Introduction to give a little background. Please ignore this paragraph if not relevant. I've just bought XPress512, the Akai APC Mini and downloaded ShowXpress all in a hurry after my first choice solution was unavailable until after Christmas and New Year holiday in the UK. My 20 year-old lighting desk decided to pack up and I need to light an event for New Years Eve so am getting desperate. I leave home on the 22nd and may not have a data service until I get to the venue on the 28th. I imagined this solution would do everything I wanted but can't at the moment get the basics to work. I've been doing lighting for 40+ years and IT for 35, and frankly expected the software to do certain things out of the box, but it appears not. I've watched several hours of the Youtube video's and seem to have found a gap in the functionality of the software.
The set up. For this event I'm using 4 LEDJ 9Hex10 LED Intense SlimPar http://www.prolight.co.uk/ftp-in/LEDJ254A_Manual.pdfthat are RGBWAUV Par's, plus a couple of DJ specific lights. The letter are not the issue and I've got those working reasonably well. I also need to link to the house dimmer based rig so have those set up on DMX 1 thro 24. I've put the LEDJ's on 51 - 60, 61- 70, 71- 80 and 81- 90, with the other devices above that.
The issue. I want to be able to chase the SlimPar's but I can't find anything to allow me to do this. Ideally I want two, three and four colour chase, and overall speed, slope and dimmer controls. So to give an example. Yellow and Cyan on opposite pair's so that each PAR is either Yellow or Cyan. or the all Yellow with a single Cyan chasing through. From the training video I can see how you would do that in Pan/Tilt for a group of movers. but I just want it for colours. Eg; Magenta and Blue, Red and Green etc. I'd also want to go to three and four colour chases, but I don't seem able to do this without hours of programming time in Steps. Hours I don't have. If I try to do it in generator, there appears to be no way of off-setting the four PAR's in the same way as you can in PAN-tilt, and to get the colours I need three DMX channels selected [channel 1 (master dimmer), channel 8 (between 001 and 041), and then pick the colour from Channel 9].
I just can't get this to work.
I've yet to connect the Midi desk because I can't get the basic's to work, but Ideally want to throw some static colour states onto buttons, and the chases onto others. It would appear from the video's that it would be easy once the buttons are defined, and I'm really hoping this is true. However, without the chases, at the moment the button's I've defined in Live are just controlling the colour of all 4 units together. (All red, all Cyan etc.). I have set up steps for unit's 1 & 3; 2 & 4 etc under each colour, and can see how I could use a macro to turn on 1 & 3 as Yellow and 2 and 4 as Cyan at the same button push, but it seems horribly complicated when this functionality was all inbuilt in my old desk originally designed back in the 1980's!
It's likely that I'm being stupid, or I've bought the wrong thing, but I've used product's like M-PC and MagicQ that do this so easily,. I expected this to do the same as it's aimed more at the disco end of the market.
Unfortunately I have some IT consultancy work I must do this week so can't spend hours on end trying to programme or get my head around this, so watching hours more of video is not really an option. Can anyone help with some easy pointers please?
Many thanks .... Robin