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    Heather Richards
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Steppy LEDs

I'm sure this has been covered several times already - I'm in a tech heavy day with no time or screen to hunt it down - apologies for the repeat!

I have some house and some rental Rgb LEDs in, and all of them are very steppy looking over longer cues at low intensity.  The designer has seen them behave much more smoothly - Im wondering if my console may be putting out dmx oddly, or if there is a trick besides part cues or discrete timing, or if that's just the way LEDs are.  The house ones are x-focus, rental colour blasts, I'm on an ion with software version 2, and to the best of my knowledge no output/priority settings have been changed since we got it in 2009, and we have net3.  Any advice appreciated!

Parents

  • If you have the headroom with your fixture's brightness, and no other options work for reducing the "steppiness", you can sometimes reduce the zipper noise by putting a neutral density gel on the fixtures. At the cost of output at the top end, it gets rid of some of the low-end drop down, which is accentuated when you have a lot of the same-type of fixtures dimming at the same time at the same rate...

    If you don't have easy access to ND, you might try fudging it a bit with colour correction, although I've never tried it myself.

Reply

  • If you have the headroom with your fixture's brightness, and no other options work for reducing the "steppiness", you can sometimes reduce the zipper noise by putting a neutral density gel on the fixtures. At the cost of output at the top end, it gets rid of some of the low-end drop down, which is accentuated when you have a lot of the same-type of fixtures dimming at the same time at the same rate...

    If you don't have easy access to ND, you might try fudging it a bit with colour correction, although I've never tried it myself.

Children
  • in reply to JHarpur

    I also found you can play with the profile (curve).  If using the LED strip units with conventional fixtures, the bulb normally can be seen starting at around 7%.  So if you make a profile to start the curve at 7% for the LED I found it matches better.  We did this for our ColorBlaze 72 cyc strips.

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