ETC has told me that it farms out their
fixture profiles to a third party. Some of their profiles are great, ETCs fixtures for one. Some are just bad, Chauvet in particular has been an issue with us. Some problem like pan and tilt are an easy fix. Others, like the HUGE
red shift in my S-PAR 1 fixtures lead me to believe they have never seen one and just used a generic
profile. I have mentioned the problems to both companies at
LDI and was told by Chauvet that they would
send a
fixture if asked. When I told
ETC this they were non committal. Obviously
ETC wants us to by their LEDs and High End's movers. What they should realize is that they don't always have the right tools for what I need,
IP65 rated fixtures for one, and that those of us in educational settings have tight budgets and can't always afford their equipment. I know that some folks from
ETC are in this forum, I hope that they will see this thread and respond. Just to be
clear I am a very heavy
ETC user and have equipped multiple venues with their gear. There are 8 full Sensor racks in my building and i just installed a full
LED gallery light
system. All three spaces
wash lights are Desires. But sometimes a Desire or S4 is not the right tool for the job and I own other companies products. I need them to work seemlessly with each other on
EOS. Sorry to hijack this thread, spent a long night programming Nutcracker and now I have to tweak my fill lights since the
color picker and
gel picker are so far off between a D60 and the S-Par 1 as to be useless.
Hi
@Lextech ,
We (along with other manufacturers) use a company called
Carallon to assist us in providing
fixture profile information as there are too many fixtures and manufacturers out there for us to be able to keep up with all of them. If
fixture manufacturers
send a physical
fixture to
Carallon, that
fixture is characterized as the golden example of the
fixture and, where possible, color calibration data is captured and shared for use in
fixture libraries. However, a majority of
profile information is written based on the
fixture's
manual and/or
DMX chart without ever seeing a physical
unit. Unfortunately, if we don't have the color calibration data, we can't know that a particular
fixture model is off from the generic color model. This appears to be the case for the S-PAR 1 as there is
no color calibration data in the library.
In every
fixture library update, we include an HTML
page that lists all of the fixtures in the library, their modes, names, and whether we have color calibration data for the
fixture. If you see that your
fixture doesn't have color calibration data and color matching is important to you, we encourage you to reach out to the
fixture manufacturer to have them
send a
fixture to
Carallon for characterization. That data can then be added to the library in a future update. We also encourage you to reach out to us on our forums or via email to let us know that you'd like us to make sure to include the color calibration in an update (this flags us to be watching for the update rather than passively including it at some undetermined future date).
It should be noted, even if a
fixture does have color calibration data, that is not a guarantee that your fixtures will match the characterized
fixture. LEDs can vary by a number of factors and depending on the choices made by the
fixture manufacturer on how narrow of a range they will accept to use in their fixtures. The emitters used in the "golden"
fixture sent to
Carallon may vary from those used in forward production. If you find small discrepancies, it is likely a variation in individual
fixture manufacture or age/use of emitters. I'd recommend using discrete color palettes to work around this issue to tweak those fixtures that are not quite right. If you find large discrepancies, it is possible that either the characterization is incorrect or the
fixture manufacturer made a change that affected the validity of the color calibration. In those cases, I would recommend that you let us know that the calibration is having an issue (so we can make sure there weren't code issues in our software) and also let the
fixture manufacturer know as well as they may have updated their manufacturing process and may need to
send an updated
fixture to be (re)characterized.
As a non-sales person, I can say that while we'd love to have you
purchase ETC and High End products exclusively, we understand that isn't always possible in every application. We do strive to make our consoles work as seamlessly as possible with third party gear, however we are limited by the data we receive.
@Crisp image , Thank you for reaching out to us on the
ETC forums. It appears to be that you've reached a resolution, but if there is more we can do, please let us know.
