So, last night, I had my FIRST big event of the year. Yeah, my sound company kicked serious behind, took names and make the right kind of impression. Band did great.
Now, setting lights didn't go so well. First off, we start with the LED 64 Pros. No big deal, went up fairly fast. But I have a big of an issue, but hear me out as this was an issue that made things not as "friendly". It's all well and good that you turn off the display so it doesn't distract when you're using the lights. It would be nice if there was small light to let me know the darn thing is ON!
Well, so I'm all excited, I get to run MyDMX at a show. Didn't happen. I'm still trying to get to the root of the problem, so, I don't want to get you thinking "MyDMX sucks and doesn't work", because that's wrong information. My objective is to educate through example. I'm still sticking by MyDMX, even if it did bite me in the butt.
What was happening? Well, as I would change scenes from the User tab, it was literally taking MINUTES to make a scene change. The other issue was that it didn't appear that signal was leaving the MyDMX dongle.
Replicating this problem at home, it appears as others had said, sometimes you have to unplug and replug the dongle to get it to work. Sure enough, I get home, first test run(no fixtures, dongle and computer only) and it's doing the same thing. I quit MyDMX, unplug and re-plug the dongle, relaunch, and now it's behaving the way it should, best I can tell. What, if anything I noticed different was at home(where I could pay attention), the USB light was NOT LIT when the problem came up. I can' say I took the proper time to see if the dongle was lit up properly at the event as I was trying to rig lights.
But, what do you do when MyDMX fails and that was what you were relying on? In my case, guess what saved me? That's right, my old reliable DMX Operator!
So, am I saying MyDMX bad? No. However, under the crunch, last thing you want to do is troubleshoot problems. I had problems, I was for whatever reason unable to solve them on site. Stuff happens.
So, my advise is a money issue. YOU might want to consider spending some mone on a DMX console of some sort to serve as a back-up. Remember, if you're doing big events, it's a really good idea to build in some fail-over into the bigger scheme of things.
Now, what about the positive? Sure, there's still positive. ADJ was my solution. 8 of the LED 64 Pros lit up that stage quite aquedately, perched on a pair of ADJ LTS-2 T-stands. Using only Accucable(another ADJ product) using Accucable ends. The hope to use ADJ's MyDMX didn't work for whatever reason, so my back-up solution fell to the reliable ADJ DMX Operator.
Next show, I will still try MyDMX first. Sure, I got nailed this time, but that was this time. Regardless, I'm pleased my lighting needs for this event were 100% ADJ products.
OK, it's 3:15AM. I'm beat up and tired. Time for sleep. I'm done with my post-show wind-down.
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