Motion light questions

Hello,

  Our church has 2 Chauvet Intimidator LED 250 moving lights. We are using an ION console with the fader wing and we just installed V2.2 software. An issue we've run into with them, which is really more of an aesthetic issue than anything else is the fact that this fixture has a color wheel vs. colored LED's. You may say, "So what?" and that's fine but the issue we're facing is the wonky color flip from one color to another as the color wheel indexes to the next selected color in the next cue. The same can be said for gobo wheel indexing. As a temporary measure I created a timed filler cue that fades the primary LED source out, then after the timer has expired, the next cue triggers and the color wheel indexes to the next chosen color and the gobo indexes as well. This happens just as the primary LED sources begins its upfade. My question here is, can I create a timing feature within a single cue that will accomplish our goal of fading the primary LED source to black, index the color wheel and gobo then upfade the primary LED again? Thank you for your input.

  • No, this isn't possible* because the Intensity parameter must make two separate moves:

    1. Intensity fades to zero (before colour wheel changes)
    2. Intensity fades to full (after colour wheel changes)

    A Cue contains zero or one movement for each parameter - it either tracks from previous (no move) or it changes (moves).
    So in order to have two moves, you need two Cues.

    What you're seeing is the general limitation of all "intelligent" lights - you've always got to get there from here, and often the 'straight-line' route looks ugly.

    With things like colour and gobo wheels, you'll usually do that by fading out, changing then fading back up - and in fact, the console can automatically do this for you - it's called "Marking" in Eos Family consoles, and on Ion you have either "AutoMark", or "Manual Marking" for more advanced users.

    For other types of movement (Pan/Tilt, CMY/RGB mixing etc) delaying or accelerating one or more parameters can also give a better transition.

    * In theory you could use an Effect but don't. Really, don't!

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