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CONTROLLING CONVENTIONAL DIMMERS
The Show Designer 3 can control up to 128 conventional dimmers. They can be programmed
from the flex faders or by entering percentage values using an external keyboard. Dimmers
must first be patched using the “Patch Conventional Dimmers” menu as explained in the menu
chapter of this manual. To use the flex faders as dimmer controls, you must go to the “Select
Flex Fader Mode” menu and select “conventional dimmers”. You can switch the flex fader
mode at any time without losing anything you have already programmed. The flex faders
provide 16 pages of 8 faders for a total of 128 dimmers. You can freely switch pages using the
page up and down buttons using any fader that is patched to a dimmer.
NOTE: The flex master fader and the grand master fader must be at maximum in order to get
the full range of output for conventional dimmers. All conventional dimmers will be scaled by
first the flex master and finally the grand master faders. All conventional dimmer outputs will
also be set to 0 whenever a blackout is in effect.
DIMMER CONTROL USING A KEYBOARD
If you have a PS2 keyboard attached to the SD3 you can set dimmer levels using the numeric
keypad. To do this, first press the F12 key on the keyboard to enable dimmer entry. “Dimmer:”
will be displayed on the top line of the display followed by a blank space. Enter a dimmer
number from 1 to 128, you will have to convert the page and fader numbers to a single
number. For example, dimmer fader 1 on page 3 will be dimmer 17. Press “enter” on the
keyboard, “Level:” will appear next to the dimmer number. Enter a percentage value from 0 to
100 followed by the enter key. Do not press the percent key. If you want to select a range of
dimmers, type a minus sign (-) between the first and last dimmer number. For example
Dimmer: 1-10, followed by “enter” then followed by the level and then “enter”. You can only
select a single dimmer or a range of consecutive dimmers.
To exit the dimmer entry display, press F12 on the keyboard or press any function switch on
the SD3 when you are ready to do something else.
As when entering fixture channel values, the SD3 will keep track of any changes you make so
that you can save the current stage look as a scene at any time.
CREATING A MULTI DIMMER PLAYBACK (Proportional Dimmer Patch)
To put a group of dimmers on one fader for playback purposes do the following:
First clear the scene edit memory by pressing and holding the blackout switch until the LED
goes out.
Then select the dimmers to be used by moving the flex faders to the desired levels or by
entering the dimmer values using a keyboard as described above. Record this as a scene by
pressing “record” then “scene” followed by an available scene number button. Assign this scene
to a playback by pressing “record” followed by any playback flash button, then “scene”
followed by the scene number you just saved. If you want to use the flex faders for playback,
switch the flex fader mode to playback before assigning the scene to the fader. Make sure the
playback is running in “HTP mode”. Refer to the following chapters on scenes and playbacks
for more information.