VRSL DMX: Making a Patch Sheet
This mini-guide walks through creating a patch sheet for your venue.
A patch sheet is used to provide with lighting techs with the information they need to set up their control surfaces to work with your venue in a clean and concise manner.
If you are new, it can help immensely if you create the patch sheet at the same time you are patching the fixtures within Unity, as spreadsheet software can do a lot of the work for you, reducing errors and pain.
In this guide, we will use Google Sheets.
Lets make a few changes to setup.
We'll make each universe a pair of two columns, one for the fixture, and the other for the channel number. I'm going to merge the top two cells of the column to act as a header by navigating here.
Lets also apply some formatting for the rows. Select the first cell in the column for the DMX channel values, and navigate here.
Entering "CH"### will result in CH1 being formatted from only 1.
This is critical, as having cells contain numbers and no letters allow use of extremely helpful pattern fill features.
In fact, lets put in 1 now, as all universes will begin with that value. Lets also copy it down the entire column to set the formatting of those cells too.
- 10 moving spot
- 16 par lights
- 2 lasers
We'll start by getting the channel count of a moving spot: 13
The address of our second fixture will be that of the first fixture plus its channel count, so our second moving head will be address 1 + 13 = 14.
By selecting these first two values and using the fill handle, we can get the channel values for the rest of our moving spot fixtures automatically.
Lets now fill in the other column with the fixture name. Ideally, you would name them based on their position, (ie. "Overhead MWash 3", "Rear-Left Laser") but for this guide they will just be named sequentially.
You may notice I filled one extra row when filling the DMX address column. This is because this extra value is the next starting position.
I'll do the same steps for the par lights. These are 5 channel fixtures, so now we do 131 + 5 = 136, again filling one extra in the address column.
Finally, the lasers. Back to 13 channels, 211 + 13 = 224.
Now we've completed Universe 1. The process for more Universes is exactly the same, starting over at 1 each time.
When all of your Universes are complete, format to taste.
You now have a patch sheet you can share with whoever you host, or make publicly available.