jglodeklights
Well-Known Member
The theater company I work for just opened a new theater facility, and got a brand new lighting package to go with it. Part of that package was ten Altman Spectra CYC 100's. I figured I'd put down my thoughts about them after our first tech on here so that I wouldn't forget them and others would have access to them in case they may find them useful.
We are using 5 of them to top light a white leno filled scrim cyc. The scrim itself is a little old and crappy; it has significant yellowing. It is 16'-6" x 30'-0". Our spacing for the units is 5'-6" on center with the electric 4'-0" downstage of the cyc. Trim height of the pipe is about 17'-0". Units are as sent by Altman with only changing in DMX addressing. This means 4 channels of DMX and Smoothing on.
Illumination: Extremely even. Top to bottom and left to right. No scalloping of any sort, with gradual falloff when units are soloed.
Color: Blue is pretty punchy. At Full it is able to balance nicely with our stage washes that are moderately bright and warm. Green repeats this. Red and Amber are lacking. They balance nicely with medium brightness stage washes, but Red especially lacks the kick one would like to have. Doubling up fixtures is an option to rectify this. All at full yields a nice shade of lavender. Pull out some Blue intensity and you get a nice shade of white. That is the strongest ability that I've found of these fixtures so far. Even with only four colors it is possible to mix less saturated colors effectively. Additionally, once three or all four of the colors are in the mix, the output can be made to look nice on a range of caucasion skin tones. Haven't had the opportunity to mix them onto someone with any other skin tone yet.
Dimming: They dim smoothly, but have a unique curve. And fast. We put timing of .35 seconds on them for any 0 count cues. Played around today with some curves, and with our wash spacing and theater size writing a curve that has an input of 0% outputting 20% and a slightly fast bottom helps to improve the look of them as they dim significantly. If only a dimmer curve would make our CFL based houselights dim better (I didn't spec them).
Playing with conventional fixtures: The output on the cyc looks nice against our stage wash made up of conventionals. We have four conventional S4 ERS fixtures with some R2003 Storaro Yellow throwing a gobo wash onto the cyc. The R2003 mixes predictably with the cyc wash to different hues.
Overall, I'm enjoying the Spectra CYC 100. They definitely save dimmers, which is important since we only have 96 dimmers and have a 36' x 36' playing space available to us for a variety of shows from comedies to large musicals. Oh, and yes, all ours match!
We are using 5 of them to top light a white leno filled scrim cyc. The scrim itself is a little old and crappy; it has significant yellowing. It is 16'-6" x 30'-0". Our spacing for the units is 5'-6" on center with the electric 4'-0" downstage of the cyc. Trim height of the pipe is about 17'-0". Units are as sent by Altman with only changing in DMX addressing. This means 4 channels of DMX and Smoothing on.
Illumination: Extremely even. Top to bottom and left to right. No scalloping of any sort, with gradual falloff when units are soloed.
Color: Blue is pretty punchy. At Full it is able to balance nicely with our stage washes that are moderately bright and warm. Green repeats this. Red and Amber are lacking. They balance nicely with medium brightness stage washes, but Red especially lacks the kick one would like to have. Doubling up fixtures is an option to rectify this. All at full yields a nice shade of lavender. Pull out some Blue intensity and you get a nice shade of white. That is the strongest ability that I've found of these fixtures so far. Even with only four colors it is possible to mix less saturated colors effectively. Additionally, once three or all four of the colors are in the mix, the output can be made to look nice on a range of caucasion skin tones. Haven't had the opportunity to mix them onto someone with any other skin tone yet.
Dimming: They dim smoothly, but have a unique curve. And fast. We put timing of .35 seconds on them for any 0 count cues. Played around today with some curves, and with our wash spacing and theater size writing a curve that has an input of 0% outputting 20% and a slightly fast bottom helps to improve the look of them as they dim significantly. If only a dimmer curve would make our CFL based houselights dim better (I didn't spec them).
Playing with conventional fixtures: The output on the cyc looks nice against our stage wash made up of conventionals. We have four conventional S4 ERS fixtures with some R2003 Storaro Yellow throwing a gobo wash onto the cyc. The R2003 mixes predictably with the cyc wash to different hues.
Overall, I'm enjoying the Spectra CYC 100. They definitely save dimmers, which is important since we only have 96 dimmers and have a 36' x 36' playing space available to us for a variety of shows from comedies to large musicals. Oh, and yes, all ours match!
