Phil Rhodes explores Aputure's Sidus One and finds versatile connectivity options, competitive pricing, and eminent suitability for professional lighting setups.
Lighting control uses some pretty old ideas. The first DMX standard dates back to 1983. Even now, most implementations use a 1990 standard. The time between 1990 and now coincidentally maps to an absolutely meteoric rise in information technology, which has left the world’s lighting desks pushing data that feels like it comes from another era.
Lots of people have figured out interesting new ways to send data from controllers to lights, and that’s part of the problem: there are lots of ways to make lights do what we want. Assembling all that into a usable setup has often been a job in itself.
There’s probably no easy way around that, but Aputure’s Sidus One might be a large part of the solution. It’s tricky to sum up because it can bridge together a lot of different protocols. Probably the most common application will be to connect a WiFi device like a tablet to lights expecting CRMX or wired DMX control data.
There are two widely-used ways of sending DMX data over Ethernet (and therefore also WiFi) networks: Art-Net and sACN. The former is simpler and often used in installation and architectural work while sACN is probably more common in film and TV. Sidus One will receive either and turn them into CRMX or wired DMX.
CRMX is a wireless protocol built specifically for lighting control, supported for both input and output. This isn’t something that has to ride on top of BlueTooth or WiFi, although there is the option to send CRMX data to the Sidus One over BlueTooth.
There’s also conventional wired DMX output which makes it possible to fire up Sidus Link Pro on an iPad and control more any intelligent light built since Madonna was charting Into The Groove (the author lit up the night sky with an ancient Dataflash AF1000 strobe, just for fun).
Sidus One will also accept wired DMX data, and deliver it to CRMX devices. Being an Aputure product, it supports the company’s proprietary Sidus Link protocol as well. That approach allows the Sidus Link app to talk to a network of devices using the crafty mesh topology which allows devices to pass messages among themselves, maximising range and reliability.
Yes, that’s a lot of I/O.
Aputure’s Sidus Link Pro app is certainly not the only piece of software that’s capable of sending various forms of lighting control data over WiFi or BlueTooth, so (assuming no compatibility glitches) Sidus One should integrate nicely with a wide range of other gear.
The design of lighting control software – much like the design of lighting desks in general – is a very personal thing, depending very much on the task at hand, and the designer’s experience and preferences. Setting up lights in any of these apps can quickly start to reveal the age and simplicity of the DMX protocol itself, which still underlies things like sACN and CRMX. It’s still just 512 numbers (per universe).
People used to more recent protocols, things like USB, might be slightly thrown by this. Plug in a USB mouse, and the computer knows it’s a mouse. A DMX network – however that data is sent – will generally need to be told what light exists at what address, how many control channels that light has, and what they all do. Exactly how that works out will depend on the light and the mode it’s in.
Aputure supplied a case full of its own Infinibars, for which Sidus Link Pro naturally has presets (there’s a large library, and users can add their own). In “CCT + RGB” mode, a PB12 light uses eight channels, so that the DMX addresses for four lights need to start at 1, 9, 17 and 25.
To take that mode as an example, those eight channels specify overall intensity, colour temperature, green-magenta shift, CCT-RGB transition, RGB channels, and a strobe effect. Some infinibars have modes in which 48 individual regions are each individually controllable, requiring 336 channels, though that’s less likely to be manually controlled.
Sidus Link Pro is still fairly new, but seems promising. We’ll talk more about Infinibars separately, particularly their suitability for use as part of an image-based lighting system in virtual production.
The headline, really, is pricing. Aputure is asking $439 at shop.aputure.com, which makes the Sidus look like stellar value. The RatPac AKS+, for instance, lists for $1900, and even a Satellite is half that. Both of those have wired Ethernet options, though the Satellite lacks wired DMX. Compare carefully, then, but it’s very competitive.
At that price, we might expect a cost-optimised physical build, though this device is clearly part of Aputure’s recent push toward a higher-end clientele. So, the Sidus One is in a metal enclosure, an extrusion with metal end caps screwed in place and connectors appropriately wired to the board. It offers an eighteen-hour battery life that should be the equal of even the most dedicated director’s 'Fraturday' overrun.
Complaints? Well, the user interface on the device itself is packed into a small area, and perhaps a bit too reliant on timed button presses, and the Sidus Link Pro app scatters setup and configuration options around rather haphazardly.
Beyond that, the only complexity is that Sidus One connects a lot of things together in a lot of ways, and DMX itself is old and primitive. On the upside, for older lighting that we’d like to be wireless, other companies have inexpensive CRMX receivers which would just plug in, and then work nicely with a Sidus One.
At some level, it’s possible to boil the Sidus One down to being just a protocol and media converter, although even then it’s quite a lot of converter. Look at the recently-announced Sidus Four to handle more universes of DMX, but for a belt-clip device, Sidus One does plenty and the pricing is as tempting as a big slice of chocolate gateaux. In the end, not everyone needs one, but those who do will recognise Sidus One for the steal it is.