2024 Review and What’s Ahead
As the year draws to a close, we reflect on some popular developments from 2024 and to give you the lowdown on what’s new for early 2025…
Posts
Crafting cutting-edge electronics for props
In today’s entertainment landscape, the demand for realistic props has never been higher – in movies, television shows, or theatre. Whatever your requirements, we can bridge the gap between reality and imagination. We’ve designed electronic solutions to create props for both traditional and futuristic settings.
Introducing our DMX candle – the Candelair
Candelair is an innovative DMX-controlled LED candle that eliminates the issues of real candles, while retaining all the visual benefits of traditional candlelight
‘How to use’ lighting products video series
The team at EMP Designs prides itself on well-designed, easy-to-use products. To assist our users further and ensure they are getting the most out of our range, we have started to create a series of instruction videos.
New Compact Artnet to Radio DMX Gateway
EMP Designs has created an Artnet to Radio DMX Gateway – a device that allows users to control radio DMX lighting via any controller that has an Ethernet port and broadcasts Artnet, typically an iPad, a laptop or a lighting desk, etc.
Benefits
Although systems have been created that control lighting directly from Artnet sources like the iPad, these use wifi. A film set is usually a heavy radio environment with busy airwaves. Particularly for real-time applications, wifi can be unreliable and suffer from interference. A radio DMX protocol is more dynamic, and using the excellent Lumen Radio technology can jump around and find gaps to give reliable real-time responsiveness. As such, EMP Designs have created this smart gateway device to connect the controller to ethernet and provide radio DMX.
As always, working in the film and TV industry since inception, the product was designed in response to customer demand and frustrations with existing options. It provides a compact, highly reliable solution and is already in use in productions.
Click here to find out more about products, and product design and development at EMP Designs or contact us.
RDM Fully Isolated DMX Buffer (3:4 and 3:10)
Remote management and distribution of film, TV and theatre lighting just got easier!
Responding to the needs and requests of lighting companies and directors in film and TV, EMP has created a DMX buffer with built-in ‘Lumen Radio’ and Remote Device Management (RDM) capability to improve network control and flexibility of lighting.
Even when we are simply delivering existing solutions, we are always looking to ensure we make the most of the latest technology and deliver the best capability availability. The units are very economical for the given functionality.
Technical Detail
Removing the need for a separate radio unit, there is now a 3rd choice of remote connection in addition to the standard 2 inputs. To aid diagnostic and initial set up, the system allows 2-way RDM communication – the unit communicates with the lighting fixture, and the fixture communicates back to the system controller.
For ease of use, each output has a switch allowing users to choose from each of the 3 inputs, universe A and B, and Lumen Radio. There is also a small LED light by each output that lights up to indicate when data is coming through, with the colour of the light identifying which source. This allows easy reading of the connections in a dark setting and also aids quick recognition of a selection fault.
To make the system more robust, each input/output is both galvanically isolated and opto-isolated, with no electrical pathway between it and the control electronics.
This system is also available with 4 outputs – version 3:4. At EMP, we are now developing RDM software and hardware for all controllers.
