Automated Fixtures A standard for fixture profiles?

[JohnD]

I was just curious if there could be a standard for fixture profiles for LED's and Movers. It seems that it should be possible, instead of having to contact the console maker for every new fixture the fixture maker could provide a universal profile. Of course, the major console companies would have to get behind the idea.

 

[epimetheus]

I'd be happy with the console manufacturers giving the end user full capabilities in building a profile themselves. (ETC I'm talking to you!) The end user should be able to create a custom fixture profile with all the same options and capabilities as a profile generated by the console manufacturer. I bought the console, give me access to the full capabilities of it already.

 

[sk8rsdad]

There wouldn't be much of an issue getting the console companies to adopt a universal profile. It would greatly reduce their development cost and simplify maintenance. OTOH, the fixture manufacturers have a tougher time with a universal profile since their market differentiation is directly tied to the features they offer. Many LED fixture manufacturers provide a lowest common denominator profile that matches something like 8-bit RGB or 8-bit RGB with an intensity parameter. Trouble is, somebody always wants to use some extended feature.

The DMX protocol complicates things quite a bit too since the limit on addresses per universe together with the relatively slow transmission speeds means sending a lot of data quickly can't happen. Since a univeral profile would have to be written to the worst case of every feature at the highest resolution it would very quickly chew up every available address. If we get an to ethernet-based protocol, that issue would be alleviated but I don't see that happening any time soon, and not without a great deal of grumbling from people like us with a large investment in DMX today.

Most console manufacturers are trying to provide a layer of abstraction to the bit twiddling needed to manipulate a fixture. Even with a universal profile there wouldn't be universal behaviour. Pan and tilt ranges vary, colour mixing is going to be different, gobo wheels are not going to match, etc.

The best hope today is some sort of bidirectional communication wherein the fixture could describe itself to the console using some agreed upon standard. RDM tries to do this over existing hardware but it is limited in both the kind and the amount of information it can transmit. Assuming those limitations went away, there would still be issues with the console being able to handle some new and unsupported feature.

It's a nice goal though.

 

[wheat]

Carallon is doing so: they basically are gathering all sorts of info about products, organize them in a prefixed database and selling them to console producers.

Console guys eventually take this spreadsheet and extract the bits they need for their specific filetype.

Almost all the bigger players on the consoles side are actually using Carallon services, and carallon is also providing color measurements for lots of fixtures and some other nice services

 

[avalentino]

I'd be happy with the console manufacturers giving the end user full capabilities in building a profile themselves. (ETC I'm talking to you!) The end user should be able to create a custom fixture profile with all the same options and capabilities as a profile generated by the console manufacturer. I bought the console, give me access to the full capabilities of it already.

Can you please advise which platform you are working with? We have three in active development and a handful of legacy products. Additionally can you identify what functionality you are looking for that does not exist in the current custom fixture editor (for said platform)?
Thanks very much!
a

 

[techieman33]

There wouldn't be much of an issue getting the console companies to adopt a universal profile. It would greatly reduce their development cost and simplify maintenance. OTOH, the fixture manufacturers have a tougher time with a universal profile since their market differentiation is directly tied to the features they offer. Many LED fixture manufacturers provide a lowest common denominator profile that matches something like 8-bit RGB or 8-bit RGB with an intensity parameter. Trouble is, somebody always wants to use some extended feature.

The DMX protocol complicates things quite a bit too since the limit on addresses per universe together with the relatively slow transmission speeds means sending a lot of data quickly can't happen. Since a univeral profile would have to be written to the worst case of every feature at the highest resolution it would very quickly chew up every available address. If we get an to ethernet-based protocol, that issue would be alleviated but I don't see that happening any time soon, and not without a great deal of grumbling from people like us with a large investment in DMX today.

Most console manufacturers are trying to provide a layer of abstraction to the bit twiddling needed to manipulate a fixture. Even with a universal profile there wouldn't be universal behaviour. Pan and tilt ranges vary, colour mixing is going to be different, gobo wheels are not going to match, etc.

The best hope today is some sort of bidirectional communication wherein the fixture could describe itself to the console using some agreed upon standard. RDM tries to do this over existing hardware but it is limited in both the kind and the amount of information it can transmit. Assuming those limitations went away, there would still be issues with the console being able to handle some new and unsupported feature.

It's a nice goal though.

I think he's asking about a universal profile/s for each fixture. So Martin would put out a Mac 2000 wash profile, or maybe a couple of profiles for various options 8-bit vs 16 bit, etc. Then no matter what console you were running you could just load the profile you got from the manufacturer when you bought the fixture.

 

[MNicolai]

Carallon is the king of profiles. If there's a place you want to get profiles from, it's them. Especially as they are providing color-calibrated profiles. Many manufacturers of modern console are subscribing to their libraries, and they do a good job keeping up with new products on the market. It's then up to console manufacturers to regularly provide software updates and console owners to install those updates for maintaining their console's profile libraries.

