Colour Changers/Scrollers

[PhantomD]

I'll cut the waffle and be blunt:

What current models/manufacturers are there?

What do people recommend?

How effective are they e.g. changing colour speed or use during a dance chase?

Thanks guys in advance.

[len]

Color changer, scroller or color mixer? To convert a conventional into a color changer or out of the box? LED? Budget? Throw? Your question is too open ended to answer.

[soundlight]

Apollo or Wybron are both good brands. You will see colors scroll past in front if you are doing a dance chase, and that will also wear out the gel string faster by whipping it back and forth really fast. But, if you set your string up so that throughout the chase you are just moving from one frame to the next, you'll be good there. Just line up your chase (20 or fewer frames max), and then you can have it move from one gel in the scroll to the next. If you're doing dance chases and can't do this, go with some sort of RGB type fixture/3 fixtures.

[soundlight]

And if your focus is broader than color scrollers, there are tons of different kinds of fading/mixing scrollers with two gel strings of cyan/yellow and cyan/magenta, RGB mixing fixtures, LED fixtures, and all of those kinds of things.

[digitaltec]

Well there is the High End Color Command... The SeaChanger...

Try and stay away from scollers especially if you are going to fly through the colors to try and attempt to re create a moving light chase. If your going to go from one color to the next over time then it's ok but noisy.

I really like the Color Commands... only 4 channels and full CMY color mixing. Practicly a 750w Par. Not a bad item.

the Sea Changers from what I hear are amazing but are expensive for what they do.

[JSFox]

The colorcommands are great as long as you don't need to match gel colors and don't need a very wide beam.

[zac850]

The color commands also change colors REALLY SLOWLY.

Well, OK, really slowly is an exaggeration, but I tried to do a quick change with one, and it failed miserably. They are wonderful for most other things, beautiful colors, beautiful changes, but if you want snap color changes, not gonna happen. (The Color Merge, on the other hand, does nice snap changes though.)

Really, there is no good way to do the snap changes your talking about with any changer/scroller type thing. Anything I can think of will require more time then you want to move the glass/gel scroll to the next color.

I would say either
a) get lots of Source4s (or whatever) with all the colors you want and hang them
b) rent a moving light with a color wheel. Color wheel should do some fairly quick snaps (though, of course, depends on make/model)
c) get 2 sets of Source4s (or whatever) with scrollers/changers. system a turns on with color 1, system b scrolls to color 2. system a turns off while system b turns on. system a scrolls to color 3........ and so on and so on.

Of course, all of these require decent budget.

Oh, choice d would be to hang a red, green and blue light and color mix with those. Won't work perfectly, but always an option.

[Kelite]

The Apollo Smart Color scrollers will run end to end in just 2 seconds, probably a bit faster than they really would be used- but you never know who wants to blast through the color selection.

Stage Electrics has purchased quite a number of these scrollers and have a demo if you are interested. There is no better way to judge a color scroller than 'taking it for a drive'.

[PhantomD]

Thanks for all the help guys.

Looks like it might be wiser just to use gel permanently and specials.

By the looks of this, colour scrollers are expensive for what they do (if they do it well).

Does anybody have any ideas for some other effective implementations of DMX for glitz/other? We have permanent DMX moving light control, but we only hire in movers when we need them so it would be really great to have something on hand all the time to use and to train people with.

Thanks again - sorry for late reply, I have been away from home.

[lightbyfire]

If you want a simple ML trainer that is also functional the S4 revolution with a shutter and gobo package is a nice moving special with a color scroller but also repositional. It has its limitations, which have been discussed numerous times, but I think it is a good model to use for people who are not used to MLs.