I got my fist opportunity to run some of the Skypanels last week and wow these are great lights. I think/ hope I start seeing I'm going to start seeing them on a lot o movie sets going forward. That being said I ran into 2 issues while trying to control them. The specific fixture I was running was the 60c, but I have a feeling that this will apply to the other models.
1) In mode mode 11, corse/ fine control, the dimming is awful. Going from 0 to full looks like the intensity is jumping all over the place. It looks like it is bumping up and down in intensity as the fade goes up (or down). this happens with both a 'sneak time' fade as well as just rolling it up/ down with the wheel. I have a feeling that the profile was just built as if it was just a 16bit profile, but according to the profile specs it doesn't quite look like that is how it works.
2) After I switched to mode 6 which fixed the dimming issues, I still had an problem with the plus minus green encoder. The instrument in all of it's color correction profiles has one channel for Green tint control. It's a very full line in the profile that is doing a lot of work. Unfortunately the encored in the board doesn't reflect any of work that the encoder is doing. When you move the wheel you get "+" and then "-100 +100" which doesn't tell you anything you anything about where you are in the value of the channel. my work around was to pallet out the entire wheel, which takes up to 20 pallets and some time to create. We had a color temp meter so I was able to set my pallets up as +1 Green, +2 Green, and so on which is a better way to communicate with a gaffer. It came out to be ~ 10 points on the 255 value in the 8 bit encoder. This would be my suggestion as a way to break up the encoder as it's how the industry talks.
TLDR: the encoder need to work like a gobo encoder.
I'm attaching a link to the Arri spec for the units with all of it's modes spelled out.
