Existing events and LED cyc lights

[SteveB]

[EDIT - This is a hypothetical scenario]

This is a brain picking “how would you do it” question.

The local electrical service company granted your request to go green, provided the funding and you are now the owner of a complete set of ETC Selador Vivid-R 63” LED strip lights, 16 total to light your 40ft wide x 30ft high white cyc. 8 units for overheat, 8 as ground row, complete with appropriate lenses that give you the prettiest cyc wash on the planet. Plus they funded a new ETC Ion console as well as appropriate nodes and relay's to get it all working.

You're a road house that also does in-house produced events and have a tour next month of Montana Rep's “Of Mice and Men”. They tour with an Expression console, plus a few scrollers and Twins-Spins, but all other lighting is house gear. The tour plot calls for a 4 color cyc – R23, R27, R80 and R91, top and bottom, with 18 control channels for left, center and right separation, top from bottom.

There are maybe 100 cues in the show that include daytime, dusk, night and dawn, with sunsets, sunrises, etc.... all run off the Expression running your rig.

So what's your method for utilizing the LED cyc units on a visiting console, to match the desired colors a conventional set of incandescent cyc lighting units would provide ?.

- Do you port over all the cues to the Ion, hoping the scroller, twin-spin channels do their thing ?.

- How do you match cyc colors on a cue by cue basis from what had been incandescent units to LED's ?.

This is not exactly a hypothetical question, but is exactly the scenario we (I) face as we struggle with the desire (and possible funding) to move to LED cyc lighting. Thus I ask for wisdom and examples of lessons learned from my fellow CB members.

Another Edit: The question is somewhat

1) Do you configure LED's as 3 or 4 separate RGB channels and hope the Red, Blue and Green (and Amber) match the values and intensities of standard incandescent fixtures, thus losing some of the useful control functionality, or set up as single intensity channels and use the console color mixing.

2) How do you match intensity and color on a cue by cue basis to a "look" originally achieved with incandescent fixtures ?.

Note for non-Eos/Ion users. The consoles are very good at letting you tell pretty much any CMY ML or CXI scroller or LED fixture to match a gel color. If I have 20 LED Color Blasts set up as Channels 301 thru 320 I can put them in Group 301, then call "Group 301, Color, 5/85, Full, Enter", which will put all those fixtures pretty close to Roscolux 85. You can then modify via Color Picker or encoders using R,G,B,R-A,I,BG (Red, Blue, Green, Amber-Red, Indigo, Blue/Green) adjustments, then saving as assorted color palettes. So easy enough to set up some R23, R27, R80, R91 color palettes. Then what do you do ?.

 

[bdkdesigns]

Obviously this is hypothetical seeing as how the Montana Rep isn't touring that particular show....however, to be technical, the next time they come touring through there, they should be a carrying an ION with them. They just got it after this past tour.

However, not a bad question and one that I don't necessarily have the answer for. I almost went out on this years tour of Bus Stop too. Had I have been the ME for this tour however, it would have been my responsibility to create a custom showfile for your particular venue.

I could have easily gone through a cue by cue basis roughing in what I would have hoped the cyc values would have been provided I was aware of this right away after you told me from viewing the tech packet. I guess the only hangup for me would be the unfamiliarity with the color mixing on the Selador units vs. a standard RGB unit.

For me, it seems like it would be a great purchase, but are you creating more work for yourselves than necessary? Any touring ME/ALD/LD (whatever that structure is on the tour) should be able to make adjustments for the given venue on the fly to closely match the intended design as possible. With that being said not many people out there have the experience on recalling values for the full Selador spectrum and it would likely become much more reliant on you to help as the venue tech. Granted of course, I haven't messed with the built in color palettes of the ION and how they interact with the Selador units. Would it be possible to tell the traveling venue to approximate the gel color being produced and using that palettes to your advantage? I guess that is something that I need to look at during this years USITT.

 

[derekleffew]

...The tour plot calls for a 4 color cyc – R23, R27, R80 and R91, top and bottom, with 18 control channels for left, center and right separation, top from bottom.
There are maybe 100 cues in the show that include daytime, dusk, night and dawn, with sunsets, sunrises, etc.... all run off the Expression running your rig.

1) Do you configure LED's as 3 or 4 separate RGB channels and hope the Red, Blue and Green (and Amber) match the values and intensities of standard incandescent fixtures, thus losing some of the useful control functionality, or set up as single intensity channels and use the console color mixing.

2) How do you match intensity and color on a cue by cue basis to a "look" originally achieved with incandescent fixtures ?.

1. Yes, use only four of the seven available LEDs. Writing a Selador 7-color profile for an Expression 3 isn't going to be terribly useful. This is a one performance tour stop, correct? And for a morning school show at that? Theatreworks USA used to (maybe still does?) travel in a passenger van pulling a small trailer, with the AEA SM running a reel-to-reel, and did excellent performances.

2. How do "you" know what the "look" was with the original fixtures? It's the road crew's problem. One would think they are used to dealing with fixture differences in various venues, even if the cyc fixtures are colored with R27/R80/R91/R23. Thus I'd patch the Seladors as channels, and treat them as though they were standard cyclights. (If the visiting console supported color palettes, my answer would be the opposite. It's highly unlikely the Expression was programmed with focus points labeled "day cyc", "night cyc", etc.)

...Would it be possible to tell the traveling venue to approximate the gel color being produced and using that palettes to your advantage? ...

