I guess that's what's mind boggling to me. Why wouldn't
Rosco push for deals that make calibrated colors a selling
point on certain manufacturer's lights? With a
logo on the light and everything. Like
Rosco branding your
face!
Wouldn't "legacy" designers jump at the chance to use fixtures guaranteed to match existing
gel colors?
Rosco, as any vendor, will only care so long as they are getting paid -- particularly since their market cap in
gel products is deteriorating. Probably the reason the lawsuit doesn't
call out gobos as a problem -- gobos are still a product that
Rosco can sell and that having those libraries included in consoles can be helpful to their sales.
As for legacy designers -- I can't imagine almost anyone choosing to buy fixtures based on
Rosco having built-in presets when there are so many other factors to consider -- and
fixture vendors will want to maintain openness to
all color libraries. No
point in putting a
Rosco label on it if 1)
Rosco didn't make the
fixture and 2)
Apollo and
Lee would have their logos on it as well. There's also the fact that
LED's have spent a decade already gaining momentum. The days of it being potentially compelling to buy a
fixture because a particular
gel manufacturer blesses it as accurate...for some portion of the spectrum but even today maybe not all of it...are well past and quickly further diminishing.
My small team of 6 works on probably 30 high schools a year -- high schools being one of the predominant markets for
stage lighting systems. As Bill Conner would say, the number of professional theater installations in a year is a pittance to the number of K12 projects annually. Nobody, on a single project of mine
ever, has raised a concern about being able to match gels. They're almost all getting entirely new
LED systems. Compatibility with one
gel system or another has no influence on the vast majority of
fixture or
console sales. That may have been the case in 2014, but it's only a factor today for a relatively small portion of the total
stage lighting market. So while
Rosco may want lots of money from a company of
ETC's size,
ETC may see it as not worth the expense.
But the reality is -- nobody in the public knows what happened. Did
Rosco want to hold
ETC or
Carallon hostage with extreme fees? Did
Carallon undergo their own business model change when they became employee-owned in Nov 2020? Are the fees
Rosco may have been asking for actually unreasonable or simply they were asking for maybe more than
Lee or
Apollo has historically wanted -- but that
Lee and
Apollo may start asking for themselves? Are
ETC and
Rosco in a feud because they both sell film/broadcast
LED fixtures now like how the
ETC/Wenger feud has
led to Wenger pushing
Strand and other solutions rather than propose options from a direct competitor they have in the motorized rigging market?
Nobody here knows. But suffice it to say,
ETC is the big dog in the neighborhood,
Rosco's having to adapt their business model to the new norms in modern lighting, and there's potentially a lot of money on the
line for what seems like a trivially simple color library but is the product of decades of development on the behalf of
Rosco -- the merits of which today are gradually becoming more questionable because whether it's in 10 years or 20, the days are coming where most users will have zero reference to what L181 or R08 were in the
tungsten days -- and their experience calling up those numbers in the
LED days will change every time they are using a different type of
fixture providing no stable reference.
In that vein, probably a discussion to be had about what happens over the next 10 years as the
tungsten gold standard becomes a thing of the past.
LED vendors will still have their own configurations of emitter arrays of different capabilities and qualities. Does a consortium or open-source color library emerge? Do
console manufacturers make their own libraries? What's the virtue in paying licensing fees for multiple libraries that the majority of users will have no experience with and/or inconsistent experiences depending on which fixtures they're using? Does none of this matter because designers will become used to spending a little time making their own custom palettes before they start cueing a show and a much, much smaller library of options will get them close enough to start with and they will tweak as they see fit?