A notable exception to this is Strand Lighting, who creates their own profiles for their consoles. Last I talked to them, they were punting responsibility on color-calibrated profiles as they do not provide that service on the in-house library they maintain. That was one of several reasons at a leading up to a very early retirement of their console at a local venue and the abrupt acquisition of a competitor's product.

Carallon's service is fairly comprehensive to a degree of detail you couldn't expect manufacturer or user-generated content to be. I'd recommend checking out what they're providing here: http://www.carallon.com/assets/files/carallon_data_service_overview.pdf

There's a lot more detail to a profile than just the parameters listed by the DMX personality tables you get out of a fixture's user manual, and each console manufacturer may choose different ways to present that information and those controls to users in ways that manufacturers just aren't capable of -- and for good reason. After all, who's being paid to be experts in user interfaces and provide users with powerful features? It's not the fixture manufacturers, I can promise you that.

 

[JohnD]

Great information, especially from wheat and MNicolai. I suppose I was mostly thinking of the model for computers, where the maker of say the video card provides drivers for various operating systems. Of course that has its own set of problems. I was just thinking about all the console forums with instructions for asking for new profiles, usually asking for copies of the manual.

 

[wheat]

Carallon is the king of profiles

Well... Some of them (Alpha Profile 1500, Alpha Spot HPE 1500) are actually pretty inaccurate, at least with some kind of console...

The guys at Cast Lighting actually have the most accurate fixture libraries for their kind of product imho

 

[epimetheus]

Can you please advise which platform you are working with? We have three in active development and a handful of legacy products. Additionally can you identify what functionality you are looking for that does not exist in the current custom fixture editor (for said platform)?
Thanks very much!
a

I'm spending most of my time on an Ion. My complaint is more on principle than actual need at the moment. In the past when I had to create profiles on the fly for a fixture that was brought in on short notice and did not have a stock profile, functions like Lamp On, Lamp Off, Reset, basically macro style functions, were not able to be created from the fixture editor on the console.

 

[sk8rsdad]

I'm spending most of my time on an Ion. My complaint is more on principle than actual need at the moment. In the past when I had to create profiles on the fly for a fixture that was brought in on short notice and did not have a stock profile, functions like Lamp On, Lamp Off, Reset, basically macro style functions, were not able to be created from the fixture editor on the console.

Lamp control features are in the current release. It's all covered in the fine manual starting on page 88.

 

[avalentino]

Well... Some of them (Alpha Profile 1500, Alpha Spot HPE 1500) are actually pretty inaccurate, at least with some kind of console...
I can't recall exactly when the lamp controls were added to Eos family custom profile mapping - but it's been there for at least the last 3 years....

If there are inaccuracies in the profiles - it would be most helpful to identify those to the manufacturer of the desk you are using, if you've not done so. Because there are so few standards (does the zoom home to narrow or wide, does the iris home to open or closed?), most manufacturers do the best they can - but it isn't always possible to get a physical unit to vet the profile mapping. Other users of the units would be very grateful to get fixture updates as well. Thanks much!
a

 

[Nsimmons]

The guys at Cast Lighting actually have the most accurate fixture libraries for their kind of product imho

Cast don't have the same demands on their library as console manufactures, I don't remember seeing a version of WYSIWYG in every school, concert hall, theatre etc etc. If cast were dealing with a request for the latest Chinese LED fixture everyday it would be a different story.

It's also easy for fixture manufacturers to come up with whatever profile they like because controlling it is someone else's problem! The latest trend of sticking LED's on every fixture and turning the profile into 70-120 DMX address is fine for them!

 

[BadRad]

There's a lot more detail to a profile than just the parameters listed by the DMX personality tables you get out of a fixture's user manual, and each console manufacturer may choose different ways to present that information and those controls to users in ways that manufacturers just aren't capable of -- and for good reason. After all, who's being paid to be experts in user interfaces and provide users with powerful features? It's not the fixture manufacturers, I can promise you that.

Sure - but applying a specific fixture's DMX personalities to a controller is really more of a mapping function and still based on the limitations built into the fixture (whether documented in the manual or not).

There should still be a universal standard for defining the DMX personality in a way that's usable by any console, DMX software or visualizer to take advantage of. Would be a simple matter for each to map the new specification to whatever they are using now with an import routine or translator until the standard becomes more widespread. Adding an ability for fixture manufacturers to 'tag' a specific profile as officially supported by them, while still allowing custom profiles to be built for older fixtures (or lazy manufacturers who won't bother) would allow for community support to keep profiles more up to date.

DMX profiles do not contain such a vast amount of data points that this would be that difficult - someone big just needs to define and get behind a specification. Not hard to store opticals, luminous intensities, speed timings, images for gobos, product images, basic 3d vectors, etc., and still add in some custom assignments inside of a spec that could have versioning as the needs grew. This problem has been solved many times over in other industries. It's ridiculous to be recreating these profiles for every console/software app out there, and for each of those specs to contain only a subset of the fixture's profile based on their own needs.