The Problem
Situation: We are both a producing house and a receiving house. About a 50/50 split. We have a Gio, tungsten Source 4's, and 8x Source 4 Series 2 Lustr's, (as well as lots of other 'generic' fixtures).
Touring shows either have to accommodate what every venue on the tour has, or take the equipment with them. Thus tours will take anything that isn't a 'lamp in a box' / 'generic' have to bring it with them to ensure they have comparable equipment at each venue. This has been fine so far, as rigs were mainly 'generics', and tours could rely on every venue having profiles, fresnels, parcans and cyc floods; although of varying types and qualities, they all did pretty much the same, and certainly took the same control.
With the advent of LED profiles this has got more difficult. We have some S4,S2 Lustr's which have been brilliant for producing, but are difficult to use for receiving work. We could use them on a 1:1 replacement basis for a generic S4, just telling the desk that it is now a different 'type' and plotting the gel colour throughout the show. That's ok, but is a great waste of the LED's potential, and when they cost 3 times as much to purchase can't really be justified. For producing work we can have a smaller rig (every light that the designer would same "same thing, different colour" can now be a single unit). For the receiving work, we have to keep our lantern count up, to accomodate the fact that they have been programmed on 'generics'.
This may only be a problem for a certain length of time - but it will be quite a while before all, or even most, venues on a tour will have LED profiles, or cyc washes, or fresnels, or decent LED pars. And it probably won't be even what each venue gets first - we might get profiles first, whilst others might get pars first, which means non of them can be used effectively. I think that a toolset to help transition rigs from 'single colour' tungsten to 'multi-colour' LED's is needed.
A Solution
I propose that to make LED lights truly useful on receiving work, a layer of abstraction needs to be added to the patch.
The desk would present several 'generic' channels, which are given the attributes of gel colour, etc. The desk then translates those 'generic' channels into instructions for a 'multi parameter' fixture - your LED fixture. So it is as if you had programmed with an LED - except that you are restricted to the attributes of 'generic' fixtures you are replacing (which is fine - because that is what you are replacing, and all it is being asked to do).
So in patch, an extra layer is added with 'background fixtures' where you patch your real units. Then, rather than patching your 'generic' channels to dimmer addresses, you patch them to your 'background fixtures'.
The desk already contains the algorithms required to calculate the resulting colour from two gels (used in the 'gel' color path), and I dare say it isn't too much of a leap for it to calculate the result of three or more gels added.
Conclusion
This would enable a much better case to be made for the purchase of LED source 4's over tungsten source 4's, as the LED unit's would not be idle so much. This would probably also increase the rate of take up of LED fixtures, for the same reason.
Imagine being able to use your S4 Lustr cyc unit's easily for a show which was programmed on 4-cell 1K cyc floods.
If you know that a show you are producing is going on tour to venues without LED units you could program with these 'background fixtures', so your show is ready for the generic units.
If there are ways of doing some of this now (i.e. combining two generic channels information into one LED channel) I would be very interested to know how this has been done. Also, are there any ways of doing the opposite (i.e. splitting and LED channels information over to several generic channels, based on colour used) - it seems this may be possible based on seperate colours, but is incredibly difficult when you start to think about the multitude of shades it is possible to create with two generic lamps (think one 'warm' and one 'cool')).
Many thanks,
Joseph Kennion