LED Fresnels for church

[johnb]

Hi All, I'm looking for some pointers on changes we are looking to make in the lighting within our church.

Currently as have a set of 4 minuette fresnels and 2 prelude profiles which are used to do a face wash on the front area.  Two years ago to add more coverage for streaming we added a pair of Thomann Varytec LED fresnels.  At this point we're looking at all the lighting in the space to LED including the main wash.  While we have 2 profiles in the current setup, I they are all actually doing the same throw, so might be more sense to standardise on fresnels. 

I've looked back through some of the recent threads and talking with a few people I have had the following options:

1) Go with more of the Thomann Varytec fresnels.  At 100W the existing ones are brighter than the 500W minuettes, so happy with the amount of light they put out.  They came with barn doors and was able to get some shaping with them, but not perfect as I don't think the light source is quite as much of point source as the conventional lamp.  My main concern with them is that they are 8 bit dimming and you can see the steps when controlled with our basic 12 channel controller.

2) Recommended in previous posts seem to be the Elumen8 MP60 from CPC.  These look interesting, however taking the Varytec 100W as a benchmark I'm concerned whether the 60W light output will be too low.  That said, for the price we could probably afford to put more in, but would probably then need to go through the faculty to get them approved.  I'm not looking at the MP 75 RGBW for the main faces wash, however am quite interested in them as an option to add some colour.

3) I've had recommended the Chauvet range which would probably be the Ovation F-145WW which is a 70W light source that they claim is comparable to a 650W light and 16 bit dimming.   However the cost of these seems huge when compared to the previous two options, part of which I guess is driven by the fact that it has motorised zoom which is unnecessary in our scenario.

So I would appreciate any feedback from people on these three options and any real life experiences of them.  Also if there is another option I should be considering then it would be good to get further recommendations.

 

The other challenge we have is around control.  As mentioned earlier we're running on a basic 12 channel per fader desk which has worked for us so far.  We are starting to do more with RGB style fixtures to add colour to the space, so it is probably a good opportunity to look at what we use going forward.  The key thing is simple operation by non-technical users - both for the simple fading up of lights (so some faders is probably important) as well as controlling a couple of different colour washes.  We're also finding tablet control for the technology systems is becoming more and more important, so would like something with an app ideally available for both Android and Apple devices.

The most interesting option I've seen that covers all of this is the LightShark (LS-1 or LS Core plus Wing).  It has both the physical faders, as well as web server and app control.  However I've no practical experience of it in operation.  I've seen suggestions in the past of using Chamsys for simple option, however that appears to require a PC and not sure if there is app control.

So again, thoughts and suggestions for options which meet the requirements would be useful.

John

 

[timsabre]

Mp60 are not very bright. Chauvet ovation are nice but probably not worth the extra cost for your situation. I'm surprised you find the slight steps of 8 bit dimmer a problem - even if you went 16 bit you couldn't control it from a simple controller, you'd have to switch to 8 bit mode anyway. So I'd recommend getting more of what you already have. 

[alistermorton]

We have some MP75 fresnels and they're OK, about equivalent to a minim. The "tungsten" curve smooths the dimming quite well. There is a 180W fresnel from elumen8 which is about 750 quid a pop which we intend to investigate at some point. It's  RGBALC apparently See here might be worth a look. 

For control you really want something that does 'fixtures' rather than ' channels' which takes you into conventional consoles or console software on a computer with some sort of wing.

Edited September 8, 2022 by alistermorton

[Don Allen]

Looking at Thomann for pricing, I would recommend the Zero88 FLXS24 desk instead of the LightShark LS-1 which is a tablet or phone screen based desk, great for youth minds but not too user friendly with users that like to push up a fader to see a light work. The FLX S 24 has a 7" touch screen but connecting a laptop or PC to the network port and using the Monitor program gives you a large external screen and most of the functionality of a FLX S48 with an external monitor.

Have a look at the Stage CL Stage CL UK which will do everything you want for a small community theatre. The colour picker is limited but you can replace their colour swatches with your own choices. Training videos on line. Not designed for movers at that price.

[kgallen]

If you're spending that money, +1 for the Zero88 FLX S24. You can programme the playback faders as single-cue submasters to satisfy your push-and-go wash requirements, but it has the power to lend itself to fancier stuff for your more advanced users. As @alistermorton recommends, it's "fixture" based rather than DMX-channel based (although you could go that way just by patching each fixture as a 1-ch dimmer channel but that really wouldn't be a sensible idea!).

