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Correct a hung or turned moving head in the patch

A moving head now hangs upside down, or stands turned, and your position presets and movement effects point the wrong way on it. Correct the mounting once in the patch, so presets and effects work again without touching any cue. Why pan and tilt depend on the mounting: Moving heads.

Requirements: the fixture is patched; you can see it on the real rig (or in the Stage view); you have a position preset to compare with, such as DJ booth, and ideally a second head of the same type that is mounted the usual way.

Find out what's wrong

  1. Select the head and a correctly mounted head of the same type, and call the position preset.
  2. Turn the pan encoder, then the tilt encoder, and watch both beams.
  3. The head moves the opposite way on one axis: it needs an invert on that axis.
  4. It moves the right way but points off by a fixed angle (it stands turned): it needs an offset.
  5. Pan and tilt seem exchanged: it needs Swap.

Correct it

  1. Press Setup and tap Patch Only (Live). The LiveSetup menu opens; grey cells can be changed without a show upload, so the output keeps running.
  2. Tap the layer that holds the fixture and find its row.
  3. Scroll right to the columns Pan DMX Invert, Tilt DMX Invert, Pan Enc. Invert, Tilt Enc. Invert, Pan Offset, Tilt Offset and Swap. If a column you need is black (locked) here, use Patch & Fixture Schedule instead; leaving that menu does a show upload, which stops DMX for a moment, so don't do it during a show.

  4. For a head that hangs instead of standing, set Pan DMX Invert and/or Tilt DMX Invert to On, one at a time, and call the preset again until the beam lands where the other head's does.

    To verify in onPC: check 32

  5. If the beam goes the right way but the encoder turns it the "wrong" way as seen from where you stand, set Pan Enc. Invert or Tilt Enc. Invert. That only changes the encoder direction, not the output.

  6. For a head that stands turned, enter the angle in Pan Offset (in degrees, negative values allowed), for example 90 or -90. Use Tilt Offset for a head that is tilted on a bracket.
  7. Leave the setup.

Keep away from the end stops

An offset only works while the programmed positions don't need the head to turn past its end stops. The manual calls it "a nice function as long the fixtures do not come all the way out to their endpoints in the programming".

Check it

  • Call the position preset on all heads of that type: the beams should land together.
  • Run a movement effect (a circle around Crowd) on the corrected head and a normal one: both should run the same way round.
  • The offset doesn't show in the fixture sheet; the DMX sheet shows the output values with it.

Then: the room

Inverts and offsets fix how the head is mounted. If the DJ booth itself is somewhere else in this venue, update the position presets as well (see Adapt a show to a new venue).

Sources