Smart Lights Response Times vs. DMX
While you’ll be able to control your Smart lights right alongside your DMX-controllable lighting with Luminair, there are some limitations due to the nature of the communication protocols used by these lights.
When using Smart Lights within Luminair it’s only possible to update the state of bulbs 10 times per second. Furthermore, it’s only possible to update one bulb in each of these 1/10ths of a second. Compared to a single DMX universe, which controls all 512 individual parameters up to 44 times a second, there’s some major differences in how quickly we can update your lights.
The end result is most noticeable in Sequences mode. If you’re trying to automate scenes with fade times that are shorter than the total number of smart lights in your project, times 1/10th of a second for each light, you’ll notice that some lights aren’t given enough time to receive their message and update their state. This is because Luminair’s playback has moved on. Unfortunately there isn’t any way for us to handle this situation, it’s just a limitation of the low-bandwidth communication protocol. We recommend using fade times long enough for all lights to receive their updated state message.
If you have Smart lights in your project that you consider a priority, and are working with short automated fade times, Sound Active or Tempo Timing FX, we recommend rearranging their track order. To rearrange the order of tracks in Luminair, open up the list view, tap “Edit”, and drag the track higher in the list for greater priority.