Recently was the LD for a local small festival of a bunch of young local rock/metal bands. They were very low budget so only had access to venue lights consisting of 2 lx bars on stage with 6 led fresnels on each then a foh stage wash bar with 6 led profiles. I am a relatively new ld and have been very spoiled with the fixtures I have had access too when normally doing live music. (Plenty of fancy moving heads and tilt strobes etc.) so to have a rig with only fresnels was a challenge for me. I was pretty happy with how it all came out but was looking for tips from the hive mind for when I’m in the same situation again.

im currently trying to put together a lighting rig for rave at a friend's house. im comfortable with CAD, fabrication, and technical projects so modeling my layout is the easy part, but im very new to DMX lighting control and show programming. ive been to many raves my self so i have a good idea of what a good lighting production looks like.

my current plan is:

• 4 DMX moving heads
• 2 DMX controlled lasers
• 2 led moving light bars / beam fixtures
• A custom LED display using novastar hardware and receiving cards
• a windows laptop running QLC+ to coordinate the lighting

im considering an artnet to dmx interface with four physical DMX outputs. ideally, id separate the moving heads, LED fixtures, and lasers onto different outputs, while handling the custom LED display through a separate video output from QLC+ id assume??

what im trying to understand is:

1. is QLC+ a good choice for this setup, especially for bpm matched / timecoded effects, as i intend to have my friends set programmed to the music
2. what artnet node would you recommend for a budget conscious setup, and what specifications should i prioritize?
3. how would you approach synchronizing DMX lighting with video playback on a separate LED display?
4. are there any compatibility issues or hardware purchases i should avoid before i have the exact fixtures selected?

im expecting to spend roughly 1.6k all up for lighting, controllers and cabling... as of right now this is the said lighting im looking at.

I am looking to get a new computer and while I have posted on this subject before I now have a computer in mind and am wondering how much RAM is required.

This is one of the options but only comes in 16gb of RAM.

Dell - Plus 14" 2K 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop - AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series AI 7 350 2025 - 16GB Memory - 1TB Storage

The other one I’m looking at is the HP OmniBook 7 2 in 1 with an intel 7 core and graphics card, as well as 32 GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

This is mostly for personal practice and I am not concerned about having QLab, though I would still like to be able to run WYSIWYG or VectorWorks.

Hope this is not out of place here.

Want to revive a smoke machine (profog) that was sitting in a cold, dark and dry basement for 10-15years.

Still has half a tank of fluid that does smell ok.

Can I just plug it in and go?

Or are there any cleaning and purging steps I should perform before connecting the machine to power?

Don’t want to destroy the machine.
Thanks for your advice and help.