I'm looking for a DMX controller, but don't know too much about them. I get how DMX works, addressing, standards, signalling, but scenes and chases have me a bit baffled... Most controllers seem to offer for example, 30 banks of 8 scenes and 6 chasers...
I have DMX boards in 5 lasers which control blanking, 2 x servos, Individual R, G and B module brightness, X Flip, Y Flip, RB Flip. So each laser needs 9 channels and I am likely to add more lasers in the future. The most common option on the controllers seems to be 12 fixtures with 16 channels each, which I can live with.
What I want to do, is hit a button on my DMX controller and the lasers chase left to right, hit another button and they chase right to left, hit a third and they do a colour chase across the heads. At that point with only 6 chases I would only have 3 chases left at my disposal. This doesn't seem very many on the grand scheme of things. I can do this with the TTL chaser in LivePro, but that is limited to 32 channels and I need 45 for 5 lasers.
So can one of you lighting guru's point me in the direction of a decent, small, cheap controller (I'm not looking for a Pearl or anything that huge and expensive) that will allow me to run a bunch of different programs. And maybe explain what all this stuff means?
The way I see it is a scene is a static look for all my lights, so colour, brightness, position and so on and a chase allows me to play back a string of scenes to make the lights flash, change colour and move etc. When I see people on a Pearl, they seem to program hundreds of chases to keep the show looking different...
So surely there is something that can offer more than 6 chases without breaking the bank..
Cheers
Mark