Hello all,

With the increasing use of LED RGB panels, strips and lamps in the DMX world, the question raises whether one can use video to control those DMX fixtures. Well, yes you can, and you don't need a huge array of RGB LEDs. If you use slices of your video signal to feed DMX LED strips, you will discover that your eyes will (to a certain extend) fill-in the gaps. Anyway it looks spectacular!

So we created an example with MAX-MSP + Jitter to feed video to a virtual fixture and output DMX from a list of slices with UDP broadcasts. Be careful that you don't use large slices of the video, as a rectangle of 20x1 pixels (a commercial LED RGB strip) is already using 60 DMX channels!

The virtual fixture has controls for Intensity, CMY, Gobos (noise, stripes, movie), Gobo Speed, Zoom, Rotate, Pan and Tilt. If you wish you can even add external control for this virtual fixture, e.g. via DMX input of a LanBox-LCX (broadcasting only DMX input).

With this example it's possible to broadcast thousands of DMX light channels 20 times per second, but then you need a fast computer running MAX+Jitter, a good 100BT Ethernet network with switches, and lots of LED RGB strips and LanBox-LCEs :-)

The example can be downloaded from: http://www.lanbox.com/downloads/downloads.html#other

Regards,

Fokko van Duin, CDS advanced technology bv, http://www.lanbox.com/