digital communication standard for lighting equipment.

#Connecting lights to lightkey mac

These devices connect directly to your Mac over USB, and output DMX using a traditional XLR-3 or XLR-5 DMX connection. The second way QLab can communicate with lighting equipment is by using any of the following compatible USB-DMX interfaces: QLab is compatible with any Art-net interface that uses ethernet or WiFi. To connect to DMX-controlled lighting equipment, you’ll need an Art-Net interface, often called a node, which is a device that receives Art-Net messages from a network and outputs DMX messages over a traditional DMX connection. While some lighting instruments and dimmers are able to receive and directly interpret Art-Net messages, most lighting equipment must be controlled using the DMX control protocol. QLab sends Art-Net messages into the network, and those messages are received by other devices on the network which can interpret Art-Net messages. The first is by using the Art-Net protocol, which uses an ethernet or WiFi network to transmit data. QLab 4 communicates with lighting equipment in two ways. Thereafter, and throughout the rest of this documentation, bold text will be used in the traditional manner, as well as to indicate a menu name (such as the File menu.) How QLab Communicates With Lights

This is meant to help you notice that you’re being introduced to a new idea. On this page, every time a new tool, interface item, or concept that we feel is particularly essential is mentioned, it will appear in bold text.