A cue on the Expression has R@80, B@50, G@30, A@25. What gel color is that? What's the easiest way to translate that to X7? Note as I learned at http://www.controlbooth.com/forums/ldi-2010/22004-experiments-metameric-failure.html , there's more than one combination of colors to achieve what they eye perceives as an identical match. May not matter on a natural muslin or white cyc, but what if it's a painted drop we're lighting?

 

[SteveB]

1. This is a one performance tour stop, correct? And for a morning school show at that? Theatreworks USA used to (maybe still does?) travel in a passenger van pulling a small trailer, with the AEA SM running a reel-to-reel, and did excellent performances.

Hypothetical question using real life examples..

SB

 

[meatpopsicle]

[EDIT - This is a hypothetical scenario]


- Do you port over all the cues to the Ion, hoping the scroller, twin-spin channels do their thing ?.

No, not me. While I know that its a possibility I would think that the cleanup of that kind of file transfer (everything gets moved over in ascii) is not that desirable. I know its possible but for a road show I would think staying with their console would be their preference.

- How do you match cyc colors on a cue by cue basis from what had been incandescent units to LED's ?.

This would be my go at it. It uses the shows console and cuelist so all the timings are in place. The downside is you have to go through and update the show cues. For 100 cues it shouldn't be too bad using the following method

I would build 4 submasters that mimic the colors of the cyc units. Break the Seladors into groups of cells like old style strip lights. Then your using additive mixing with the chosen colors. I might even use the DMX in on the Expression so I could use the color picker in the ION to set the actual levels. Then record the subs using those levels.

Where the old show calls the colors at level I would set the subs for those levels and update, cue by cue.

Couple a 4 hours work I would think, maybe a 4 hour lighting call? The work would go a lot faster toward the end of the call as the levels became more familiar.

I think it would work.

 

[SteveB]

Bdkdesigns wrote: “For me, it seems like it would be a great purchase, but are you creating more work for yourselves than necessary? “

This is the million dollar question, or at least the $80,000 question as that's at least what it costs to light a cyc with decent LED's top and bottom.

Derek then wrote: “How do "you" know what the "look" was with the original fixtures? It's the road crew's problem. One would think they are used to dealing with fixture differences in various venues, even if the cyc fixtures are colored with R27/R80/R91/R23. Thus I'd patch the Seladors as channels, and treat them as though they were standard cyclights. “

As well as “Yes, use only four of the seven available LEDs. “

To which meatpopsicle added with: “I would build 4 submasters that mimic the colors of the cyc units. Break the Seladors into groups of cells like old style strip lights. Then your using additive mixing with the chosen colors.”

So since nobody else chimed in. My take is there's no easy solution for moving to LED's from incandescent's in an existing design. Possibly the cyc, and a white one at that, would be the the most trouble of any type of movement from conventional to LED, due to the fact that light on a white cyc is the most obvious place to to see a mis-match or change. I'd go on a limb and state that as there are few if any LED profile or spotlights used for area/facial lighting currently, nobody's having issues as yet, trying to match an S4 in an R05 to the Robert Juliat LED profile. Certainly there are plenty of uses of Par type LED's in backlight situations, but they are somewhat easier to deal with as you can have the house console sit in a color and have the visiting console deal with the intensity, or so goes the theory. In addition, with FOH area lighting as well as some backlighting situations, the LED fixture may only be a one-for-one swap, thus mixing is not much an issue. Possibly the backlights are somewhat less problematic as to color matching a real R321 to that chosen by Console X for that brand of RGBA LED Par, as the light is not lighting a portion of the stage or actor where the difference might be a problem. It's on the cyc, on a white background , where we see the difference.

In addition and given the current state of LED fixture designs, there are probably more types of striplight/cyc wash type LED units available then other types, thus the cyc seems to be the obvious place to make the move to LED. That and the huge wattage loading required by incandescents make it an easy “go green” location.

In my house, I'd love to have LED's lighting my cyc. The Tommy Tune event I did last week had me using 20 ColorBlasts for a ground row and I was in love with the blending and color transitions, the ease of getting color variations as well as the control of the various fixtures. But that was a show cued for that event and I sometimes don't have the 2 -4 hrs. required to go cue-by-cue to update the cyc colors to an LED fixture. Yes, it's the road crews problem, but why make work for them and myself ?. Especially if there's no time. The methods suggested, using the LED's to replicate a conventional multi-cell cyc light system, “might” work, but has to be thought thru carefully. One option would be to configure the control of a Selador system for individual cell-per-color, park it that way on the house console, then have the visiting console just run the intensity channels, piled on to the DMX stream. Selador has 7 colors per cell, plus intensity, so that might be the only way to deal with this issue. I'm now going to post this over on the ETC forum to see if anyone has feedback.

Thanks for reading

 

[LuxMax]

Another option would have only the house LEDs on the house console, program them to match the corresponding RGBA levels per cue on the touring desk. Hook up a MIDI cable between the two and sync them via MSC. I'm not sure if this is easier/better, but it is another method.

 

[SteveB]

Another option would have only the house LEDs on the house console, program them to match the corresponding RGBA levels per cue on the touring desk. Hook up a MIDI cable between the two and sync them via MSC. I'm not sure if this is easier/better, but it is another method.

Thought of that as well, but it means writing cues for cyc levels that correspond to the cues in the visiting console. Might as well go Q to Q in the visiting console and adapt.