PRG Mbox Designer Manual 3.8 - Manual (Page 143)

MBOX ® MEDIA SERVER USER MANUAL 135
Step 9. Before adding the other eight screen objects, you're going to add some controls to the first screen object.
Remember that we said you would need Opacity, X Position, and Y Position controls for each screen object.
With the Square 1 screen object selected in the MultiScreen Editor app, click once again on the small
popup handle at the top right of the window. This time select Add Control from the list. As when you added
a screen object, a disclosure arrow will appear in the listbox. This time it will appear to the left of the screen
object's name. Go ahead and click on it to expand it.
Step 10. You now have one control attached to the screen, give it the name "Opacity." As with the properties for the
screen object, each control has properties that can be edited:
a. Universe: If this control is to use external Art-Net data, this is the universe that it will listen to. The list is
populated with the pool of Art-Net universes provided by the listbox at the bottom right of the main
window.
Note: The Universe popup shows a number in parentheses to the left of the absolute universe number. The number in
parentheses is the zero-based index number of that universe within your group of universes used in the entire
MultiScreen setup.
CAUTION! If you edit any universe values in the Universes listbox those edits will not be automatically updated to the
universe value for controls that have already been configured. You must reselect the universe value for those controls.
b. Address: This is the address of the first channel within the selected universe that this control will listen
to for its data. Values between 1 and 512 are valid.
c. Stride: This number represents the total number of Art-Net channels that this screen object uses (for all
of its controls, not just this one). The stride setting simplifies the use of the MultiScreen object on more
than one layer so you don't have to perform excess patching or create multiple configurations, one for
each layer. The stride setting tells the screen object how many channels to skip between layers, so it
can automatically use the correct address offset for each layer. In the case of some controls where you
don't want each layer to have a different/unique value (e.g., positional data) the Stride value should
remain at 0. For controls like opacity that might need a unique value for each screen for each layer, the
stride setting becomes very useful.
Step 11. Because some controls need to have a per-layer value and some do not, this leaves several options on how
to patch everything. You could give every control a unique address for control on every layer. This would
require the use of more control channels and might cause you to have to send the same values to more
than one control at the same time. One alternative is to use the stride setting, but to use the same address
for controls that need to receive the same data. This cuts down on repeated data, but leaves empty
channels in your patch. The other alternative is to patch all the unique control channels sequentially before
controls that use a stride setting and then patch the per-layer controls.
a. Data Format Pop-up: This sets the range and default value of incoming Art-Net data. As with typical
fixtures, 8-bit data uses one channel (0 - 255), 16-bit uses two (0 - 65535), and 32-bit signed uses four
(-2,147,483,648 - 2,147,483,648).
1) In the case of the 8-bit controls, "unsigned" relates to a control with a range of 0-255 and a default
that is one end of that range (usually 0), "128" relates to a control with the same range but a default
of 128 and which varies above and below the default, and "127" is like "128" but with a default of
127.
2) In the case of the 16-bit controls, "unsigned" is as with the 8-bit version noted above, but with a
range of 0-65535. "Offset" relates to a control like the 128/127 varieties of the 8-bit controls, with a
default at halfway, i.e. 32767.
3) And finally, the 32-bit signed control has a very large range that is both negative and positive. 32-bit
signed controls are generally reserved for positional feedback from very accurate scenic encoders
as the large range allows the control to be extremely accurate, receiving actual encoder counts in
many cases.