Soft patching is a facility which gives you control over the way PCStage channels map to the dimmers controlled by its DMX output.

For each of the 192 dimmers supported you can specify:

The channel which drives it; by default this is the channel of the same number.

The drive ratio, which is the percentage of full power applied to the dimmer when the driving channel is fully on; by default this is 100%, shown as FF.

The applicable dimmer curve number (by default zero)

A flag indicating whether the dimmer is influenced by the Master Level slider or not. For some types of fixtures the effect of the Master Level may be undesirable.

Patching lets you do some very useful things. For example:

You can patch the same channel to more than one dimmer if the lighting needed on that channel exceeds the power capacity of one dimmer.

If a dimmer fails you can patch the driving channel to a different one without editing your production.

You can patch channels to dimmers located in the rack closest to the driven lamp(s) to reduce mains cable length.

You can patch all your dimmers to one channel to simultaneously test all of them.

You can disable a dimmer completely by setting its ratio to zero.

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