The Avolites Discussion Forum

Had a problem at a show last night and trying to understand the issue in a bit more detail.

Needed to very quickly build a show for some venerable HighEnd Studio Spot 250's and Futurelight MH-640's on a Titan Mobile v9.0. Fixtures had working personalities which is great but found for the StudioSpot 250's preset palettes weren't generated at all or the MH640's colour palettes were generated but were just had text labels stating "colour 1" "colour 2" rather than with auto-legend scribble strips or with the colour name in text "Red" "Blue" etc.
Checked at the time whether in Patch "Create Palettes in Workspaces" was enabled and in user settings Quick Palettes and Auto Legend were enabled - they were.

Just re-testing with a completely new show and if I patch say a Robe Robin 100LED Beam then I get preset palettes as I expect. If I patch the StudioSpots then those palettes aren't re-used and no other palettes are generated.

So three questions:
1. Am I correct in assuming that this is a personality file issue where auto-palettes and scribble strip colours are not set in the personality file ?
2. Is this because the personality was created originally for desks that didn't use auto-palettes ?
3. Is there any quick way of telling/knowing/guessing which personality files have auto-palettes set or is it a case of trying and seeing or checking within the personality builder (I'm not experienced with the personality builder !). For example fixtures older than say X years might have personality files but are unlikely to have auto-palettes set because they are based on personality files for previous desk generations. It makes quite a difference when estimating what the timescales are in an emergency for quickly creating a usable show from a selection of available fixtures !

Thanks.

1) Essentially, yes.
2) Not really.
3) Sort of but no simple rule.

Preset palettes have existed for a long time and therefore age is not directly related. In many cases it is simply a case of whether they were created when the personality file was written - obviously you might expect they would be but reality is sometimes they have been missed out (like the studio spot here). Certainly the greater the amount of time since a files last update the greater the chance.

But there might be more to it. In the case of the 640 for some reason this has palettes based on the fixed colour wheel rather than colour mix. Depending on the method used to build these you can end up with the generic 'Colour 1', 'Colour 2' rather than the corresponding function names. With fixed colours to create scribbles it further relies on RGB values being set in the function properties. In this case they were not set and so it fell back to the text legend. Bottom line here is they really just need to be updated to CMY instead.

In terms of finding out in advance you can look in the library on the website. If preset palettes exist for a fixture there will be a [P] button above the channel mapping information. Hovering over the [P] will reveal the palettes including legend and the functions each is made up from. So by doing this you would see the studio spot doesn't have any but if, like the 640 the current colour palettes are fixed wheel, there is no way to know from here whether they will have scribbles or not. You would either need to test patch (maybe using the simulator) or open the file in Personality Builder and check assuming you know what to look for.

For any files that are missing or have problems with preset palettes please submit bug reports via the library.

Nic thanks for such a quick and comprehensive reply - really useful.

John.