LED Striplights

[gaffmaster]

Hi everybody, this is my first post, so I'm sorry if I miss any formality.

I work for a high school, and one of the parts of this job is lighting design for their shows. We have 4 Altman R40s that are 8 feet long, each with 16 lights divided among four circuits that we use to light our cyc from the bottom. From the top we have ETC Multipars, which each have three seperate lights in them, each on their own circuit..

In the past we have used these (as well as a few source 4 pars or parnels) to get a pretty good looking wash onto our scrim. In the past, we have gelled mostly only one color, which effectively covers our cyc evenly.

After that long preface, I have two questions:

1. Do you think it would be possible to get some good RGB color mixing by gelling all the instruments 1/3 primary ged, 1/3 primary green and 1/3 primary blue? It's a wide cyc, and this collection of fixtures does not span the space easily.

2. The theater has DMX built into the system, and I have for a while wanted to experiment with either the Chauvet Colorstrip, or the American DJ Mega Pixel Colorbar. Have any of you tried them, and how much manual control is there with dimming each of the red, green, and blue sections separately?

Thank you all so much!

 

[epimetheus]

Use the search function and you will find plenty of threads about using LEDs on a cyc. The general consensus is that it is way out of the budget in most cases. DJ quality fixtures (Chauvet, AMDJ, etc.) don't have the intensity necessary and generally have trouble smoothly dimming. The high end fixtures, such as ETC's Selador line, cost more than most college educations.

Generally speaking, the cheap fixtures aren't capable and the capable fixtures aren't cheap.

 

[shiben]

Take a look at going conventional on this one, we just bought 20 Selecon Hui cyc cells, for something significantly under 4 grand. They are nice and bright, very low profile, and really didnt cost us that much coin (compared to doing them all in LED units, would have cost over 20 grand plus running power for the LED units (cant use dimmer circuts).

 

[icewolf08]

There are no LED units, expensive or cheap, that can even hold a candle to traditional cyc units in terms of photometrics. You can't get a nice even field across an entire cyc with LEDs yet, and the ones that come the closes are super expensive. Check out the Selecon fixtures listed above or the L&E Boad Cyc fixtures. For the cost of a couple feet of LEDs you should be able to get enough 4-cell cyc units to evenly cover your cyc and color mix.

 

[gaffmaster]

Wow, so many great responses so fast. Thank you all so much!

This leads me to my next two (related) questions.
Using what I have, 4 8ft Altman R40 striplights and ETC 3 section multipars, how should I go about creating good cyc washed, and if possible color mixing?

My second question is that I have also wanted to experiment with LED pars for some time now, inexpensive ones being ideal. Even if they are not bright, I would be interested in using them for some effects. So are there any particular models that are popular (I have looked at the American DJ ones personally), or are there other instruments that I should experiment with first?

Thanks again for the great advice I'm getting

 

[epimetheus]

Wow, so many great responses so fast. Thank you all so much!

This leads me to my next two (related) questions.
Using what I have, 4 8ft Altman R40 striplights and ETC 3 section multipars, how should I go about creating good cyc washed, and if possible color mixing?

My second question is that I have also wanted to experiment with LED pars for some time now, inexpensive ones being ideal. Even if they are not bright, I would be interested in using them for some effects. So are there any particular models that are popular (I have looked at the American DJ ones personally), or are there other instruments that I should experiment with first?

Thanks again for the great advice I'm getting

While there are probably more traditional theatrical fixtures that you would benefit more from, I like the Elation TRI LED series. That series has the each RGB LED cluster under a single lens so that you don't see the individual RGB LEDs. The color mixing occurs before the light leaves the fixture. I've got a Elation Opti TRI 30 that set me back about $400. The Wiedamark products also seem to have a reasonable balance between quality and price.

 

[Pynspot]

I'll second the Tri Pars. Over the summer, the show I worked on had just picked up some for additional color washes. We were so pleased that I think they're going to double their inventory of them.

 

[xander]

How big is your cyc?

 

[derekleffew]

...You can't get a nice even field across an entire cyc with LEDs yet, and the ones that come the closes are super expensive. ...

In the super expensive category, the CK ColorBlaze72.

The fixtures are 4' below the deck, and the cyc is 12" US of the stage. The light easily reached 20' up the 30' tall cyc, fading off gradually. The first 4' is not so pretty however.

 

[gaffmaster]

The cyc is about 70 ft long and 25 ft tall if I remember correctly. Rather large.

 

[shiben]

So conventional wisdom would put you at having something like 10 lights per color across the entire cyc (I believe the standard operating distance is about 6' between units and 6' between units and the cyc, so I approximated.) Depending on how many Multipars you have, you might be able to approximate this and fill in with the strip lights.