Pars or DMX Stage Pars

[plainman007]

Dear Members,

 

I require your help and suggestions concening some fixtures that im gong to buy. Your suggestions are important. So please help.

 

Im buying an entire infrastructure of lighting for my stage show. My max stage sizes would be 30'x40'. I was to buy 20 par 64s (1000 watts) for my general lighting of the stage and for wash effects. But it seems theres a better product option which is called a stage par 1200. Its got a 1200 watt halogen lamp. 27 colors on 20 color wheels. Full dimming 0-100%. Fresnel Lens. And its a native DMX fixture (which will eliminate my need to also carry and connect a DMX dimmer pack etc). Secondly I think I would need just 8 of these for my stage size since they have color wheels in built and I dont need to carry so many pars just for the additional colors they can give me. So my opinion was that one of these would replace about 3 pars because of its ability to change colors etc. So, lesser units to carry, easier to connect and maintain etc. And each is brighter than a 1000 watt par. So what do you feel about my idea. Do you think I can go ahead and buy 8 of these. Will they suffice for my stage size ?

 

Heres the fixture im talking about...

 

http://satanlighting.net/stagepar1200.htm

 

 

Thanks for your help in advance..

 

Plainman

[paulears]

The thing looks interesting, how much is it?

 

The snag will be the build quality, but if you case them up and look after them? I would guess they are not anywhere as bright as a Par64, but with 8 of them, all on - should be good enough. You need to see one before buying 8, no matter what the cost.

[Just Some Bloke]

Firstly ignore the name - it is NOT a Par 64 by any means. It is much more like a fresnel so the texture of light produced is quite different.

 

Secondly, it only produces 27 colours by mixing together 2 colour wheels. This means that at least 9 of these colours will be quite dark (mixing primary blue with primary red will be VERY dark, but may count as one of the 27 colours).

 

Thirdly you'll need to find out how good the 'variable dimmer' is. The lamp itself may not dim, but may have some sort of shuttering which will close to obscure some of the light. This isn't always as smooth as the lamp itself dimming, especially towards the end of the fade out.

 

Fourthly, you'll need to find out how robust it is. Par cans are renouned for being able to withstand being hit a few times with passing scenery etc. These type of lanterns are often made more for price than robustness.

 

All in all, I'd suggest the best bet is to see one for real before you make any decisions (as Paul suggests). Maybe a BR member has used some before and can help?

 

 

 

Edit: Just had another thought: don't forget angles. If you have lots of Pars all coming from different angles, the change from one state to another can be quite effective with angle and colour both changing. If you have only one state which simply changes colour each time, it gets a bit boring after a while to be honest. Just a thought.

[Brian]

Similar to these...Eurolite thingies at Thomann.

[Simon Lewis]

Is fan noise an issue for you? The Stage PARs are force cooled, and eight of them may be distracting.

[dosxuk]

The fixture in that picture looks a lot like a Clay Paky fixture, but I can't find it on their website.

 

When using colour changers, remember when changing colours, you'll normally see the colour change as a rainbow effect, rather than smoothly changing as you would with pars. Therefore, you'll still need a large number (maybe two thirds) or these as you would pars.

[Nicktaylor]

Is fan noise an issue for you? The Stage PARs are force cooled, and eight of them may be distracting.

You are right. I have involvement with a school who have twelve of the things. The fans run all the time and are together very loud!

 

Looking at the original post these devices look like the Martin Robocolors which I have four of. Fan noise might be an issue here, maybe not with rock and roll, but certainly in a quiet emotional scene

 

As another poster has said, the colour spooling is not clean.

What desk do you have? three channels of DMX each.

[paulears]

The colour wheel info is as follows:

 

DMX-protocol

Control channel 1 - Colour-wheel 1

Linear colour change following the movement of the slider. In this way you can stop the colour-wheel in any

position.

DMX-value Feature

0-21 Open/white

22-43 Red

44-65 Blue

66-87 Salmon pink

88-109 Yellow

110-127 Light blue

128-187 Forwards rainbow effect with decreasing speed

188-193 No rotation

194-255 Backwards rainbow effect with increasing speed

Control channel 2 - Colour-wheel 2

Linear colour change following the movement of the slider. In this way you can stop the colour-wheel in any

position.

