Chamsys and 7 colored fixtures

[Crash_Override]

Has anybody any experience with Chamsys MagicQ and 7 colored LED's.

Looking at Robe DL7S Profile and Wash.

With wash fixture I found all other colors under Beam on Page 3. With profile I was able to get them in Color window. That's little odd :S

My main concern is that Chamsys doesn't seem to be able mix colors with more than RGB colors.

For example if I select amber and have also amber LED in the fixture, it doesn't seem to use it by it self or any other colors from Lee, it only uses RGB to mix them. Is this normal?

 

Having mostly used ETC Element that uses 7 color mixing. It's very nice to select certain color from Lee or Rosco ranges and tweak it little. It would be harder to great it with full manual mixing from 7 colors.

 

I don't know how other consoles handle the 7 colored LED's.

[Mazz]

Hi,

 

I have an MQ100 and it has no problem with 5 or 6 colour fixtures. They all appear on the same page of encoders, and all get used to mix colours.

[Crash_Override]

Weird, I'm testing on PC at the moment. If I select the DL7 and give it color from gel picker it only uses RGB to mix it. It doesn't use other colors, all others stay at zero.

[Don Allen]

In Light Factory you have to select "advanced heuristics" to take advantage of all of the colours of a fixture, is it the same for Chamsys ?

[dbuckley]

Deleted; completely misunderstood the question!

[timsabre]

Weird, I'm testing on PC at the moment. If I select the DL7 and give it color from gel picker it only uses RGB to mix it. It doesn't use other colors, all others stay at zero.

 

I think Mazz was not referring to the gel picker but to individual control of each colour on the encoder wheels? Not sure.

 

I can't answer the Chamsys question but for comparison on Avolites consoles if you patch an DL7S fixture in mode 3 the colour picker appears to operate RGBA and Cyan channels automatically but you have to do UV and Light Green yourself (only the last few versions of software, before that it was just RGB). If I remember correctly their colour picker will do 5 channels, normally RGBAW. There isn't a gel picker on the Avo software at the moment.

[Shez]

Weird, I'm testing on PC at the moment. If I select the DL7 and give it color from gel picker it only uses RGB to mix it. It doesn't use other colors, all others stay at zero.

I can confirm that behaviour. Seems the visualiser isn't set up to display more than RBG / CMY at the moment either. Possibly the colour picker just isn't capable of dealing with all the combinations of different colour functions now available - a rig with a mixture of RGB, CMY, RGBA, RGBAW, RGBACUV etc would I imagine be programmatically quite fun to accommodate!

Might be worth asking the question of the folks at Chamsys - they're very helpful!

[indyld]

Modern colour picking has become complex, as Shez suggests. I can't speak for Cham Sys but I do know that the original colour picker system worked on an RGB model (and the inverted values for CMY). Having created a major fixture with 7 colour LEDs, ETC really had to make a better job of colour mixing these complexities and other control makers have begun to do likewise. My guess is that, at the moment, the MagicQ colour picker is still old skool. All the various colour source combinations are programmatically a lot more complicated than 3 colour models, not least because there is more than one way to make some of the colours (as perceived on a white target). Colour picking and the different colour sources is a bit of a headache for software makers, I'd imagine.

 

Being old skool myself, I'm still happiest making colours from scratch with wheely-wheely methods but wouldn't be averse to more user friendly interfaces emerging on all the different consoles.

[ninjadingle]

This is based on my 6 channel QTX pars (RGBWAUV) - nothing posh like Robe here!

 

Visualiser shows RGBWA for me - not UV though.

 

If you're using the default palettes, it's purely down to the profile. No harm in changing that, or just update your palette manually. (I had to do this with all my palettes as there was no setting for UV, so changing a colour left the UV setting as is)

 

Colour picker / swatches etc seem to be RGB only - but can you blame Chamsys for that? I don't even want to think about making all those settings for all the different RGBWhatever fixtures that are out there!

 

Get on the encoders and mix it! :-)

[gyro_gearloose]

Is there a mode in the fixtures where you control colour via 'conventional' RGB/CMY channels, and it mixes in the other LEDs as it sees fit, bit like the Magic Amber channel some fixtures used to have ? I imagine that fixture manufacturers would have a better idea of how their fixtures mix colour than console manufacturers.

[tom_the_LD]

Is there a mode in the fixtures where you control colour via 'conventional' RGB/CMY channels, and it mixes in the other LEDs as it sees fit, bit like the Magic Amber channel some fixtures used to have ? I imagine that fixture manufacturers would have a better idea of how their fixtures mix colour than console manufacturers.

They have a hue/saturation mode which is generally the best way to mix multi-colour LED's.

 

As people have suggested, the lights themselves are better at knowing what they should do than a human is. take S4 LED Lustr+ 2 (apologies if that's slightly incorrect!) for example. Trying to mix L200 quickly using 7 different colours is very tedious. However if you say to the fixture I want this hue and this saturation, then it can do all the complex working out itself. You'll often find, again as is the case with S4 LED, that in hue/saturation the calibration is done to make sure all units output looks the same on the stage.