A place to talk about show and studio lighting, light design and light control, whether that’s Hue bulbs, midi-driven light shows on your small DJ-style rig, or the ground packages for your next tour 
I didn’t see a dedicated thread, and I figured we should have one. I’m a relative lighting novice — self-taught over the past five years — but I run a small venue in Helsinki with about 40 instruments plus a bunch of Hue house lights, and I’m happy to answer questions if I can.
I’ll start off with some hard-learned opinions:
Of all the home automation wireless lighting systems, the Hues are the only ones worth touching (possibly with the Ikea Tradfri bulbs). You’re paying for the software stack, and while I have plenty of complaints still, all the others are much more likely to be unreliable and have weird failure modes. Buy once.
Cheap wireless DMX is also wildly unreliable. If you really need wireless, pony up for the Lumen Radio CRMX hardware. If you don’t need it badly enough to go there, it’s probably worth figuring out another option if you’re planning on using it live.
In general, “you get what you pay for” is pretty brutal in lighting. All the DJ level kit is great for flashing lights and dancing (obviously), but if you need good color mixing and fine dimming — anything approaching theater-style work — or video compatibility so you don’t get annoying flicker/bar artifacts, you’re going to have to pay. Money also buys you reliability, like crazy.
What are the brightest and warmest salt lamps and other types with a similar warmth for a good price?
Not something I’ve looked at, but you should be able to put any 2800k warm white bulb in a salt lamp that will fit, right?
Looking for ideas of a small dmx based setup to go with an opz that could be ported from a bedroom studio to a small venue. Going down weird rabbit holes with dmx decoders and power supplies and led vs pixel strips, channel limitations of the opz… it seems expensive too! Led or pixel strips seem like they would be nice and packable but the decoding and power supply really clutter it up. Tempted to go with something more streamlined but just exploring what seems to be a modest pro option of a Chauvet flex drive and 4 led strips comes in at $3k usd! Not even rgbw… I like the ability to scale dmx channels though to optimize the heavy channel demands of going pixel…
Anyone else navigating a similar path? Any lessons learned? Is the opz even worthwhile as a controller for more than a just a single light or something?
Do you actually need pixel addressability? It adds a ton of complexity and cost, and doing interesting stuff with it without either writing code or having a real lighting console with a lot of channels is tough, unless you just want to use effects that are built into the controller. You can get similar LED bar lights that aren’t pixel-addressable much more cheaply — most of the cost of pixel hardware is data handling, not the LEDs themselves.
When you say ported, do you mean bringing your lights with you physically, or that you’d plug your controller into the venue rig and run similar lighting effects on it?
From my experience, it’s not very difficult to grab a roll of WS2812B/neopixel LEDs, an Arduino/Teensy and a 5V/10A power supply, and roll your own. The electronics side is basically nonexistent unless you need a lot of LEDs, and the code takes a bit of getting used to but becomes a little creative coding exercise to program some basic patterns that can be triggered by MIDI. Using a Teensy (and possibly even Arduino too, haven’t checked) it can be programmed to be a class-compliant USB-MIDI device, so it’d plug right in to the OP-Z and not need any DMX interfacing, though it may not work with the lighting track. Instead you could send it note on/off messages, with each note assigned to a different pattern, and could sync to MIDI clock too. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and am very close to making myself now that I’ve been working with this stuff as a job for a few months and have seen how easy it is to get a basic setup going.
Yeah, it’s not hard to roll your own if you’re already handy with electronics and code, until you start looking at hundreds or thousands of pixels and you need to harden the systems for use on the road.
thanks for chiming in!
@Dymaxion No I don’t think I need pixel addressability, although I’m not actually even sure of the differences in how led vs pixel strips behave with the op’s messaging. As I understand it, the opz can only produce messages for 128 pixels, so that would be a pretty small setup indeed. Unless you can achieve something like scaling individual pixel messages across several pixels, like the Chauvet unit boasts ($). That data handing cost is a really good point though and I don’t have a strong reason to pay it given the opz doesn’t really seem very capable at this level.
