Freestyler 512

[adonex]

I second all who said Chamsys. I'm not a massive laser buff like you all but am a lampy by nature and when it comes to the best cheap lighting software MagicQ wins every time. Their interfaces are affordable and you can run pretty much everything off them including video. Its being used by large LD's more and more these days. But still, nothing better than a GrandMA

[colouredmirrorball]

I must say I don't like Chamsys. The Windows program version that is. It feels clunky and unnecessarily convoluted. I get that it's because it originated from their console, but it feels like they just recreated the console on the computer, and badly at that.

Now I have to say I'm biased because I only used Chamsys a couple times but the pattern was always the same: I was doing the lights and because my humble setup was no match for the venues, the organisators hired a company which brought a Chamsys controller with two or if I'm lucky three programs for each fixture group. Of course it was password protected so I could not make programs myself. Try doing band lighting with that... It felt like it was really hard to just take control of individual fixtures and make them form a scene, even without the password protection.

But all of that is subjective and people will undoubtedly argue that you get what you pay for.

The thing I like least about Chamsys is that it is even worse lock-in than Pangolin. If you want to use a MIDI controller you need to spend €400 on their MIDI interface. They don't even support other's MIDI interfaces! So if you want to send MIDI data to it from your computer you need another MIDI output device and physically connect it to their MIDI input device! But why would you want to use another controller because their way is best, right?

Yuk, no thanks.