DMX-value Feature

0-42 Open/white

43-85 Purple

86-128 Green

129-171 Yellow

172-214 Pink

215-255 Closed

Control channel 3 - Dimmer intensity

You can invert the dimmer via the RDIM function.

DMX-value Feature

0 - 255 Gradual adjustment of the dimmer intensity from 100 to 0 %

Control channel 4 - Reset, internal programs

[niclights]

That does look suspiciously like a Clay Paky unit, doesn't it!

 

I wanted to add that not only will overlaying colour wheels reduce output, but the lamp will almost certainly be high colour temperature, like most moving fixtures. This means they are great at producing cold colours like blues & whites, but terrible with warm colours. As always, all fixtures have their purpose.

[Brian]

...but the lamp will almost certainly be high colour temperature, like most moving fixtures...

Nope, as the OP said, it's a bog standard 1200W halogen lamp, so 3200K.

[Just Some Bloke]

Looking at the colour wheels, it is clearly designed for lighting bands as most of the colours are saturated. The only two suitable for skin tones are salmon pink and light blue. Additive mixing of saturated colours (by combining both colour wheels) will give lots of very dark shades. Red on wheel 1 plus purple on wheel 2, for instance, is going to hold back an awful to of light!

 

What will you be using these for?

[plainman007]

Hi Everyone,

 

Thanks for your replies.

 

Its for an illusion show. So lemme try to say, fan sound wont be a probem because these are 30x40 feet stages. And the first row is about 15 feet away. There is always the illusionist talking or theres music to the performance of the illusion/magic in the style of a rock show. So I dont see the fans being a big problem. Then about colors... We are more than happy if it can give just 4 to 5 useable colors, even if they are just cold colors. We have done shows with 24 to 30 pars where weve had 6 each in white, red, blue, amber respectively. All those extra cans and wiring just for the extra color. Considering that,, this still feels a better choice.

 

Yes I think im going to go to the store and ask them to put up a par64 and one of these side by side and compare the brightness. But I think 1200 watts halogen is not gonna look duller than a par 64. Cost wise this is 158 gbp (250 USD approx). When I added the cost of 20 pars + a 24 channel DMX dimmer pack its far exceeding the cost of 8 of these.

 

Also we did an interesting thing. We reviewed all our DV video recordings of our previous shows. Every show which had about 30 pars showed only 6 to 8 of them on at any particular moment. So my idea,,, 8 of these will always remain on but changing to the colors we need.

 

Someone mentioned about caring for them and casing them properly. Yes we would sure do that, firstly because we are not a rental company so its usage is for our own tours only. Secondly, we only do about 12 shows a year. The light is only gonna do 12 shows per year and just be in storage the rest of the time. And for us those 12 shows alone will recover the entire cost of these lights. And I dont think however delicate they are they will go to the trash that soon. Even if they complete 2 years we still win. And I forsee them lasting much longer. This would be a better option instead of paying rental companies and relying on their bad service (No offence, im reffering only to my country across the globe from uk).

 

Also someone asked how we are planning to control these units with reference to the 3 channels required per unit. We are buying a software based contoller giving us 512 channels of DMX with 3d visualization. I think 8 of these units x 3 channels each would be marginal.

 

Paulears >> You have mentioned the complete DMX values of the color wheels etc. May I ask where you got them. Frankly, because I myself couldnt get them from the dealer yet. Is there any link where you got that. Pointing me to the source could help me a lot.

 

Some others were confused with claypaky. I havent seen claypackys version but this is from a company called SATAN LIGHTING. What a name !

 

Everything ive said here is to lay the cards out on the table. So that we judge these units fairly. Im not trying to prove anybody wrong or vice versa.

 

What do you guys think ???. Please give me your feedback.

[Hambone]

I had a look at the Satan stuff online.

 

Is there a UK distributor?

[enbee]

I hate to be the pessimistic one but...

 

in my experience, the more a unit does the more there is to go wrong. sound obvious but if you are only using 8 lights and one goes down, thats an eigth of your light gone. I'm only really in favour of lights like this if I know enough people who would trust them and it seems that not many people have used them

 

personally I would only really consider these as an extra within a rig

 

par's have a good rep for being able to take some abuse and if 1 par goes down out of 20 then its less of an issue

 

just my two cents