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What Are Palettes In Lighting?


matthew_ob

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Hi there,

Can somebody please explain what Palettes are in terms of lighting and also can you give me an example of when they are helpful to be used? as It has always been something I never understood. I read the desk manual and it told me the type of Palettes the desk handles and how to programme and delete them but not what they are and how I would use them.

For reference I am using a Zero 88 Fat Frog desk. This desk can handle Colour, Beamshape and Position Palettes.

Cheers

Matthew.

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Palettes are 'building blocks' of different parameters (e.g. iris, gobo, zoom) or groups of parameters (focus/position, colour, beam) that you can apply to moving lights when building looks onstage.

 

To take position as a simple example ... say there's a particular position on stage (perhaps a DSC mark used by a vocalist) that you're going to want to point your moving lights at a lot. Without palettes, you'd have to grab hold of a fixture and manually pan and tilt it to that position every time. But do it once, and record the pan and tilt values into a position palette, and you don't have to do it again - just select the fixture and qpply that palette. The same goes for commonly-used combinations of colours and beam settings.

 

It really comes into its own if you're moving a show from one venue to another. Say you have the same DSC position recorded into ten cues at different places in the show, and you've plotted each one by setting the pan and tilt values manually. When you move from one theatre to another, the chances of both the light and the position being in exactly the same place are really slim, so you're going to need a different set of pan/tilt values - this means that you're going to have to re-visit all ten cues, plus any mark cues you may have programmed, and update the values in each one manually. If, on the other hand, you record a number of cues using a position palette, those cues then refer to the palette rather than discrete pan/tilt values - this means that you only have to update one thing (the palette) when you move venues, and all the cues which use it are therefore updated as well.

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Hi Matthew,

Palettes are basically the building blocks for states, or looks of the stage. They are used with intelligent lighting (LEDs, Movers etc) to enable quick and easy programming.

 

There are a number of types of palettes: Position, Colour and Beam.

 

For a position palette, you point all of your movers at a particular point, downstage centre for example, and then save these positions as 'DCS'. Then, when programming, you just select 'Mac250 #1' and DCS, and it will move to its pre-saved position. The advantage of this is it saved loads of time when plotting complex rigs of movers; you can have a long list of frequently used positions and just recall them quick and easily as required. Also, if you update the palettes with new positions, then all cues with that palette also change. So if you had a palette for a particular set piece, plotted a load of cues, then the set piece was moved, all you'd have to do is update the palette with the new position and the cues would all be correct again. Very useful for touring productions where they need to change all the positions in each new venue.

 

Colours work in the same way, save all your LEDs with 'Blood Red' and 'Fern Green' and whatever, and then just click to recall them during plotting. Same again for beam. If you have a particular focus point, or mix of gobos, or zoom position etc that you will want to use a number of times you can save it in a palette.

 

Sorry if this isn't very well written - I'm doing it from my phone!

Hope this helps,

Charlie

 

EDIT: Beaten to it ;)

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Another use for them would be pre-programming.

 

When I'm lighting a show I'll often sit with the desk before the plotting session and spend some time putting palettes in that I think will be useful to me. I'll record a load of positions that I know from rehearsals may be used, a number of colours that I often use or feel will be useful to me in the show, the gobos I'm most likely to want with moving prisms if I think they may be needed, strobe states etc.

 

Then when it comes to the actual plot things are so much quicker. When I find I need to have a moving head spot pointed at the doorway USL in sky blue with a soft focussed breakup gobo turning gently, then I just recall position pallette 4, colour pallete 10 and beamshape pallette 6, tweak the speed of the prism slightly and hit record thus taking about 4 seconds instad of 4 minutes. If I know that I'll need this state later in the show, then I just record what I've created as an All Pallette (asuming the desk allows that) and I can recall the whole thing later, even though the rest of the stage could look quite different second time (thus meaning I couldn't have just recalled a cue).

 

Working this way means that I ofen have pallettes recorded that I'm not using (I just thought they might be usefull in the pre-plot but then didn't need them) but it still has saved me time in the long run.

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On some consoles, Palettes are also 'referencing'. So say the majority of the show has been programmed, and then the director 'changes' where the DSC vocalist has to stand (maybe a piece of set has moved, for example). The programmer only has to update the individual Palette and all the cues using that palette will automatically 'update'.
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  • 3 weeks later...

