okay where to start:

Rock club that occasionally has DJs. There is no one in charge of running lights, I need an automatic solution.

We do have a DMX board with DMX dimmer packs for our live show cans, but I want to stay seperate with my recently purchased 2 DJ Scan HPs 250. I have learned a very annoying new term called "Duty Cycle". I love how its no where on the outside of the box.

So I bought a copilot to run the scans, turn one off and one on for 10 minutes.

First question, thats not really working. I have on channel 1 and one on channel 2; switched to the 10 minute program. The only switch the occurs os channel 1 goes off after 10 minutes.

Second question; should I be doing that to the lights? Thats a lot of test turn on cycles to go through for the night.

Third question; should I just dump these lights and the co pilot and get some run all nighters? I'd really like to have some other trick lights in the future, but this duty cycle stuff is really throwing a wrench into this.

fourth question; i wanted to stay away from this but can I program the DMX controller to switch through duty cycles for me?

Hope Im not asking too much. Old to sound; very new to lights.

Best

Ryan

Firstly I havn't been on this site for a number of years since I retired from DJing, however I'm thinking about getting back into it. A lot of new lighting has come out since I was doing it. Yes duty cycles can be a problem unless you have enough various pieces of lighting. If your just starting out with a few lights, best to go with run all night (no duty cycles). I just recently went to a gig and the DJ there only had 1 piece of lighting. It was the REVO III. It actually did an outstanding job all night for him. I was totally impressed and will be buying one the first chance I get. All of my lighting right now is fairly old, and I'm going to be looking into newer pieces, REVO being the first one to get. I sorta made the same mistake myself when I first started out be buying the LOTUS. Great lighting effect, however it also had the 10 on, 10 off cycle, and until I actually purchased more lighting it didn't get taken with me much. Right now I have about 30 pieces of lighting from Roto Pods, Mini Gems, H2O, Party Gobo Light, Saga's, Laser Widow, Vertigo's, Mirror ball, fog machine, and the list goes on. Once you've got a good base of no duty cycle lights you can then add those to it, or if you just go all out and buy a whole wack of stuff with duty cycles.
Really though,,,,check out that REVO light, simply amazing.

Oh forgot to mention,,,,,Keep your co-pilot, you'll need that for the run all night lights.

LOL. also forgot to mention,,when you go to buy your lighting products, it's always nice to get to know the person you are buying them from. The guy where I go lets me play with all the lights before I actually buy them, he's real good that way. He'll turn all the lights off in the store for 15 or 20 minutes and let me go crazy. Let him know your needs and I'm sure your learn a lot real quick. Also don't get rid of your DJ Scans, you'll be sorry because they are very nice pieces and will come in handy once you get more lights to compliment them.


THA DOGG

If the lights say "duty cycle" or, in your case, they didn't say, but use a duty cycle, then it's really a measure to prevent the bulb from burning out. Some of the earlier lower-cost fixtures I bought have duty cycles, such as the Sunray III and Electra, which lack fans and hence the heat build up can be an issue.

If you make wise purchases, you can figure out how to retain your investment in existing lights while moving forward with addtional future purchases.

You might consider this: With your DMX controller, perhaps you can program scenes. Maybe one set of scenes with one DJScan250HP, and an identical set with the other. Of course I'm assumng your controller can do chases or otherwise have something automated to help change between scenes.