This is a hypothetical scenario and is a brain picking “how would you do it” question [Edit] and is a re-post from ControlBooth.com
The local electrical service company granted your request to go green, provided the funding and you are now the owner of a complete set of ETC Selador Vivid-R 63” LED strip lights, 16 total to light your 40ft wide x 30ft high white cyc. 8 units for overheat, 8 as ground row, complete with appropriate lenses that give you the prettiest cyc wash on the planet. Plus they funded a new ETC Ion console as well as appropriate nodes and relay's to get it all working.
You're a road house that also does in-house produced events and have a tour next month of Montana Rep's “Of Mice and Men”. They tour with an Expression console, plus a few scrollers and Twins-Spins, but all other lighting is house gear. The tour plot calls for a 4 color cyc – R23, R27, R80 and R91, top and bottom, with 18 control channels for left, center and right separation, top from bottom.
There are maybe 100 cues in the show that include daytime, dusk, night and dawn, with sunsets, sunrises, etc.... all run off the Expression running your rig.
So what's your method for utilizing the LED cyc units on a visiting console, to match the desired colors a conventional set of incandescent cyc lighting units would provide ?.
- Do you port over all the cues to the Ion, hoping the scroller, twin-spin channels do their thing ?.
- How do you match cyc colors on a cue by cue basis from what had been incandescent units to LED's ?.
This is not exactly a hypothetical question, but is exactly the scenario we (I) face as we struggle with the desire (and possible funding) to move to LED cyc lighting. Thus I ask for wisdom and examples of lessons learned from my fellow CB members.
The question is condensed to:
1) Do you configure LED's as 3 or 4 separate RGB channels and hope the Red, Blue and Green (and Amber) match the values and intensities of standard incandescent fixtures, thus losing some of the useful control functionality, or set up as single intensity channels and use the console color mixing.
2) How do you match intensity and color on a cue by cue basis to a "look" originally achieved with incandescent fixtures ?.
Steve Bailey
Brooklyn College
[edited by: Steve Bailey at 4:44 PM (GMT -6) on Tue, Nov 23 2010]
