Beam Properties - Direction (Moving Head)

[razberri]

Has anyone had success ALIGNING the beam-direction of your Moving-Head in Visualizer with the actual physical beam-direction of the fixture itself ? If so, how’d you do it ? Could you share a snippet of your “.dmx” file ? I can only do it if I use a type 'D' but it causes bad side-effects. Any help/insight would be appreciated.
To test, I created a very simple 1-channel fixture. Then I tried all 3 types (D,S,V), and below are the results I got:

Pan
D,0,255,
….. results:
- Sliding the “Direction” control left/right DOES make visual changes in Visualizer. This means I can ALIGN Visualizer to reality. GOOD !
- Moving the channel-fader up/down pans the physical-head, does NOT pan the beam in Visualizer, and dims the beam in Visualizer.

Pan
S,0,0,0
S,1,1,1 … etc.
….. results:
- Sliding the “Direction” control left/right makes NO changes in Visualizer.
- Moving the channel-fader up/down pans the physical-head, and also pans the beam in the Visualizer. GOOD !

Pan
S,0,255,junk
….. results: same as for the “S” test above

Pan
V,0,255,
….. results: same as for the “S” test above

PS - renaming the channel from “Pan” to something else like “PX” causes the Visualizer beam NOT to display. All other behavior in the testing seems to be intact. I tried this because it seems like there are keywords that the system uses, so using them gets in the way. For example, if I used “Tilt” as a channel-name, I would not see the “Direction” option in the “Beam properties” pop-up. But if I renamed “Tilt” to “Tlt”, the “Direction” option appeared.

[vwodwo22]

So this is one area I think the SBA could use some improvement. I too have some (4) moving heads. Unfortunately, being a 2d representation this would be difficult to emulate. Also, I don't think the format of the .dmx file structure lets you customize certain light properties such as pan range. 360? 540? or 720 degrees?. When I move my pan or tilt or fader from 0 to 255 it only moves 90 degrees in SBA however in reality it turns 540 degrees. What I did to compensate for this (and hope it gets better in the future) is edit the .dmx file like below. This works for me. I can see the colors projected, however when I move the sliders on my moving heads, I will at least see a label corresponding to the position. I put the actual dmx value for the true Left/Right/Front/Back in parentheses. Hope this helps.
To be honest, what I will probably do (because I am not planning on using a ton of various head movements), is disable all channels except my pan and tilt channels. Create scenes of just pan/tilt movements while my heads are set up. Save them to a separate Song/presets. And do this for as many as needed. 20-30 scenes +/-. Then for my normal songs/presets, I am going to use all the channels I need for the rest of my setup, however I leave my pan/tilt channels disabled. Then I can just save my pan/tilt scenes to my working song scene as I need.
Probably named something like this: 004 - DS-2 - P/T - sync - slow - 4m
(004 - Midi note needed - Control Type - Sync/Async - Speed - over X measrues (I often use the oscillator)


DMX File:
Format is like this:
(Static/Dimmer/Variable/Blackout) , start range, End Range, Label

Pan
S,0,10,Front
S,11,39,Right-Front (21)
S,40,45,Right (42)
S,141,239,Right-Back (63)
S,80,90,Back (84)
S,91,119,Left-Back (84)
S,120,135,Left (127)
S,136,159,Left-Back (148)
S,160,175,Left-Front (168)
S,136,159,Front (148)
S,160,175,Left (168)
S,176,205,Right-Front (189)
S,206,215,Right (210)
S,216,245,Right-Back (233)
S,246,255,Back (255)
Tilt
S,0,15,Front
S,16,129,Front-Mid
S,130,140,Straight Up/Down (133)
S,141,239,Back-Mid
S,240,255,Back

[SWR]

I think many of us are waiting for this feature. It was announced when I bought SBA (named differently back then), but later pushed to version 2.0.12 which we are still waiting for.

I play in a small amateur rock band with 25 moving heads and no fixed lights.
I bought SBA because of the announced visualizer with moving beams, and I still haven't switched from DMXIS to SBA.
I just don't see the reason to switch before we get the visualizer with moving beams.
Without the visualizer I've got the same functionality in DMXIS.

For those with fixed lights I think the current visualizer is quite ok.

Any status update on the "wiggly beams" announced as landing soon on November 15th 2018, would be highly appreciated.

Kind regards
Soren