Robe 250 wash pallets / groups

[jhaynes199]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone knew where I could get paletts / groups for the Robe 250 wash unit for a Strand so you can just key in any Lee filter number and the light comes up in that colour.

 

Thanks very much,

Jonathan

[gareth]

You'll have to make them yourself, I'm afraid. I very much doubt that the CMY values for every Lee colour have been determined for that particular fixture, and it's even less likely (i.e. not likely at all!) that said values have been collated into a set of Strand preset focus groups.

[jhaynes199]

hmm that's what I thought. I've managed to get them for VL5's but no joy with the Robe units. Can you suggest any quick way of getting round this problem?

 

thanks for your quick reply!

[gareth]

Not really, no. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but there it is! The only way forward, if you've got a list of DMX values for CMY equivalents on the Robe for the Lee filters that you want, is to sit at a desk and crunch them all in. I wouldn't suggest using an OLE for this, as you'd only be able to enter values as a percentage and not as a 0-255 DMX value, and would therefore probably not get the degree of accuracy that you'd need for the results to be useful as accurate representations of Lee colours.

[Liam FitzG]

The snag to setting up preset focus groups for heads is that the groups are patch dependant, hence you need to be confidant of the number of fixtures etc ahead of time. They don't always work from one show to the next.

I have an excel sheet somewhere ... I will try and dig it up tonight; which has the Rosco Supergel numbers with percentage CYM figures for each gel. You could use a Lee to Rosco converter (nearly all the numbers under 100 are similar anyway). Then it would be an hour or four with the OLE. Might be worth looking at the show realistically and pick the colours out that you are most likely to need. I generally find most shows that I do end up drawing from the same group of 30 or 40 colours; with the odd special.

 

Liam

 

Edit:

Remembered ... http://www.martin.com/service/FAQs/MAC2000-RoscoMatch.htm These are the values for a MAC2000 profile using a source four to compare the colours. The colour temperature of your lanterns and the output will give you a degree of variation. But they will start you off.

[gareth]

Liam's point about preset focus groups not being "auto-expanding" (to use a piece of Hog terminology for a moment!) is a good one. The way around this would be to copy the programming from old channel numbers to new ones.

 

Say you originally patched your moving heads as channels 1 to 4, and in the next show you wanted them as 101 to 104 ... you'd need to load the patch info and preset focus groups for channels 1 to 4 from the original show, then patch yourself four more fixtures at channels 101 through 104. Then, assuming you were copying parameters that had the same value for every fixture in a p/f group (more than likely), you could make yourself a macro which went something like

[101][Thru][104][@]{CopyFrom}[1][*][1][Thru][4][@]{Off}

. Stick it onto one of the P-keys, and then just scroll through each preset focus group individually hitting the P-key each time to copy the information across. Then remove channels 1 to 4 from the patch. It's really clunky, but I think it'd work. What a pity you can't use Update across ranges of groups in the same way that you can with cues (at least, I don't think you can! I don't think I've ever tried it!) -

[101][Thru][104][Update][Group][1][Thru][750][@]{CopyFrom}[1][*]

would be such an easy way to do this. Unfortunately, given the current state of Strand Lighting, I don't expect we'll be seeing any improvements/additions of this nature in the GeniusPro software for a long time, if at all.

[jhaynes199]

Thanks for the MAC2000 Rosco colour equivalents sheet, Robe have not got a list of DMX values for CMY equivalents which is annoying. I presume I can just bang individual colours into a group and recall them as and when required?

[Liam FitzG]

Absolutely, you can record colour attributes into groups using... (if you are at the desk with a blue colour on stage with heads 101 thru 104 and if you want to call the group 201)

 101 THRU 104 GROUP 201 @ATT {Colour} RECORD

or on the OLE, make the group in Group Preview then use... (assuming that on the fixture's DMX sheet you have read the blue that you want on the colour wheel to be at 15%, and that you are using two digit input)

 101.2 THRU 104.2 @ 15

recall the group using

 101 THRU 104 @ GROUP 201 *

you can use GROUP 201 ON but this inputs actual values for the channels and not a group reference, so it prevents you updating the show by updating your groups later; and also prevents you nominating individual fixtures (eg 101 @ GROUP 201 * ... only 101 will change to blue).

if you have a Qwerty keyboard plugged in you can use

 GROUP 201 TEXT blue *

to give you the ability to recall the group using

 101 THRU 104 @ GROUP TEXT blue *

and the blue will appear on the screen rather than the group number; and if you are careful naming your groups you wont have to type much of the group name as the desk auto completes the name (assuming that you have Preset Focus display on in setup).

 

As usual with Strand there are several other ways of doing these commands. These are the ones that I use.

(Oops... this is longer than I thought!)

 

Liam

Edit : Typos