When building a new or retrofitting an existing building, generally people prefer a cleaner look without portable/distributed dimmers hanging throughout the room. Ultimately, there are various options available in different form factors (and at different price points), but they all essentially accomplish the same thing-regulating voltage to the fixtures at your control. A sleeker, more elegant solution and one of my favorites is the ETC Smartbar, giving you the same function in a bar-style solution that you can mount your lights to if you choose. A variety of manufacturers make 4-channel dimmer packs, such as Elation’s DP-DMX-20L, which you would generally hang from your lighting pipe amongst the fixtures it’s powering with a standard lighting clamp. Portable/Distributed dimming comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and price points.
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#Dimmer for led lights stage lighting portable
Portable dimmers are generally DMX addressable, so if you address your standard portable dimmer to 1, it will receive DMX and control intensities for channels 1-4. With portable or distributed dimming, the power is already near the fixtures, so you just need something to control the power output. With other dimming solutions, you centrally locate dimmers somewhere and run the power to the fixture. For smaller venues, venues where dedicated 20-amp circuits are readily available and for smaller portable setups, portable dimmers make a lot of sense. Portable dimmer packs most often come in 4-channel packs (though they can range from 1-6 channels), taking one 20-amp circuit and dividing it into 4 channels of 600 watt dimming.
![dimmer for led lights stage lighting dimmer for led lights stage lighting](https://www.stage-services.co.uk/images/dimmer-system-hire-12-channel.jpg)
Unfortunately your lighting console can’t control these dimmers, so you have to dim lighting “manually”. While not terribly user-friendly for theatrical uses, if you have a super small lighting rig (maybe 4-8 lights) and this is all you can afford, it sure beats an on/off switch. Unless you are a licensed electrician, please do not take this role on yourselves.įour Main Types of Dimmers Dimming SwitchĪ dimmable switch is dimming at its simplest form. All in all, once you get into larger dimming set ups, an electrician must be involved to ensure proper electrical distribution. A 12-channel, 1,200 watt per channel dimmer will need 120 amps to power it all. If you break it down, that means for every 600 watts you have, you need 5 amps. Very simply, 20-amp circuits equate to 2,400 watts of power. While portable/distributed dimming generally will work with a 20-amp circuit, most dimming packs will need much more. Quick Power Lessonīefore we dig into the types of dimmers available, it’s important to have an idea of how much power these dimmers will need. There are four main styles of dimmers you see used in the church today, three of which are DMX controllable. As anyone who has house lights that only turn on or off can tell you, dimmers play a valuable though often under-the-radar role in great lighting. Ideally DMX controlled, you would send your dimmer a DMX value (between 0 and 255) or a percentage from 0-100% and the dimmer will send the lighting fixture plugged into it that much power. Typically used with halogen or specific kinds of fluorescent and LED fixtures, dimmers give us the flexibility to set the mood and/or focus attention by simply turning lights on, off, up, or down. They are used to increase or decrease voltage to a dimmable lighting fixture in order to adjust its intensity.
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Lighting dimmers are a pretty simply concept. The problem? Every par can was controlled by an on/off switch on the back wall. We discussed a simple solution: dimming the lights that were closer to the stage in order to match the ones that were further away. The lighting positions they had didn’t allow their fixtures to be roughly the same distance away from the stage, so some were closer and some were farther. The lighting wasn’t even across the stage, and when I looked up at the lights it was easy to see why. It seems that in some places, their pastor would appear bright on the camera while in others he would appear dark. While there, our conversation turned to their lighting for the video camera. Last year I was visiting a small church on the east coast. In this article, Duke DeJong shares dimming concepts and gives options for people looking for dimming capability in their lighting.