We need to come up with a solution for all of the elusive fixture profiles that are costing us countless hours of hunting down DMX charts and building our own hacked-together libraries. In the last few months, I have received several emails, text and even Facebook messages asking if I had a fixture profile for everything from a two channel smoke machine to a 48-channel beam wash hybrid fixture. These cries for help are coming from newbies as well as top-level programmers who are scrambling to find the correct profile for the current fixture that needs to be patched immediately so that they can get to programming…. The time that is most crucial is when it comes to media servers. Studying a DMX chart for most major servers can be more difficult than finding a genuine Sharpy in South America. Media server DMX charts are constantly changing from each software update to the next. Just because you have a profile for version 3.8.00.1124 does not mean that 3.8.00.1124-2 will work for you. We don’t have time to go hunting through manufacturer websites that lead us to vendor websites that lead us to a dead Dropbox file in order to confirm that the mask layer was moved to DMX channel 18, even though it was on channel 24 for the last eight software versions.
—Chris Lose, from “LD-at-Large,” PLSN, Oct. 2016