Re: ‘ported’ I meant physically but I do like the plug out to venue lighting idea too. A few to several strips that can be strung out or mounted to gear with a dmx thru to venue lighting if it exists. Is that reasonable?
@pselodux This sounds super cool! Where does the arduino slot into the dmx setup? Is it between, in this case, the Enttec dmx usb pro (the only box ‘approved’ for opz) and the dmx decoder? or it replaces the decoder entirely? Compelling option if so but the rabbit hole certainly deepens with it!
solid point!
I think I’m just trying to get around the dmx decoder and power supply clutter and complexity, then I see these nice rugged chauvet flex strips and connections and I think there may be a better way, but it’s really just the order of magnitude more expensive way. I probably just need to accept the clutter and find ways to tighten it up.
According to your knowledge of setting these things up, do I need a separate 4 channel connection for each strip I string out? No stacking/splitting connections?
In my example it wouldn’t use DMX at all, and you’d just control it using a standard MIDI track. You wouldn’t get the direct control that the lighting track has, but you’d be able to program your own animations and wouldn’t be limited to 128 LEDs.
I believe there is a way to get Arduino to respond to DMX messages, but I haven’t looked into that.
Right. If you don’t need pixel addressability, I wouldn’t go that route — to get interesting results, you need a fair number of pixels and more complex effects.
If your goal is to learn how to drive show lights in time with your music, with the eventual goal of using them in a performance context, I’d start by just getting maybe four or eight bar-type LED fixtures and driving each one as a single light, via the Enttec DMX box. The fixtures will take DMX in directly, and you can concentrate on learning how to work with light in the context of your music, instead of learning Arduino programming and soldering.
If you can swing it, I’d suggest getting rgbw lights — having a real white instead of mixing it from rgb will give you a much cleaner white than you’ll get from cheap lights otherwise. If you’re getting 1m bars (a standard size), you want the kind with 9-16 individual LED units, instead of lots of little ones — they’re better looking and better built, and at least 70w total power across all the leds (e.g. 16x5W LEDs). Stuff in this category should be well enough built that you can take them with you to a venue later if you want to. You’ll also need some way to mount them; at home, this can just be bolting them to the wall, but you’ll need to think about how they’re mounted when you take them out later. The bar fixtures are pretty flexible, and they can work nicely along a ceiling or behind a table in the studio or around the front of a road case/DJ table at a venue.
The question about driving venue lights was mostly to understand what your goals are. Integrating your lights with the venue is a whole other pretty complicated subject, and honestly, I wouldn’t even think about trying it without a lighting console. It will take a fair amount of pre-planning, and most venues won’t let you dod it unless you’re the headliner or only act. That can come later 
Tl;Dr get some basic show lights and work on the art side first, and stick to standard show lighting wiring, so what you learn at home will translate to real world performance later.
I would personally reccomend avo titan 2 which allows to midi input for midi triggers. I’ve dabbled with all of the above boxes in a dmx context. Titan is way easier to programme, and has the advantage that a reasonable amount of venues use either titan, or one of the avo desks which runs exactly the same software. This means showfile exchange is possible pre gig. Also, may be worth considering hiring decent fixtures. There are plenty of helpfull and pro hire companies out there to build relationships with that have very nice kit beyond your purchasing power.
Most venues are very accomodating in my experience. All thats required is a patch list from the venue which they should already have, and then its just a case of creating a showfile, practice in titans visualizer and patching one or 2 cables into the venues universe /s. Its not complicated.
having used the chauvet flex drive epix system, couple of things:
4 strips per output max as it is essentially one universe per 4. This is also a limitation for the available power output per out.
The epix strip link cables are essentially cat5. Cable run lengths are extremly limited, i think the manual states the max overall length per out, cant remeber exactly what it is, but it aint very far. If you run lengths too long the power does not reach and data becomes sporodic and unreliable.
