Blizzard Lighting ProKontrol MH Stage Light Unit

edit: I have reduced it to 2 stars because I found another problem. So I had the board all set up and went to the event. Got into the music, everything was going well, and I started to get into the beat, changing scenes and playing around. I had some scenes set, and I knew the song playing, and there was a big change in tempo coming. I wanted to flip from one set of scenes to another, turning off 2 and turning another one on. Knowing what I said below about the order of scene priority, I had everything lined up to go. The beat came, I hit the 3 buttons, and the board went nuts, creating a random selection of scenes across the bank. Upon further troubleshooting and many experiments, I discovered that any time you hit 2 scene buttons at the same time, the board creates a random selection of scenes. The choice of which 2 buttons you hit doesn't seem to make a difference, it just goes crazy. This is a big problem when you're trying to coordinate some high-energy trance or other music that has moving tempos and energies. When a quiet moment comes in a track, and you know you want to dump the dance floor for a split second then take it back to full energy a moment later, and you have the exact buttons in your head that you want to hit.... the beat comes, you hit the buttons, and instead of going dark, the dance floor goes completely random. Then you have to freak out, act quickly, and recompose the floor in less than a second! A good light jockey does NOT miss these cues! So.... because of this, I am finding this board to be pretty much useless and unreliable. Such a waste, because it's one of the few "mini boards" that can handle all 512 channels. This board is DEFINITELY NOT WORTH $300 !!!Quite a few "good" reviews of this board floating around on the web, I figured I'd give it a try. Unfortunately I've quickly found that it's not that great. This is definitely a starter board!My setup is 4 MHLs, 4 spiders, 4 derbys, and 10 par cans.The nice thing about this board is that it is one of the few that support all 512 channels in the price range. It's also got room for 32 pre-defined fixtures, where most of the other <$300 boards support less than 20. Also, for the novice user, it has some pre-defined movements for MHLs, and some color macros for par cans. That's about where the good stuff starts to fall off tho.Programming is a bit wonky on the board, and the manual presents information in an attempt to be logical, but misses the mark a bit. First off, remapping the channels is necessary and critical if you want any of the macros to work. So, be sure you do that for all your fixtures. I also found that it was important to move any OTHER functions of the lights away from channels 1-5, and pan/tilt (17/18), or you might get some funky behavior. Once I got all the channels mapped, and mapped out other channels to follow the alignment of 1-5, things got much much easier! Also, this board has a Dedicated "white" channel, which is very nice for LED fixtures, where a lot of other boards are just RGB.So, channels remapped, I started to program. This is where the manual fails completely. So, you select your fixtures and apply a movement macro, adjust the offsets and movement ranges to get them pointing where you want them, and ..... the lamps aren't on, and the color macro buttons don't work in conjunction with the movement macros You have to apply lamp controls manually while the movement macros are applied. So I got them all set and added them to a scene. I then went on to program the spiders, and added them to the scene.This is where the board fails completely and is why I said this is a novice board. It cannot handle more than one "batch" of movements at the same time. So, if you have 2 sets of moving lamps, and you want them to do different things such as criss-crossing beams with opposing vectors, this board cannot do it. Only one movement macro can be running at a time.in my setup, I have the MHLs programmed on scene 5 and the spiders on scene 10. Turn on scene 5 and the MHLs start moving in the desires program. As soon as I hit scene 10 to add in the spiders, the spiders start moving, and the MHLs immediately return home and stay there. The lamps control I programmed on scene 5 continues so they are basically pointing at the ceiling with the lamps on. Turn off scene 10, and the scene 5 program resumes controlling the movements again.And before you ask, no there are no overlapping controls in the scenes, and I performed a complete reset and reprogram twice because of this. I also tried rearranging the scenes and many different combinations of scene control. Every time, I ran into the same problem. You cannot have 2 moving head scenes with macros going at the same time. This is a major drawback for a board that is advertised as having stackable scenes.Here's another weird behavior solution for you. If you are playing around with some fixtures, and let's say that you have some color set. Moving along, you select a scene, get into it, forget where you were, play with some other lamps to build the scene, and then deselect that scene, only to discover that your first lamps start doing something unexpected. It's because you left them with that color selection from earlier on. The lesson here is that when you are done messing with settings of a fixture, you have to manually return all the faders to 0 in order to blank the fixture. Many boards on the market assume a complete separation between live and program mode, this board does not. This is hard to explain. The best thing I can tell you is this: if your lamps are doing something weird between scenes, just select them and flip all the faders back to 0 again to stop sending whatever signals are going on, then you can return to playing with scenes.Another significant problem I ran into several times while is