Setting up a DMX Joystick Controller for your Lights

In this video, the StreamGeeks show you how to set up a DMX Joystick Lighting Controller. We unbox and set up the Chauvet Obey 70 used with the Intimidator Spot 255. Using DMX lighting control can be intimidating although it’s really the only option for professional DJ and production event lighting.

Chauvet DJ Joystick DMX Controller

The first tip we have for you is reading your light manual and locating the DMX Channel list. This is the first DMX controllable light that has used with a joystick controller and while I will say it’s usable, the set up is difficult. It definitely does not work intuitively when you first plug it in. In order to setup this DMX joystick we had to map the Pan and Tilt channels to the channels represented on our x/y joystick on the controller. By default, our Chauvet Intimidator uses DMX Channels 1 and 3 for Pan and Tilt. So we had to go into our Chauvet DJ Obey 70 and remap these channels to our x/y joystick.

DMX Assignment Manual Channels

Once this was done the joystick does work but we lost precision compared to the sliders. I would highly recommend labeling your lighting console to map out your DMX channels so you know where each one is. You can also setup scenes which are collections of lighting settings that can be recalled with the click of a button. Another cool feature with these lighting control consoles is that you can issue lighting commands to multiple DMX controllable lights at the same time.

DMX Joystick

At the bottom of our Obey 70 you can see that there are “fixture” buttons that allow us to select more than one at a time. So you can simply click on the lights that you want to control and perhaps change the color or dimming on all of them at the same time. The final feature we review is called “Chases”. Chases are essentially a collection of scenes that are triggered in a sequence. You can trigger these to go off by programming a chase to include multiple scenes and set the timing to go in the speed that you choose.

Setting up a live streaming studio

1. Tips for setting up your next live streaming studio – here
2. See how we setup our live streaming studio lighting – here
3. Setup a DMX Joystick controller for your lights here.