That’s easy if a) you have a real console and not an OP1 like @Analogic was taking about using, and b) depends having a fair bit of lighting experience under your belt. (And also, C, the venue having an accurate patch list, which, sure, for bigger venues, absolutely, but a pub with ten par cans, good luck)
Desk choices by venue seem to vary a lot by region and size — I’m curious where you are/what size range you’re talking about? (Genuine question)
I’ve seen a lot of Chamsys stuff and occasionally Avo in small to medium commercial venues here in the Nordics. State-funded event venues are all over the place; I’ve seen an MA2 light in a small public library in Oslo that apparently got a grant and had a tech guy who wanted some toys.
Perhaps more of a nice gimmick, but for cv signals this looks nice to experiment with:
https://somasynths.com/illuminator/
avo, chamsys and grand ma all have the ability to populate a patch list and can all do RDM if required. I am not reccomending using a venues in house desk. What im suggesting is that in my experience from touring the UK and the EU, venues are genrally helpful in providing information upon request. Titan 2 gives you a very low priced fully featured console with midi in that would work well in the context of midi music synch. The other options thus far are expensive, awkward to programme, and not very capable of producing an interesting controlled look imho.
If its just a pub with 10 par cans, chances are they arent even addressed or universed, and they are probably not worth using anywayz. lolz
Thanks for all your thoughts on this. I could see this strategy landing with lots of folks with an opz out there, not just me!
-100% agree with pixels, we can set them aside.
-That’s pretty close to the goal, but I’m pretty cold on the larger lighting boxes. A big part of my reasoning toward led strips. (rgbw for sure) I have a really small space but blending a few more cables/strips into the fray is no big deal.
-For driving venue lights, the idea was just to drive a dmx thru from the… dmx decoder, I suppose. And then hope for the best with whatever dmx plug out opportunity arises. But I might be thinking of dmx too much like midi to assume I could do these kinds of things?
The few options I’m mulling over at this point are:
-a decoder like the Enttec CVC4 driving a 10 m rgbw strip with sections of extension spliced into it in order to separate shorter sections of led strip from each other.
-the same with a stacked led strip connection at the CVC4 to use 10 m total in shorter strands instead of one long one. (Is this even possible?)
-One of these 12+ channel dmx decoders I see advertised with several patch points for an rgbw strip. (Some of these seem not able to drive rgbw though…)
I’m leaning toward the first option. Any thoughts in that case? Is splicing extensions into an led strip problematic from a dmx transmission perspective? I could always leave it intact. 10 m is quite a bit.
Ok so theres a couple of things here to be aware of:
Products like Epix or any other pixel tape is distinctly different to other led tape in that the pixel tape types have a tiny little chip in them that can recieve dmx data (typically over artnet) I call these tape types addressable. On the other hand, non addressable led tape recieves no dmx data, its just recieving voltage.
In order to work out how much tape you can run off any given decoder is going to involve some maths. For example, the enntec cvc4 is 20 amps split over 4 channels gives you 5 amps per channel. So you’ll need to work out what the amps per metre rating of whatever tape you use is rated at, AND also calculate the voltage drop over the distance of cabeling + tape. For safety reasons, i would advise installing in line fuses per channel rated at 5amps each, And once fully built getting it pat tested.
Running strips in series is entirely possible, but you need to be very aware of how many amps your cables can handle, and how many amps are able to pass through the strips. If you get the maths wrong, the first strip or cable in the series will be the first to melt. (which is why i suggest inline fuse.)
I once built a 32 channel led tape system, each channel was operating a 1m tape of just solid white smd 5050. The wiring was an absolute knightmare, soldering onto all the connector blocks was a pain in the ass, the points on the tape for the connector blocks are not very robust so you’ll be lucky to get a couple of gigs out of it, the cost soon added up quickly with all the cabelling, inline fuses, connector clips, tape, circuit board.
Personally, if you are dead set on the opz for control, and your happy with rgbw as one pixel per fixture, i would reccomend taking a look at some of the dmx led bars on offer. Will last a lot longer and therefore more cost effective in the long run, easier and quicker to rig, easier to pat test, and safer.
If it were me, i’d be looking at some of the laser tilt bars in red which look super cool and are less than 500mw per beam (safe for crowd scan). Led tapes and bars have been done over and over. . Even though the opz is not designed to do pan and tilt i.e movements, you can still patch a generic dimmer for the tilt and sequence it.