This week on the Podcast we have our Q+A Tuesday! Join us as we take questions from listeners just like you and help walk them through to the thought process of their situation.

If you have a question you would like to share be sure to submit it here: Contact Form and there will be an option to allow you to leave your voice message.

If you’re new here and you’re not sure how or where to get started with your lighting be sure to take this Quiz and I will send you a Guide based on your answers to help get you pointed in the right direction.

How to Begin with Lighting Quiz

Main Segment (1:33)

Charlie (1:36) I work for a sound and lighting company and have been watching your videos and reading your website for a long time now. 
I have a question I was wondering you can help me with. We have installed LED tape and moving heads in a night club, and the DJ booth where the pc and DMX buffer is located is on a different power phase then the power for the LED tape. Could the difference phases cause some interference with the lights as we are getting very random flashes. 

There’s a couple of ways to check this. First, make sure the negative or ground wire on all your tapes and your power supply are grounded. Another way to test the LED Tape is to try to run a power cord and connect the LED Tap to that power source. That may help you find out what is causing the issue.

Another option would be to get a DMX Terminator and tertminating your DMX to see if that is causing the issue.

Ridge (3:36) I’ve been working in D-pro for a few months now (Thanks for the tutorials btw!) and I was wondering if you had a work-around for the cuelist issue of crossfades. Basically, when I want two scenes in a cuelist to cross fade, instead of keeping the same attributes across two scenes, it drops or “dips” down everything before fading back in. This includes colors, dimmer and positions. To compensate I tried setting a 0sec fade in and longer fade outs which almost works but then it stacks any percentages that weren’t at 100%. (So scene 1 has a dimmer at 50, scene 2 has a dimmer of 50, when stacked now that fixture jumps to 100% until it fades out). Other lighting software can tell when two scenes have those same attributes but maybe D-pro can’t? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

The cuelist functionality in D-Pro is not great, unfortunately. What I would recommend doing is in the show control window, instead of doing a bunch of cuelists, I would do individual cues on different buttons.

I’ve found that if you put them inf the same radio group they fade in and out much better.

Andy (5:35) Hi, I think you are writing about US lighting but I can’t see that it says anywhere on your site. As every country is different (I believe) and I’m in the UK it’s a problem. Can I suggest you say somewhere what country (or countries) your advice applies to?

My advice does apply worldwide. There are things that of course will not apply such as power but in everything else it does apply. Most manufacturer’s sell lights and equipment and the do ship worldwide.

Most of the advice that I do offer is focused on how to set up lighting, work with consoles, ect and that doesn’t apply to one part of the world.

Ronaldo (10:00) I’m an aspiring light operator, I need more idea on how to operate a lighting console, specifically Avolites. Or what is better?

There are a lot of consoles out there that can create a great show. I’m always attending trade shows to explore the new technology and what makes our lives easier as lighting operators.

I’ve mentioned this many times with others but one of my favorite consoles for newer lighting operators is Elation’s Onyx. You can read more information about this console here: Starting with Onyx

What I do recommend is to seek out the people that you would like to work with in the future and find out what consoles they are working with. Realistically, if these are the ones you want to get your foot in the door with you want to know how to work with their equipment.

Closing (13:52)

If you tuned in last week you may have heard that we have some exciting changes coming in our upcoming podcast episodes. Beginning on March 19th we’re going to be starting an interview series with different lighting people with different backgrounds.

In next week’s episode, we will be discussing how to get started with professional grade consoles so be sure to tune in!

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