Friday, February 12, 2010
ESTA Releases Two Control Protocol Draft Standards for Review
iSquint.net: "At the end of January, ESTA announced the release of two Control Protocol Draft Standards for Public Review. As with any draft standards put out for public review from ESTA. People that have interest or knowledge of the specific standards are highly encouraged to read and comment on the drafts before they are no longer available for public review."
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Perhaps someone wiser and more knowledgeable on the subject can correct me, but I am pretty sure the 2nd new protocol is the update to dmx so lighting fixtures and products utilizing dmx can talk back to the desk. If that is the case, and ESTA feels they have a protocol ready to be critiqued, this could be a major step forward in lighting technology. If a fixture knows what colors it has on its color wheel, what templates it has loaded, and can send errors back to the board to avoid an electrician running to the fixture to see whats wrong, this would all be a major step forward in lighting technology.
For those who didn't bother to read the documents...
The first one (although not explicit in the title) is for the ACN protocol. This draft specifies how devices should identify themselves to other devices and controllers on the same network (so you can plug something in, and have your console know what it is when it powers on)
The second is RDM, and yes, it's basically the new DMX (although not many people are using it yet). Yes, it basically allows bi-directional communication.
The two play together though... ACN wraps around RDM, which then encapuslates DMX data... It's confusing stuff. And sadly, it's still a few years out from being functional, let alone popularly used.
So yeah, it could be a pretty cool thing, but it seems to my like too little too late. Any manufacturer doing enough new design to implement RDM, it seems, is likely to instead jump straight to ACN or *shudder* even more proprietary protocol. It admittedly fixes a number of issues in DMX512, but in the world of computing, updating a 25 year old standard seems a bit laughable. RDM still has limitations which I think most folks will not be satisfied with (eg single-master control.) Furthermore, I am incredibly amused that in this updated protocol, they are *still* not using the two NC pins they spec'd in 1986 'for future use,' purportedly because too many manufacturers violated the standard and use pins 4 and 5 for proprietary protocols, or use 3-pin connectors. This means that a lot of leeway that one used to have with modest DMX runs (lazy termination, using 'non-dmx' cable, etc) will start having more practical ramifications. So while this is a cool thing, I don't suspect it's going to see much adoption, and think that it comes back to the seemingly continual clunky technology responses our industry has to changing conditions.
I don't know why it is that when these standards come out there's such a mess about it. When midi was standardized it was a huge deal, but it seems that all of these devices should be standardized to begin with. As someone that doesn't necessarily appreciate the RDM and DMX data changes, there's always something that these devices don't do that we end up needing. It's virtually impossible to configure these devices in a way that we can use them to their full capacity before we use them for long enough to figure out what those things are. Especially in the DMX world, there are so many advancements that I've read or heard about that should be revolutionary, but aren't because they're not useful to our industry in a logical way.
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