Howto program this effect??

[(iCe)]

It's a common effect seen very often, at least in shows around here...

But what's the most easy way of programming this effect on an Expert?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAf4KbRZzmw

I mean the one in the first 40 second of this movie. Movers have a basic color, switch off momentarily and then come on again in white, which lasts maybe a tenth of a second and then goes to red again.

I assume RGB / CMY fixtures are a must for this, since you don't want to flip around your color wheel.

I can only imagine programming a chase with several steps for the base color, one for shutter black out and one for the white effect. Perhaps a cue list, but that's going to be really hard to get it beat synced? I know this particular show is all timecoded, but I've seen it done live too.

Could this be acheived with the shape gen somehow? I'm more than willing to experiment

[Funmaker]

This is the Red-white-purple move... and the strobe is just a random thingy you can add.

For this trick you'll need a fixture with cmy and a colour wheel which has the purple color sitting next to the white colour.
Program a chase which go from the red cmy colour to the purple colour from the colour wheel. If the fixture is slow enough you'll notice that it 'll go to white before going to the purple...
Add a little strobo and there you go.

If you want it to be made with other colours you'll have to program a lot of steps in the chase with the red colour... but this is how I do it and that's working out fine so far...

edit: there is also a red to white strobo move. For this effect I would make 2 submasters or just one. On this submaster you save a white strobo and you make sure that it releases the color and strobo... Hit the swap button to activate when necessary and there you go...

[niclights]

Exactly. 99% this is the sort of thing that is fixture dependent - arrangement of colours on fixed wheel, speed of change for both fixed and mixing. Varilites have incredible fixed wheel speed but slow motors might still give neat effects, albeit accidentally.

[(iCe)]

Hmmm, I'm not sure there guys... There seems to be a black-out in between and I'm not seeing a second color on this vid. It seems to be

red - off - white - red

The fixtures in the movie are Alpha Beams 700 and MAC250 Beams. We have a few MAC beams, so I should be able to reproduce the exact same thing.

Suppose it's the above sequence, what would be a quick way of programming?

[niclights]

Ha. Depends which bit you look at!

But to do that I would still use Funmaker's method - two playbacks, one intensity (containing red or red from palette) and one with intensity+strobe+white in mode2. Either flash/swop between the two creating the gap manually or just see if the switch to strobe naturally causes this anyway.

You're still relying on a relatively fast colour change. You could program a non repeating two-step chase where the first step changes colour in blackout but you still would have the return to red issue where there is no blackout in the example. It's difficult to say whether that's coming from mixing or fixed wheel but red and white are adjacent on those fixtures whereas they are not on the Mac's. Whichever, you can see it's not such a fast snap back to red so I think it should work pretty well just using mixing.

[(iCe)]

Ok, so if we leave the strobe effect out for now (I'll manage if I get the first one right), that leaves us with

RED - BLACK OUT (WHITE)

as chase steps, right?? How do you spread that evenly across fixtures? I thought about fixture overlap, but won't that mean the movers will stay in the black out position too long? I've got wednesday scheduled as a try-out night

[ChiekuRs]

I have done similar effect with simple approach - you just create simple colour chase, but add dimmer parameter to it. So each step contains:
dim 100%, colour red or
dim 0%, colour white.
Color mixing is much slower than dimmer so you see the white flash just after opening fixture dimmer. This worked very nice on older fixtures because they have slow motors. On newer devices this effect isn't so impressive without additional timing, because they change colours faster.

[niclights]

Of course dimmer might be slow too, in which case you might need shutter (with the potential associated LTP issues).

Whatever, I don't think this needs to be too complicated. I certainly can't see the application for overlap here. If nothing else it requires crossfade and so would introduce more problems.
I see two likely methods being used. One is the momentary dimmer+white+strobe playbacks (perhaps split into a few fixture groups) fired manually. The other a chase that bumps groups of fixtures from red to white and back. If the fixture doesn't somehow conveniently create the blackout as a side-effect then this can be added as an extra step although probably will need additional 'complex' timing.

[JPalmer]

Excluding the strobe, which is absolutely time code, if the fixtures you are using have the blackout to change color option, you could just create a chase with fixtures color changing. Then choose to put the chase into a random order if you want it to look as if it has more steps.
I don't know if it will work quick enough, but its possible.
Take care,
John

[(iCe)]

I'm don't think either color / cmy or dimmer will be too slow. Color rules out since there's no red/white adjacent. CMY if pretty quick and on these fixtures dimmer / shutter is the same and fast too. So if there is any problem, it'll probably be the white not showing (or not long enough to provide the wanted effect).

When I want to combine it with some LED fixtures too though, I'll have to program a white step anyway. Oh well, I'll take all your tips and report back tomorrow night with the results, thanks!

[(iCe)]

Worked fine guys! I managed to create a cue list with steps set to Wait for Go. For four movers, I needed four steps. Fixture overlay isn't going to cut it since you'll have to wait untill everything is blacked-out, which is not what I wanted.

The fade of the CMY is slow enough to get the correct effect when fade in is set to 0.

Same work with a 4 step chase with x-over set to 0, where the speed is then controllable by tapping / wheel.

The only thing which could be improved is the programming. It would be nice if the same thing could be acheived in two steps. Programming this for 16 movers (1-8 in white, 2-9 in white, etc.) is quite a hassle (though the selection patterns might help here).

[niclights]

The only thing which could be improved is the programming. It would be nice if the same thing could be acheived in two steps. Programming this for 16 movers (1-8 in white, 2-9 in white, etc.) is quite a hassle (though the selection patterns might help here).

I'd suggest a combination of macro and selection pattern. A bit of thought and you should be able to work out a macro that automates much of the process but is still scalable.

[(iCe)]

I didn't think of that, good idea. For some reason, macro's are still not something which pops up in my mind with these sort of things.

[(iCe)]

Hi all,

I've mastered this one and use the effect a lot; very cool. But that now requires me to program seperate chases for all colours I'd like to use. Made me wonder: wouldn't this be something we can use the shape generator for? For CMY fixtures; would it be possible to use two shapes to 1) set the colour to white and 2) close the shutter. Without any fading of course? That would mean I could use a single fader to overlay this effect based upon the current output colour?

[themedesign]

You can combine dimmer shape over the selected fixtures, with a color swap.
Say Red/White. but it tricky yo get the same effect. I rather use the chase