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    scottsmith
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Cyc Programming

I have a cyc that is lit by four sets of ordinary three element flood lights that are gelled red, green, and blue. Each element is independent from the others and has its own power and thus it's own channel.

So my question is: is there any way to get my ion console to think of the three color instruments as a single RGB fixture similar to an led fixture. I would like to be able to use an encoder to set the color and the ion to programatically vary the relative intensities of the three elements.

Right now I have to control all twelve lights individually, for solid colors that is no problem, I have three submasters that control the intensity of each color, For non-solids like gradients, however, I have to set the level individually for each of the 12 elements which tends to be a bit tedious especially when trying to make subtle adjustments.

I hope that makes sense and thanks for any help you can offer.

  • 0

    Set it up as generic LED_RGB. All you need to do is make sure the DMX addresses for each set of 3 cells are contiguous (i.e. 41(Red),42(Green),43(Blue).

    In my case I found the colour picker to be red-shifted due to differences in transmitivity of the gels but was able to balance it out by changing the max intensity of the red dimmers in the rack. I expect I could use curves but I haven't experimented with that part of the manual yet.

  • 0 in reply to sk8rs_dad

    You were right on the money, I don't think I would've found that on my own. It took me just a bit to figure out how the LED_RGB patch worked but now I have much better control.

    Let me know if you ever get anything figured out on those curves; I might take a stab at that this week since I have the same issue, not bad but could definitely be better. Thanks man.

  • 0 in reply to scottsmith

    Curves aren't useful in this circumstance. They apply to a channel, not an address.

    I think it should be possible to copy the LED_RGB fixture and edit the range so the max is less than 255. I tried making that change with the offline editor but the 'About' box shows it's still sending 255 DMX when full. It may be a bug or it might be me misunderstanding the way ranges are supposed to work. Feel free to try it on your console and see if you get better results.



    [edited by: sk8rs_dad at 3:10 PM (GMT -6) on Mon, Feb 1 2010] Fixed typos
  • 0 in reply to sk8rs_dad

    the issue with using the RGB fixture that I've ran in to is that the "brightness" value cannot be changed, and the Home value for the fixture is White, which means all red green and blue cells are ramped up to full, the intensity parameter has no effect, and i have not managed to be able to control the elusive brightness parameter that is supposed to be there, so the only option is to manually ramp the colour parameters down to zero, which can to my experience interfere with the Hue and Saturation controls. no matter what I have tried I have not been able to affect the Brightness parameter to deal with this issue effectively, not sure if the programmers read the forum or not but i'm seeing it as a bug, the Brightness parameter is listed in the RGB fixture profile but does not show up in the Live channel control

    my two cents

  • 0 in reply to Aristobulous

    I may be misunderstanding what you mean by brightness, but if it is equivalent to intensity then it is readily controlled by the intensity wheel or the [at] command. I think ETC has implemented RGB fixture control as product of (intensity x colour) so when intensity is set to zero, the fixture is not emitting any light.

  • 0 in reply to Aristobulous

    The Intensity (on the wheel) should be controlling the overall intensity, with the colour controls merely setting the colour.

    If this is not happening, then you've not used the Generic > LED_RGB fixture but must have accidentally picked one of the many variants like RGBI that has a separate intensity, or otherwise works differently.

    If you copy the personality you've used and look at it in the editor, you should see a set of attributes with no offset called Hue, Saturation, Brightness and Intensity.
    If any of those are missing or have a non-zero offset, then it won't work correctly.

    With regards to the "Brightness" parameter:

    Eos uses a version of the Hue, Saturation, Brightness (HSB) colour space for the Colour Picker controls.
    Brightness allows you to choose a 'darker' versions of the 'same' hue/sat (for CMY this brings in all three colour flags, for RGB it dims them all together).
    - Wikipedia has a reasonably good, although rather technical, article on the HSV/HSL/HSB colour space.

  • 0 in reply to Richard

    i think the issue im running in to is that when I programmed on the ion itself i was playing with my programming method i detailed in the other thread, where the dimmers for the cyc units are driven through the LED fixture indirectly, in that scenario i dont think the overall intensity parameter takes control properly, im sure if the LED fixture is used properly it would work, offline though i don't see a change in any of the values so thats probably where i'm assuming its not working, next time i'm on the console i'll have to play around a bit more, i'm pretty sure the theatre has the cyc units plugged in dimmer order according to cell order, will have to try it

    where i was going with the 'brightness' thing is that on the ion, i can see the console displaying a 'brightness' level, Full, but there is not a parameter input for user modification to the level, chances are the intensity parameter works fine, its just the workaround for my patching method that was causing the issue

    -Aristo

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