Chauvet Color Consistency

[MNicolai]

I think it remains to be seen how pronounced the problem is before anyone can estimate what the value would be. At the end of the day I see it coming down a question of money more than of artistic snobbery.

Christie Digital has a type of this system in their Mystique package that allows a camera to automatically calibrate, warp, and blend an array of projectors onto a canvas. The selling point isn't that the final result looks better -- it's that it saves you a gazillion hours of labor costs in setting up a new system or maintaining an existing system.

Things that I could see increasing the value:

1. If the degradation is significant enough to cause noticeable inconsistencies, but not so pronounced that calibrating the fixture would not destructively hamstring its capabilities (i.e., you get a more honest 3200K, but only up to 65% brightness because that's as bright as the weakest link goes, so you have to limit your fixtures' brightness down by 45% in regulated mode.
2. If inventories would have a longer useful service life, or would be less subject to concerns about being able to mix and match new/old.
3. For rental companies, if this meant they could cross-rent between each other, or between different rounds of purchasing, without getting grief from clients/applications that do require color consistency.
4. If in some manner or another, an effective standard is developed that is integrated with RDM, so a fixture's calibration travels with it rather than with a console, and generally fixtures of different manufacturers and models are in some manner or another calibrated to the same target in a manner which is appropriate for that type of fixture.

** Obviously, a Selador Fire and a Selador Ice and a Selador Pearl and a Phoenix are never going to produce the same breadth of colors between each other. But, when you punch up R09, it would be nice if every fixture made an effort to hit an appropriate color recipe at the brightness to which they are able to.

I'm inclined to believe that the few known-knowns we have here are that:

1. Different applications and markets will be affected differently. Nobody cares if the wall washers match at a wedding reception, but they absolutely when you're lighting up a cyc or the facade of a building.
2. Never before has our industry had a higher fragmentation of similar-but-different fixtures within each brand.
3. Never before has our industry had a higher fragmentation of similar-but-different fixtures between brands.
4. LED manufacturers turn over generations of emitters faster than lighting manufacturers produce new generations of fixtures.
   
5. Our industry is likely to see a higher fragmentation of fixture and light source configurations within the same venue, purchased at different points in time, trying to cover the same ground.
6. Lighting designers are used to colors fading and becoming clearer as gels deteriorate or arc sources age, but they are less accustomed to seeing colors shift into different colors, as opposed to just becoming less saturated.
7. The average fixture purchased today costs 5x what it did 5 years ago -- and while the fixtures may serve more purposes and the sources may last longer, they are more likely to become obsolete within 3-5 years. People are going to want to keep their investments from becoming obsolete in whatever reasonable ways they can.
8. People do not want to replace 60' of cyc fixtures because a 6' section crapped out after 7 years and now nothing can be done to match the new 6' with the existing 54'.
9. The budgeting threshold for investing in new fixtures has skyrocketed. For the last 25+ years when you had $300 you could buy a single new Source Four and know it'd match your current inventory. For groups like schools it was accessible to bury the costs of a purchase here or there into a production budget. Now, buying 1-2 fixtures at a time would be irresponsible because the same model won't match the ones you bought 3 years ago, and you don't know what the next one you're going to buy will be. Now, a single system's worth of fixtures could conservatively be $15k. The barrier to accessibility for as-needed new purchases has gone up drastically. A mechanism for smoothing out the rough edges of buying 4-5 fixtures at a time without ending up with 4-5 red-headed step children in your inventory would generally be welcomed, especially by schools.

I have every confidence the answer is neither obvious nor will it be easy -- BUT -- I think that every conversation we've ever had about how you cut gels to minimize waste -- where and with what you label them with -- how big you label them -- and whether or not you should hit them with a pounce wheel to make them last longer serves as evidence enough that maintenance of color quality so as to not impose undue costs on the operations of the venue is something that is on a lot of people's minds and which directly impacts a large number of venues.

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Commence a 7-year ratification process of a standard like ACN or AVB which will take an additional 10 years for wide enough adoption to be useful, just in time for anything and everything to be based on video projection or plasma sources with lasers on their freaking heads.