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Color-changing LED luminaires are a fact of life in today's lighting industry, but intelligent lights require intelligent control. When time and money are tight, the results aren't always pretty; small venues around the world have experienced a rash of purplish light, poor color rendering and garish transitions. Since 2014, ETC's ColorSource family of products has been working to correct the epidemic of bad LED lighting and now the company announces the latest ColorSource and ColorSource AV consoles.
Approachability is key for a small console; many venues are staffed by students, volunteers or visiting artists who need to be able to walk up to a board, learn it quickly and bring up great lighting looks. “The ColorSource console is a simple machine, not a simplistic machine,” says Adam Bennette, the R&D technical director involved in the desks' development.
Each ColorSource console boasts a sleek design and hands-on control, with an onboard, seven-inch touchscreen and 20 or 40 pageable faders that can control 40 or 80 channels or devices. The touchscreen interface brings color-selection, record, and other commonly-used functions to the forefront, while many deeper features can be accessed using the intuitive menu system. If first-time users get lost, they can quickly find their way again with built-in, multilingual help functions and video tutorials.
"It sounds basic, but many LED lighting systems these days can't do a reasonable fade from, say, pink to sky blue without passing by some ghastly shades on the way."
Adam Bennette
Technical Director, R&D.
The consoles are designed for easy set-up. ColorSource consoles streamline the patching process offering comprehensive RDM (remote device management) support. When a console powers on, it immediately identifies any intelligent lights in the rig and populates their profiles in Patch. Within minutes of setup, the fixtures can be assigned to channels using the touchscreen and dragged into position on the onscreen stage map for easy direct-selection and programming.
When it comes to color, Bennette says the console is designed to think like a lighting designer. “Fading color with ColorSource consoles works just as if you had two gelled tungsten lights and faded from one to the other,” he explains. “It sounds basic, but many LED lighting systems these days can't do a reasonable fade from, say, pink to sky blue without passing by some ghastly shades on the way.” ColorSource desks support the color-mixing systems of all mainstream fixtures, including the extended gamut of ETC's seven-color Source Four LED and Desire luminaires. ColorSource consoles' touchscreen interfaces include swatches of preprogrammed, attractive colors and a color wheel for quick, full-spectrum selection.
The ColorSource AV models provide integrated audiovisual playback. “It was important to us to incorporate new artistic tools,” says Bennette, explaining that small-scale show control increasingly involves much more than just lighting. “Even scenic projection is entering the mainstream, down to very modest productions.”
The AV consoles connect directly to monitors, projectors, networks and sound systems and are able to store and play back still images and sound effects as part of the cue stack or live fader control. The consoles also have a feature called Video Toy, which allows users to manipulate real-time projection effects through the touchscreen. With the addition of the downloadable Amigo wireless remote app, a ColorSource AV console are designed to provide for all the control needs of a small production – and free up a lot of space in the control booth.
The ColorSource PAR and ColorSource Spot luminaires use RGB-Lime emitter arrays to produce high-quality, vivid colors and bright white light. The portable ColorSource Relay serves as a power-control bridge between the console and the fixtures, wirelessly transmitting DMX signals. In 230-volt markets, ColorSource ThruPower makes any venue LED-ready, providing dimmed or switched power on a circuit-by-circuit basis.
