@LPdan I've been lighting productions since the 1950's. I've always played the Head or assistant electrician, rarely the designer, and ALWAYS felt color selection was my weak point. That said; I've had a number of combinations I've fell back on over the decades. Most recently, for front lights, Roscolux 60 (basically as a 'poor man's color corrector' to somewhat compensate for amber shift when running sources at 40% and lower) from SR with Roscolux 06 from SL. I had other combinations if I had the lamps, circuits and dimmers available to have more than one wash color per area, warm and cool for example.
Most of the usage would be for musical theatre in local schools or community theatres with limited LED sources. Most of what I've used in the past is Rosco or Lee, but open to anything that can be ordered. Ron's post is very helpful, mainly trying to achieve general warm or cool looks.Maybe you can help us narrow things down some. Is this for straight theatre? Musical theatre? Concerts? Dance? Do you have a rep plot and if so what systems are included? Is there a preferred gel manufacturer in terms of what your local vendor stocks most?
EDIT: Oh, and do you have LEDs for deep color or is it all tungsten?
@LPdan Is your plan to own a small selection of useful colors for your own personal use or are you planning to keep colors on hand to loan or sell to others? Here's where my thinking is going. If you're encountering an approximately equal number of 7" and 6.25" cuts, consider cutting all cuts at 7" square and folding one edge within the frame when needing to reduce to a 6.25" cut folding only the one side and leaving the top edge sticking up out of the frame, crimped in the fixture's frame retaining clip if / when need be. Thus,the next time you need to color a fixture with a 7" frame, you can simply unfold the gel and insert it in the slightly larger frame.
R54 has always been a go to warm or cool depending on if my front light was 04 or 60, but I always felt like 54 was slightly too saturated.
Anyone have a fav gel color that's great at acting as well as a warm or cool like 54 does but less saturated?
I’d be interested to see what other “mixes” the rest of you use when faced with a limited inventory of conventional instruments.I tend to like R51 or R52 for a neutral wash. We typically use R02 or 302 for amber washes and R64 for a cool “night” wash.
I’ve also taken to using R344 for a pink wash combined with R69 as a more saturated blue. I’ve found that when I mix them they blend to a nice neutral, so that with two instruments I can get a full range of wash colors from bright pink, neutral, to blue. Helpful because we have a limited inventory of fixtures and dimmers.
@macsound In the early 1990's, I was initially serving as an electro-acoustical consultant with a new theatre being built from the foundations up in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. I drew all of the electro-acoustic conduit risers. When the theatre opened, the owners persuaded me to work for salary and serve as their IA Head Electrician. A gentleman normally designing lighting at Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario's Shaw Festival was contracted to design the lighting for one production. The gentleman chose to light the stage five areas wide and three areas deep for a total of 15 discrete areas with each area lit by 9 fixtures, mostly 1K FEL's with a mix of 1K and 2K back-lights. The LX designer chose not to operate any fixtures lower than 80% to minimize amber shift and I learned several things:I saw a play last night that had an amazing phenomenon I've never experienced in theatre before.
Theatre had pretty standard, affluent theatre plot. So like 7 focus points across, 4 deep. High sides in 3 points wide, 2 deep. Onstage side ladders in 2 colors and 4 points across in 3 legs. Like 25 PARnels as blue downs and 12 2k fresnels for amber downs. Blah blah everything else normal.
In addition to all the regular front, down and sidelight, there were 8 Martin Vipers onstage and 4 over the house.
In addition to this, and the CRAZY thing to me, they had 4 19deg S4s with scrollers! and auto yokes!! as movable front light. I mean, there was TONS of front light anyway, in warm and cool but for some reason they had these scroller with like 4 colors of CTB and 4 colors of CTO.
Definitely the epitome of having favorite gel colors.
(Ladies DON'T sweat; ladies PERSPIRE don't you know)
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