Automated Fixtures Vivid 11" as front lighting

[sclausenETC]

Among all the issues, the main one will be color rendition. Even using a Pearl, which is the "white light" Selador, the quality of the "white" light out from about any LED might not be the best for lighting faces.

I demo'd a Pearl this past year, as a potential no color top/down wash unit for a music dept. space. I liked the fixture, especially the assorted plastic lens systems for beam control, but found the white to be too harsh and having poor rendition of colors in wavelengths outside of the very narrow range the particular LED's provided. It was a decidedly less warm white then an incandescent and not particularly flattering on the face. It was bright though, easily as punchy as an S4 par @575, but not quite as bright as the 750w.

And they are expensive at somewhere near $1100- $1200 ea.

Steve, and all, you really need to see the new Selador Desire Lustr+ fixtures in action. With red shift enabled, it's nearly impossible to tell the incandescent source from the LED fixture. Yes, I work for ETC, but I'm also a lighting designer and I have not been as impressed by an LED than I have been of the new Lustr+ design. Truly stunning and an all-around theatre workhorse of a luminaire.

That said, adding some Selador to your current rig should be no problem. Just count up the number of fixtures x the number of controllable parameters you need to see if it will all fit. I would not control the Studio Spot with the SF24/96, but the LEDs should be ok. Things to note: classic Selador use 8 channels each - so that could be up to 4x8 (32 total) if you want individual control of each fixture. The Desire fixtures offer three-channel modes, either RGB or HSI, to make controlling them a bit easier.

THe big thing to keep in mind is that SmartFade treats all channels as HTP - highest takes precedence. This means that playing more than one thing back at a time may cause unexpected results with your Seladors. Specifically, if you have a look playing back from a sequence or memory, the channel faders won't be able to take control and lower that channel's level. When mixing colors, this might be annoying. I would probably keep my selador washes in separate mems from the dimmers so that there's no overlap, and then store composite memories for the show cues. This is assuming you work with mems at all If not, I recommend storing your color washes as memories anyway, since it will be easier to just bring up a color mix, rather than having to mix it from scratch every time.

Lastly, I recommend the ETC Selador Toolkit if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch or iPad - it really helps to get color mixes for the x7 color system into the console.

That's my $0.02...

Thanks -

Sarah