When you open the “Console”, you’ll see the “Virtual console” title, and next to it either a “DMX Universe 1” label (if there’s a single universe) or universe selection buttons (if there are several). Below is a grid of 512 identical cells. Each cell is one DMX channel. The channels run in order: left to right, top to bottom, from 1 to 512.
Cells come in two kinds, and they’re easy to tell apart by color.
What each cell shows:
| Cell element | What it means |
|---|---|
| The number on top | The DMX channel number (1–512) |
| The vertical slider | The channel fader: a value from 0 (bottom) to 255 (top) |
| The fixture icon (at the bottom) | Which fixture the channel belongs to |
| The colored dot | The channel type: red/green/blue, dimmer, strobe, pan/tilt, gobo, etc. |
Colored cells (with a faint purple border) are the channels taken by your fixtures from Patch. To make neighboring fixtures easier to tell apart, they’re shaded in alternating tints: one fixture a touch darker, the next a touch lighter.
Gray cells with a dash “-” are free addresses with no fixture on them. Their faders work too: a free channel can be raised by hand to ring the address out — see 11.03. A channel raised by hand swaps the dash for a hand icon and gets an amber border.
Several universes
If the project has fixtures in different DMX universes (Universe 2, 3…), the “Universe 1 / Universe 2 / …” buttons appear at the top of the console instead of the “DMX Universe 1” label.
- Press the button of the universe you want — the grid shows its separate 512 channels with the fixtures of that universe.
- The active universe is highlighted; the faders likewise reflect the live DMX output of the selected universe.
