party tent

How much budget do you have to play with?

Chamsys do a 5 hour time limited USB dongle for £10. After 5hrs you have to unplug it and plug it back in again.
MagicQ, their software is free, but will do just about anything and can be a bit daunting at first glance, particularly if you have no previous experience of lighting control.

I might be clearing out some old stock soon, and have some very good condition Martin Destroyers (gobo flower effect, M33 lamp version - youtube them...) that might end up going.

A good desk will make a bad light look ok, a great light on a crap controller will just look crap (and often uncontrollable in any real sense)
If you want to use intelligent lighting fixtures, avoid any controller that requires you to manipulate the actual DMX channels (e.g. any of the cheap DJ controllers). Most decent desks/controllers hide all that stuff and you simply use 'colour', 'position', 'intensity' options to control the lights.

F*ck rope lights.

hmm I think it would look good to have it strobe but I'm not sure how you would do that...? One of those relay packs for converting halogen par cans to DMX? 

Did I hear 'no budget' ?! haha

ve been looking on youtube too and it would seem LED scanners are nowhere near as bright as discharge lamps

I think it all depends on what LED fixtures you are looking at.
Of course the cheap ones won't compare, but some do.
Unfortunately, most LED scanners fall into the 'disco tat' category, and that is where they aim them.

For under £250 each you could buy a Stairville MHX25 moving head which is roughly comparable to a 150w discharge fixture.
I encountered 4 of these at a festival over the summer and was very impressed. Nice smooth movement on everything, pretty flat brightness over the output area, rotating gobos, nice range of colours, etc. Certainly very adequate for your event, and beyond if it takes off for you.

I liked them enough that I'll probably be buying some of their bigger brothers, equivalent to a 250w discharge lamp.


As for software suggestions, for cheap, you probably will struggle to do better than Chamsys MagicQ (free) on one of their £10 dongles.
It's basically the software off their fully fledged consoles, with a few restrictions to give you an incentive to buy their products at some point. But it works fully and well just as the software.
But as i said in my last post, it will take some time and effort on your part to learn it, as it can do pretty much anything you want.
A cheap touch screen (15 or 17" ELO off ebay for ~£100) transforms it, and makes it very powerful.

Once you know that, you could step up to any of their consoles and feel right at home, and even take a show you've done on a memory stick and load it straight onto the hardware.

I'll stop, because I'm a fanboy, and people get fed up with hearing it, but lots of people like it for a reason.

However, you will need to suspend your thinking that it is running on a laptop, so it must work like a Windows application. If you approach it as you would a dedicated piece of hardware, then you'll get along much quicker.

There are other options, such as Freestyler which has a more 'MS Windows' workflow and feel which you may gel better with, but if you want 'pukka lighting desk' then MagicQ is the one.

is magigQ fairly lightweight software? as in, will an old spec laptop run it fine?