The very nature of consoles results in limited capabilities for products such as media servers and digital lights. Because these devices exploit multiple layers of duplicated control parameters, they do not fit into the existing logic of modern lighting consoles. As a result, the consoles “break” the media server protocol into multiple “fixtures” that represent each layer. If I was going to patch and control this 160 channel thing, I had to add in four 40-channel “layer fixtures.”
A friend suggested that I number each server based on the tens digit and each layer based on the ones digit. For example, he said that media server one could be numbered as fixtures 211, 212, 213 and 214. That would allow me to quickly know that I was selecting the first server, third layer (213) or the sixth server, second layer (262).
-From Brad Schiller's January Feeding the Machines column.
