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Hello, everyone! I hope this one is easy for you! I'll put a TL;DR at the end if you wanna just skip to the question. =)

Lemme start from the beginning and see what you think.

I run a band that uses MyDMX for live lighting. We take each song and program the light effects by hand in MyDMX. Our drummer, who has a click in his ear, starts the light show via a Korg Nanopad during each song's "click off." This gives us modularity: we can change set lists at will without having to reprogram lights.

Our rig is all cobbled together, and looks like this (not in sequence):
Chauvet Intimidator 1.0 (x4)
Dimmer pack (x2)
Weinas 50mw Lasers (x2)
Par 64 (x4)
ADJ Neutron Star Strobes (x2)

So, we're looking at a whole bunch of halogen stuff. We'd like to start upgrading to LEDs because of power consumption (we're looking at two 20amp circuits at the minimum right now), but we have a huge problem: none of the LED scanners we're finding to replace the Intimidator 1.0s have the same DMX channel setup. For instance, the Chauvet Intimidator 2.0s are LED scanners, but have 5 DMX channels while the Chauvet Intimidator 1.0s only have 4 DMX channels. When we did the original programming, we (very foolishly) set up the DMX universe so that the Intimidator 1.0s are right next to each other, and thus have no room to expand. This has become a problem!

Let me explain in more detail just for clarity. The first Intimidator is on DMX channels 1-4. The second is on channels 5-8. This means that I cannot upgrade to the Intimidator 2.0 but keep the programming because there is an extra DMX position in the 2.0s to deal with, and I was too dumb during the original setup to leave a couple spaces in there.

TL;DR: So here's my question! is there a way to move devices around in the DMX universe and retain the programming specific to the device? Or is the programming melded to the DMX channel permanently?

Thanks so much for the help! =)

--Josh
Original Post

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This is a function found only on very high end consoles unfortunately (Hog 3, GrandMA, etc). Reason is because the logic is very tricky to code and get right. It requires an abstract fixture layer (console thinks of fixtures not as a set of channels but functions instead, translating that into channel order and then DMX signal) and even then, still doesn't get everything 100% right so going through the show and updating things is still required.

My advice would be just try and do it a piece at a time or the whole rig at once. Piece at a time would be simpler on the brain but will take more time to update. Doing the whole rig at once would require a lot of thought as you are doing it, but you won't have to run through the show many times over and over again.
Another question: The poster titled Attenton System is our drummer and main light programmer. We'd love to spread the responsibility around a little and do some offtime, non-studio programming. Is there a way to do this in a virtual environment with MyDMX?

Thanks again. =)

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