And development and support is here in the UK (thumbs up to @Edward- Z88 and @jonhole).

[johnb]

Thank you everyone for the feedback, lots of useful comments there.

On the lights, it looks like my thinking was confirmed about brightness of the Elumen8's and the Chauvet's being more than we need.  It sounds like I need to do a bit more digging on to find out why the existing Varytec lights are not dimming smoothly.  It makes me wonder if what I'm seeing is effectively quantisation noise on the encoding of the faders in the cheap desk that a tungsten lamp naturally smooths out.  I think I probably need to get my DMX dongle out and see how they behave with a different controller.

The controller feedback is really useful - it's an area I'm very out of touch on these days.  The FLX S24 looks interesting - need to get my head around what's possible via a tablet as it's not clear the difference between the remote and monitor apps.  Luckily it looks like the local hire company has one in their stock, so may need to see if I can have a play with it at it some point and how simple it would be for non technical operators to turn some lights up a bit and add some colour to the space.

John

[alistermorton]

The non smooth dimming is down to the relative difference in brightness from one step to another. When you move the fader, it changes from 0 through to 255 in steps of 1. At the bottom end, the difference between successive steps is relatively larger than the difference between steps at the top. Low end LED fixtures reproduce this faithfully, so you see each step. Halogen lamps have thermal inertia, so they ramp between the levels, so they fade smoothly., Better LED fixtures use more intelligent electronics to move more smoothly between levels. So if you have budget fixtures with no inbuilt smoothing they're going to look as steppy on a MA as they will on a Scene Setter.

[Edward- Z88]

Hi @johnb

4 hours ago, johnb said:

The FLX S24 looks interesting - need to get my head around what's possible via a tablet as it's not clear the difference between the remote and monitor apps.  Luckily it looks like the local hire company has one in their stock, so may need to see if I can have a play with it at it some point and how simple it would be for non technical operators to turn some lights up a bit and add some colour to the space.

As a general rule, the ZerOS Remote app allows you to program the console, whilst the ZerOS Monitor app can be set up to allow you to monitor and operate.

To go in-depth on the ZerOS apps, please watch the video below...

https://youtu.be/LjHvt6vVl-0

Please see the playlist below for FLX S training videos...

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbMewrDGCXOGKfNxT5Q408r0c-rZCKd1n

Feel free to DM me if you have any questions.

Edward

Edited September 9, 2022 by Edward- Z88

[richardash1981]

22 hours ago, alistermorton said:

The non smooth dimming is down to the relative difference in brightness from one step to another. When you move the fader, it changes from 0 through to 255 in steps of 1. At the bottom end, the difference between successive steps is relatively larger than the difference between steps at the top. Low end LED fixtures reproduce this faithfully, so you see each step. Halogen lamps have thermal inertia, so they ramp between the levels, so they fade smoothly., Better LED fixtures use more intelligent electronics to move more smoothly between levels. So if you have budget fixtures with no inbuilt smoothing they're going to look as steppy on a MA as they will on a Scene Setter.

All true, but another cause of "steppy" diming can be inadequate DMX refresh rate (i.e. a lack of time resolution, as opposed to brightness resolution).
With cheap LED cans which don't have any smoothing, I have a basic 6-way controller which can do a very slow fade without visible steps (going one DMX value at a time), but a faster fade develops steps because the faders are only read 10 times per second, and I'm moving them multiple DMX codes in each 1/10 of a second. A better desk will read the faders and update the lights 44 times a second, so a faster fade is still one code at a time. Eventually your DMX maxes out, and then you are relying on smoothing in the lights (because of the lack of thermal smoothing a tungsten light has).

[johnb]

Thank you for the further information.  It looks like there are good arguments for why the steppy dimming could be either the controller or the lights.  So I think the only way we'll know for sure is further testing, which I'm hoping to do on Tuesday so will report back after that.  My suspicion is it's the controller since the Varytecs appear to be a popular line on the Thomann website and I've not seen any similar comments in the reviews, so we'll see.

@Edward- Z88 - the clarification on remote and monitor is useful and much clearer.  I'm away with work this weekend, but once I'm back I'll dig into the videos.

John