Spotlight Fatigue

Good day CB,

I am struggling with maintaining even color temp across my 3 Robert Juliat Aramis spots. I work in a tour venue. We do everything from weddings, corporate events to full symphonies, and rock shows. The shows spotlight needs tend to vary obviously. My issues comes into play whenever a tour requires 3 spots. My typical usage is 1 - 2 but occasional a show will come through that needs 3 (actually 4 but we don't have room). This creates a massive disparity of lamp hours between my 3 spots. 2 of them run pretty evenly and are at around 620 lamp hours on the fixture. While the 3rd, is at 260. Note: I'm fairly new in the position (~2 yrs). As such, I am not sure when the fixtures were re-lamped.

Now for the question, what to do? Should I re-lamp all 3 fixtures when the color temp gets noticeable or add a filter to correct? IF I proceed with the latter, how does that play with the filters selected by the tour? Does anyone run a venue and have experience with this issue?

I've checked this forum in several different ways as well as the interwebs. Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,

JM
 
We only have 2 spots and also have the disparity in usage on each. What we do is a yearly rotation, moving spot 1 to spot 2's position & vice versa.
It's not an ideal balance, but over the expected life of the spots ( 10 years?) it hopefully evens out.

Colour correction gel should not affect the colour choices from incoming shows; they may ask for a specific colour temperature for the spots if there are cameras involved.
If you know they need the precision of identical colours per spot, then perhaps you'll have to budget for new lamps for that specific show/tour.
 
Thanks Ric. I didn't think of swapping the actual spots. That's brilliant in its simplicity. I'll re-lamp all spots to reset to zero and implement this.
 
HMI is a fussy type of lamp to get a good match out of. Usually, new lamps from the same batch are very good, but unlike xenon, if you start putting hours on one and not the other, when you go to use them together they will look different. I used to have a bunch of HMI satellites and was very careful to keep the hours balanced so that when two or more were used together they would look the same.

The only way to get things back on track is either A) relamp all with new lamps from the same batch, or B) Give preference to using the one with the newer lamp until they grow close in hours of use.
The third option is that unlike xenon changing lamps is pretty easy, so, you could buy a new set of lamps (same batch/date code) and only put them in on shows where all spots are in use and matching is more of a critical factor. Then, revert back to the old lamps on shows when you are not using them all.

If you are unsure of the lamp hours, place all the lamps next to each other on a table. The level of white milkiness in the globe will tell you the age.
 
The lamp in the Aramis is a 500hr lamp, so if you don't have any documentation on when the lamps were changed you should change the lamps that are over 500. You will probably see a big difference in color temp after 400hrs, in relation to a new lamp. The suggestion to stagger the usage of your fixtures is the proper way to keep all of your units around the same time. And you probably won't be able to reset the counter on your ballast so start an Excel sheet to track hours. In the touring houses I've worked in we would track hours on lamps and charge each tour a fee for lamp use.
 

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