as setting things up is that the board gets "stuck" from time to time, and certain channels continue to send certain controls beardless of what lights and faders are set to. On no less than a dozen occasions during the programming, one or more lights would continue to do something even after I had I applied a scene or whatever. I know this is the board itself because if I disconnected the dmx line, the fixture would stop. Plug the cable back in and it returned to doing the same thing again, so I had to reboot the board several times. I really hope this doesn't happen during the show.After beating my head on the desk for a while, I also discovered that trying to program a single scene with many things going on is going to give you a huge headache. Since this board allows for stacked scenes, I would seriously recommend that you make each scene simple to control one type of fixture, and then stack them to control all the fixtures during the show.Finally, here is a failure of the manual, and you may consider this an annoyance or a nice feature. The way I have the board set up finally, this works well for me. Your mileage may vary. The manual states that "the last scene selected takes priority". What this should say is "the HIGHEST scene selected takes priority". Per the manual for example, this would suggest that if I have scene 6 applied, and I want to jump to scene 4, then scene 4 would take priority as long as it is selected, and then when I deselect 4, 6 would take over since it was the last selected scene. In reality however, this does not work, because scene 6 is higher than 4, not related to the order they are selected. Once I figured this out, I started programming my scenes with progressively more going on in the higher scene numbers. I also programmed scene 16 in a "full auto sound control" mode. So what this allows me to do, and why I like it, is that I can set a basic mood in the lower scenes, then as the music changes, I can add or remove lights simply by leaving that mood scene set, and stack on higher scenes. As I deselect lights, or during dramatic pauses or if I want to use strobes or whatever, that basic mood is set in the background, so it will always be on, and when I deselect my main lights, the floor doesn't truly go dark because that basic mood is already set. If I want the floor to go dark, I can unselect that basic scene, or possibly program a higher scene for momentary control that overrides everything. Actually I might move my full auto sound to scene 15, and then use 16 as a momentary dramatic pause. The basic mood sets could be a handy function for scenes 1-16 (page 1) and then you could do your main programming on scenes 17-32 (page 2). Again, your mileage may vary. You might find this to be useful, or not.So, all in all, this is definitely a novice board for sure. Programming was a bit wonky until I figured out what the board was doing that the manual didn't say, and I'm really disappointed that the movement macros cannot be stacked, that's a huge bummer. However now that I finally figured out what all the limits and capabilities are, I've got it programmed to a relatively acceptable condition at least for the immediate need.For as simple as dmx is, it sure seems like a real disappointment that it's so hard to find a board that makes it easy for entry level users. Just give me a friggin desk or 8u tall board with more buttons to select functions, no "pages" on any button or slider bank, and better macro control for $500. Or add in a midi input control so I can use a keyboard to quickly select functions.One final note: I have a $35 knock off Chinese version of the Chauvet Obey 40 to compare this blizzard board to. The blizzard offers 2 functions that the Obey doesn't. First, it has the movement macros which are nice. Second, it allows for stackable scenes. But after having beat my head on the desk trying to figure out the differences between the manual and reality, and the limits and capabilities of the board, I would say that it is almost more feasible and economical to buy 4 of the knock off ones for $35 each, than spend double the cost for the blizzard. But, each to their own I suppose.In the long run, I am probably going to move to LightJockey.TL;DR: I hope you have a good understanding of DMX controls, and plenty of time to set up the board BEFORE you set up the fixtures. This board is a very odd combination of "novice & limited", and "not easy to program". Also, pay attention to the order in which you program scenes, as higher scene numbers take priority.

This is an impressive DMX control board with quite a handful of presets and programming options. I needed a lighting setup that allowed me to control pretty much anything, but especially moving heads. The board itself has 32 fixtures with 18 channels per fixture, allowing for control of maximum functions. As you can see from the photo, its main feature is the scroll wheels, which allow for easier control of moving heads. The wheels themselves work just like any other channel; by turning them you go from 0-255, so depending on how you patch it, you can use it for any other function of a fixture, like dimming.There are at least 8 mover presets, and once activated they can be fine tuned by speed and direction, and can even be included in scenes.It has 32 scenes, 32 chases, and as mentioned before 32 fixtures.Probably the only downside about this board is that because it crams so many functions into a small space, many different functions often share the same buttons. The scene, movement, fixture and chase modes all share the same 16 buttons, you just have to activate which mode you want using a separate activator button. This can make it take a little extra time to navigate on the board itself.Other than that, it's a very excellent unit and is easily portable, and is actually smaller than it looks in the image!