An "Intense" question (strand 300)

[adude23]

Hey, Does anybody out there know how to make a fixture profile with 2 INTENSITY CHANNELS that the STRAND 300 can understand?
I've got LED par cans but the intensity doesn't do anything and is simply overrided whenever you increase or decrease the red green or blue values

So does anyone know how to make a channel in a fixture profile that has just got the RGB values on to make a sort of "Dummy intensity channel" ?
Thanks,
~Ash~

[derekleffew]

Sounds like what you're looking for is a "virtual intensity channel." I know grandMA, Hog3, etc. support it, and I believe all of the new ETC desks, and probably the Palettes, but don't think it's possible on the 300/500. Icewolf or footer can probably suggest a work-around.

[adude23]

Ok, thanks
Icewolf or footer. . . if you can help that would be brill

[icewolf08]

What fixtures are you using? Do they actually have an intensity channel in their DMX profile (the profile in manual, not the one you put in the board) or just RGB? As far as I know there is no way to create a virtual intensity channel on a 300/500 like you can on the new Palettes, Eos, Ion, or the GrandMA and Hog3.

[Footer]

The easiest thing to do would be to just make a group that is the same channel number and just call it up by group number if you want all of the colors to go at once.

Now, we have no clue what kind of fixture you have, so here it goes....

I am going to assume the fixture has 4 values, an intensity, and R,G,B.

If the intensity is at 0, and you bring up the RGB does anything happen?

Does the intensity value change anything?

If the intensity parameter acts as an overall cap, you could set up the RGB values so that at FL they are off and at 00 they are on. When the intensity value would be ran up all the colors would come on at once. This would make you have to think a bit when mixing color, but it would work if the intensity value is more important then color mixing. Don't know how useful this would be... I usually just create a group for this sort of thing.

[Diarmuid]

I worked on a rig for the most part made up of LED pars earlier this year, and controlled them off of a strand 500 series desk.
From the sounds of it, you don't need the intensity channels on your fixtures to actually do anything, (which is a simmilar situation to the fixtures we were using).
Basically the way we got around the whole profiling of the fixtures, was to just create a basic personality with CMY attributes (I don't think there are RGB attribute numbers, either that or it just made sense as everything else we were using was cmy) as well as the three colour channels, we also had like some channels for macros and stuff, so we assigned them to the relevant attribute numbers. Without the intensity channel the fixtures weren't visible in the normal channel display, so we just patched an intensity channel to an unused DMX output (this wasn't part of the personality, just 4.1 @Patch 203.1 where 4.1 is the unused DMX output and 203 is the fixture number).
This does mean that the lights can't be controlled by one channel alone, but if you set up some groups (i.e. 3 colours off, red on, green on, blue on and combinations there of) programming isn't really any slower than it would otherwise have been and the only potential problem is that the channels would be using the LTP times instead of the normal times that the rest of your intensity channels are using.
Hopefully thats the easiest way to make a 'dummy intensity channel', just make a real one but direct it somewhere where no one will notice it (by no one I mean none of the lights, they're people too right?)
Hope that helps.
Diarmuid

[photoatdv]

I just did a show with some LED cans (intensity, RBG). I just parked the intensity channel at full intensity (note- this may or may not be 100%, mine were 69%). Then if I wanted a green at 30%, I just put the green channel at 30%. Its easy if you can spare subs to put them on so its easy to play with.

[adude23]

Yeh but NOT easy if the PARS your working with don't have intensity channles to begin with, I've got R,G,B,STROBE,COLOUR MACROS and that's it and basically i want to build a dummy intensity channle.
The desk does this automatically when you patch it as a fixture with attributes but it does nothing. . .

[icewolf08]

Originally Posted by adude23

Yeh but NOT easy if the PARS your working with don't have intensity channles to begin with, I've got R,G,B,STROBE,COLOUR MACROS and that's it and basically i want to build a dummy intensity channle.
The desk does this automatically when you patch it as a fixture with attributes but it does nothing. . .

The intensity channel does nothing because it has nothing to control. There is no way that you can use one intensity channel to control the intensity of the fixture because your fixture doesn't support it (one more strike against cheap LED fixtures). If you want to change the intensity you have to scale all the colors down (keeping their ratios the same to preserve the color) to dim the fixture. It is just one of those things that they didn't anticipate when the 500 series was released.