[Andy Babin]

My background is as a theatrical electrician/automated lighting programmer, but most of this stuff applies to both.

You are correct in DMX being a daisy chain format, generally you don’t “easily” convert MIDI to DMX, the protocols are designed for two different things. Devices exsist to go from MIDI to DMX but i’ve never had a good experience with them. The big thing is you cannot fade values in the midi spec. You simply get ON (at whatever value) and OFF, there is no way to do “fade from 0 to 50% over 2 seconds in midi, dmx on the other hand is designed for this specific purpose.)

If you want to sync to MIDI you can use MIDI timecode, it’s essentially SMPTE timecode over midi. Most modern light consoles (anything ETC, GrandMA, Wholehog series) can accept midi (or smpte) timecode being output by whatever device of your choosing (when we do this setup we use MIDI Timecode being output by Logic Pro on a macbook)

You can then tell the lightboard to fire cues or lights at specific places in timecode (ex. cue 1 go at 00:01:17:51:20.03) or you can use bump buttons to manually trigger lights. For a simple setup manual control may be easier. but when you start dealing with 24+ conventional lights or anything automated you start to run into issues. Most of the consoles have some sort of “learn” feature where you can feed it timecode and do actions on the console (fire cues, bump buttons) and it will record timecode events automatically.

For control of the lights generally (I have a theatre background here) you use some form of dimmer rack (generally an ETC Sensor Rack). Anything tungsten based light will dim fine, and you can set fluorescents to “non dim mode” in the console/rack where they simply switch on/off without too many issues (you can dim them too with mixed results).
For HMI stuff you will need controllable ballasts. The arri thing you linked won’t work on overhead fluorescent light. Arri does make DMX controlled stuff for HMI gear though.

Each set of lights would be controlled by one dimmer, and then you program out your sequence as you see fit. You can have multiple lights on one dimmer (assuming you are under the rated load) but each separate thing you want to control needs it’s own dimmer channel. Just make sure you have the ability to power a dimmer rack before you go renting gear.

Quickly turning lights on and off can shorten their lifespan, i’ve never really had issue with it. A lot of the automated/moving lights have mechanical shutters in them that just block the beam and don’t douse the lamp to be safe though.

Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions. I’m currently in the process of programming out a music video with 16 automated lights and about 40 conventional units to timecode.