How to rig a set of lights to flash in a particular order, to a pre-determined beat?

Finnegan

Finnegan

Well-known member
I'm directing a music video for a really killer artist in a few months, and need to rig together a set of 3-5 (potentially 7) household sized, low wattage (60w most likely) colored lights to "flash" in a particular order to a pre-determined beat.

How would I even begin to engineer something like this? Essentially, I need to be able to control which light turns on when.
 
60W ordinary lamps are going to need running from dimmers, and some (if you hire or borrow) will not dim such a low wattage - and need a load light to make it reliable. So probably the simplest method would be to hire in an Avo or Chamsys laptop based system, DMX to the dimmers and then the small lamps hang off that. You'll need to programme the control - so might be easier to find a lighting guy rather than learn how to do it. Pretty easy, if you know - and horrible if you don't.

If it needs to be repeatable then you can link these lighting controls to your audio playback system so they sync up. Perfectly doable - just perhaps a little more complex than you thought.
 
5x2.4k rat pack dimmers are pretty readily available from rental houses. If it's a big artist and you really want to do things right, you should probably hire a lighting programmer. He or she, if they know what they're doing, would have no trouble at all dealing with something as simple as this, without holding up the whole production trying to figure it out as someone unfamiliar with writing cues might. You shouldn't need to rent a whole console.
 
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