I have been using Elation Professional LED batten wash lights with great success for many years. Their previous models have been workhorses and have served me well when I used them as footlights or cyclorama lights. Elation Professional has been very busy creating new LED fixtures, mostly PARS, moving lights, and Lekos (more to come on that!). The Colour Chorus is Elation Professional's latest batten wash fixture.
LED batten washes are very flexible fixtures. They can be used as conventional striplights, washing large areas of surfaces such as drops and cycs. They are also very useful as footlights due to their very small physical profile. Additionally, they can be incorporated as backlight color washes when you hang them on overhead electrics, vertical toning strips when mounted vertically on booms, and as small wash fixtures as you would use a PAR or Fresnel.
What makes the Colour Chorus so versatile is their almost unlimited color mixing. Elation Professional has come up with an LED array pattern that quite effectively spreads the colors to create a wonderfully smooth field of colored light. Utilizing arrays of red, green, blue, and amber LED's, the Colour Chorus can create a remarkable range of colors. From deep blues to vivid yellows, you can mix to millions of colors and gradations. In addition, the Colour Chorus offers you a great deal of color control, allowing individual LED control so that incredibly smooth gradations of color can be created across a single fixture. This allows you to create a beautiful smooth sunset across a long horizon. This was almost impossible using conventional incandescent striplights, which limited you to three colors along the length of the striplight, and their resulting additive color mixtures.
One of my favorite uses of LED batten washes is for soft video wash lighting. Because there are many LED sources, the resulting light is usually extremely soft with few, if any shadows. I have used these fixtures for footlights (to wash out shadows under the eyes) as well as low front light. If you watch almost any live television program such as the Grammys or the Academy Awards, you will see these fixtures at the edge of the stage precisely for this purpose, to make celebrities look good during the close-ups.
The Elation Professional Color Chorus comes in several lengths including one-, two0, four-, and six-foot lengths. The individual three-watt LED's have a lamp life rated at 100,000 hours. The Colour Chorus has individual hue, saturation, and intensity control. As mentioned above, you can also control each LED individually. There are variable dimming curve modes as well as chase and strobe effects.
The fixture can be controlled via ArtNet, KlingNet, and RDM protocols. It has three- and five-pin DMX inputs and throughputs, a PowerCon connector for AC power, and RJ45 in/out connections. You choose modes through a four-button control panel. The bright LCD screen displays the variable control parameters.
The Colour Chorus has integrated rigging brackets allowing you to place it on the floor like you would for footlights or cyc lights, and c-clamps for hanging the Colour Chorus on a pipe like a conventional lighting fixture.
All fixtures in the Colour Chorus Series are built with rugged die-cast aluminum exteriors and operate flicker-free for use in TV and other broadcast applications. It has a multi-voltage universal auto switching power supply (110-240v). It also has multiple-unit power linking that permits you to daisy chain multiple fixtures together to save on power and DMX runs.
The Elation Professional Colour Chorus is a very flexible tool to have when lighting various sizes of productions. You can use this fixture for several useful applications. The interesting quality of this fixture lies in its' variable lengths. For instance, instead of purchasing one six-foot fixture, you could purchase three two-foot fixtures. This would allow you to light around corners as well as in a straight line. You could also use the smaller one-foot fixture to serve as a small low profile wash light.
We are looking forward to testing the Elation Professional Colour Chorus at our theaters at California State University Long Beach. If it performs as well as Elation Professional's earlier models of batten wash fixtures, they will surely have a hit on their hands.
