- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, I wanna give you a beginner's guide
or a beginner's tutorial as to how to program DMX lighting.
What we have in front of me is an analog DMX controller
and two LED lights.
This should be enough to demonstrate the concepts
that are required if this is your first time
or as an introduction to LED lighting and DMX controlling.
So first we'll turn the lighting console on.
Now by default most small controllers will activate
a blackout mode.
If this blackout mode is on, that means
it's not sending signal to any of your lighting fixtures,
so please turn that off.
For the Elation Stage Setter 8, I prefer to run it
in 16 channel mode, that means that each fader
is controlling a different DMX channel.
Now when we connect the DMX controller to the LED light,
it's sending 512 different channels down a single cable.
This controller can only send 16 channels at a time.
Now each channel that it sends, so say for channel one here
if we move it up, that's sending a value
of between zero and 255.
So that's 256 different channels, just on the first,
there's 256 different values just on the first channel.
And each channel also has 256 different values
that is sending.
So there's a lot of data coming over a single cable.
Now when we connect this cable, it has three pin XLR.
So it's literally the exact same connector
as a microphone cable, but because of all the data
that's going down this cable, it's a different cable
than an XLR microphone cable.
You cannot use a microphone cable for DMX lights.
You might get away with it once or twice,
but more often than not it'll cause more grief
than it's worth, so just buy the proper cables
or make your proper cables but it has to be a DMX cable,
it has a different level of resistance to send all
that data down the cable.
So like I said, this console
is sending 512 different channels.
Each channel is sending values between zero and 255.
So how do we get these lights to know
what they're listening for?
These lights and most LED lights have different DMX modes,
so what I've done here to keep the demonstration simple,
is I've put both of these lights in a four-channel mode.
So if you hit menu, you can see it's in four-channel mode.
I hit enter, and I want this light to listen to DMX one,
so what does all that mean?
It means that this light is listening
to four channels at once.
Now if you look it up in the manual,
it'll tell you what four channel, what four channels
is listening for.
Whatever the address that you set this light to,
the first channel will be red, then green,
then blue, then amber okay?
So if we set this to DMX address one,
I'll put this on the lighting console just so you can see.
The first channel is red, so if we turn that up,
you'll see red, then green for number two,
then blue for number three, then amber for number four.
Now these lights they have different modes,
like this particular light you could put it
into 10 channel mode.
So that's red, green, blue, amber,
there'll be a overall dimmer,
so you can set the overall fixture brightness.
There'll be strobes and there'll be different effect modes
and programs that it can run,
but for now we're just gonna worry about static colors,
'cause if we're at a corporate event,
we're generally just pushing a color mix.
Now another note is that you can color mix,
because it's listening to all 512 channels at once,
it knows it's only supposed to listen to four at a time,
but it can listen to four at a time.
So we can push up red and blue and we'll get,
oh, sorry, red and green will give us this yellow,
we can do red and blue to give us this purple,
we can do red and amber gives us this orange,
you can color mix however you want.
Now what if we want both lights to do the same thing,
that's super easy.
First we connect the DMX cable.
So we'll come out of the first fixture,
into the second fixture.
And again, we'll make it the same,
so we'll put it in for channel mode DMX one.
So both of these lights are set to DMX address one,
which means they're both listening to the same set
of data coming down the controller.
So if we go red,
green, blue, amber,
they'll do the same thing.
Now what if we want them to do different things?
Well, we need the second lighting fixture
to listen for another set of addresses.
Now the first light we want to listen to one, two, three,
four, red, green, blue, amber.
So we have to stay away from those channels.
So what we'll do is we'll start listening at channel five
for a new set red, green, blue, amber.
So we go up, so still in for channel mode,
we're just setting the starting address to five.
So the first lighting fixture we want red,
so we go push up number one.
The second light say we also want it to be red,
now we push up number five,
because that's what it's listening for,
it's listening for five, six, seven, eight.
It's in for channel mode and it's starting at five.
And if we want a different color, we can do that as well,
we can push amber, blue, green,
and that's how you can do odd and even lights
all around the room.
Now you can keep going with this,
if you had a third light that you want a different color
you would started at nine.
Because we're already using one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, so the next available channel
would be nine.
And say we put a third fixture there,
then the next one would be 13,
because we'll be using one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12,
and the fourth fixture will be 13,
and just keeps going and going.
Now a couple things not to confuse you but just to touch on,
how do those big concerts do it all?
They use, so like I said
this single cable carries 512 channels,
that's known as a universe in the lighting world.
So some lighting fixtures, some moving lights
can use hundreds of channels depending on what you're doing,
so they just keep adding universes.
So there's more complicated ways to do it, but essentially
you just keep adding sets of 512 channels
to your lighting console and the digital,
the larger digital consoles can manage all that.
But for us, for our LED lights, this is more than enough.
You can control four different sets with a single console
and a single universe.
If you have any questions about the concepts I've explained
or if you think anything could be explained
a little bit better, please leave a comment
in the comment section below.
We'll do a similar video with the similar concepts
but how to do it all wirelessly right
after we film this one.
Thanks for watching and please like and subscribe
if you found it helpful because that helps
other people find the video better, thanks.