For years I was guilty of NOT using pallets even when they were available, simply because I didn't see the point. When the first person sat down next door to me and explained - things made so much more sense. I really can't imagine not using them now - so much easier, quicker and trouble free. Even if you just used them as groups - all FOH white, all stage O/H white etc they are worth it, but once you start to think colours, positions, gobos, and any of the other common 'clusters' of lights even if you never need the referencing feature you'll never look back.

 

For my venue we have common requests for special - profiles on bass, guitar, drums, BVs and a few mic positions on the apron - so shows I'd stuck on a page, with all these things in can just be recalled, copied and saved with a new name and the pallettes updated when somebody focuses the profile to the new position.

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I read something the other day from someone who used (I think) a Congo, and just used it as a standard-ish for conventionals, he'd never used movers. Then he needed to use movers for a show, so he learned (by which I seem to recall he took some training) how to do movers.

 

What he then discovered was that when he went back to conventionals only shows, many of the techniques he'd learned for doing movers worked for conventionals as well, and this cut his programming time significantly.

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I really must make the effort to use palletes more.

Most of my shows are corporate and typically one or a few days with a completely bespoke rig for each one. (and while I have used a wide range of desks, I have self taught on all so I am likely to have all manner of bad habits!)

Due to the typical show having fairly a fairly low number of cues and a schedule barely being sufficient for rigging let alone programming I traditionally ignore palletes and just program away. The exception to that is when it is a roadshow or I have the rare luxury of some pre-production budget and can get some wysiwyg time.

Palletes save a huge amount of time for multi venue or complex shows and I highly recommend their use. Now I just need to re-train myself to make using them an automatic process; it's so annoying when tweaking a pallete and one or more cues don't follow as I forgot to apply the pallete as I created the cue.

Fortunately desks such as MagicQ and Avolites Titan make using palletes easy and a natural process, I have had a MagicQ system for a couple of years now and it is proving quite enlightening for learning programming techniques. I keep promising myself to go on one of the Chamsys training days but so far have failed to make it, one for the to-do list...

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  • 1 year later...

Hi there,

Can somebody please explain what Palettes are in terms of lighting and also can you give me an example of when they are helpful to be used? as It has always been something I never understood. I read the desk manual and it told me the type of Palettes the desk handles and how to programme and delete them but not what they are and how I would use them.

For reference I am using a Zero 88 Fat Frog desk. This desk can handle Colour, Beamshape and Position Palettes.

Cheers

Matthew.

 

Using nested palettes, particularly for position, will save you a lot of time in the long run, and enable you to make most of your looks portable from venue to venue. To start build a set of positions with each fixture in each position. You can usually get away with about 12 on stage positions, 3 for the cyc and four for the house. Once you have these positions use them to build other positions (eg apron wash, ctx, Xs, Vs), and use those positions for your looks. As you do more shows your selection of looks will grow, but you will only have to do the first set of presets each time. Most color pallets work with "only one valid for all", so when you make them use only one instrument and as you go from venue to venue merge the new fixtures into the existing pallet and soon you will not have to do that anymore. When you do your beam pallets be careful to use the "stopped" setting for any rotational parameters and not the indexed settings so that your rotations will not "spin down" during crossfades . If you have instruments with two or more gobo wheels record the gobo pallets minus the focus parameter and do a separate focus pallet for each wheel, so that if you have a look with gobos from more than one wheel you can focus them all at once.

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I realise this is a bit of a side issue, but it seems to me that the word (palette) is used in a different sense here - unlike the way it is used in graphic design or art. There, a palette is a subset of the possible range of colours which is deliberately reduced in range so that a specific mood or feel is conveyed. A painter may have a choice from hundreds of tubes of paint, but selects maybe a dozen, and mixes the colours she uses from just that limited range. What's been described above is more along the lines of a parameter reference; or in computer terms, a named variable. Each palette is a variable which has associated with it a set of values, and the lighting plot references the variable, not the values - that way by changing the values associated with the variable, every reference changes at once. So I wonder why it came to be called a palette? (Or even a pallet or a palate!!)
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