Light Minds Think Alike

ETC ready for historic USITT tradeshow

One of the things we at ETC most enjoy about the tradeshow season is the opening minutes of USITT, when students rush the show floor and scramble to collect as much swag as they can get their hands on. The first time I witnessed the mad dash, I was reminded of the running of the bulls at Pamplona or Black Friday at the mall, but it was a lot more fun (and probably a lot safer) than that. And throughout the show, we love to see the students’ enthusiasm for everything theater-related, and we can’t help but get swept up in the excitement, as well.  

This year, we have even more to look forward to for USITT. Here’s a rundown of the top ten reasons you should join us at the tradeshow, March 31st – April 2nd, in Kansas City, MO:

1. Golden anniversary

USITT is marking its 50^th anniversary, so the tradeshow will be filled with special events and activities to celebrate the milestone.

2. Party, party, party

ETC is co-sponsoring the Fifty & Nifty bash on Wednesday, March 31^st, in the Imperial Ballroom at the Marriott Kansas City Downtown, Muehlebach Tower, from 8-10pm. With music, dancing, entertainment and more, this promises to be a fun and exciting way to kick off USITT 2010.

3. Student Session turns 10

At USITT, ETC will be celebrating the 10^th anniversary of our popular Student Session. If you stop by our booth (#630) anytime during the show, you can pick up a VIP pass to get you “backstage” with us on Thursday, April 1^st, at 6:15pm. Students can participate in a question-and-answer session with ETC insiders, learn more about our company and products, and of course, score some exclusive, student-only swag!

4. ETC Rigging™

ETC’s new rigging line will make its USITT debut this year. Stop by our booth for a demo of the innovative Prodigy™ motorized-hoist systems and QuickTouch™ controls. Safer, smarter and more affordable, ETC Rigging is designed for any venue.

5. Selador Series® of LED illuminators

The Selador Series’ x7 Color System™ is see-it-to-believe-it technology. With color flexibility unmatched by other LED fixtures, the Selador Series produces beautiful white light, rich pastels and vibrant hues that are every designer’s dream. Visit ETC at USITT to see our color passion in action.

6. Vivid™ Fire and Ice

Catch your first glimpse of ETC’s new Fire and Ice LED fixtures. Fire is designed to engulf the stage in saturated crimson, amber and scarlet, and Ice produces stunning washes of indigo, cyan and jade. Fire and Ice produce these luscious colors while equaling or beating the brightness of conventional tungsten PAR fixtures.

7. Vivid-R

ETC recently updated the Selador Series Vivid fixture. The new Vivid-R uses 10% less power, with 50% more light output. Now you get stunningly bold color with even greater power-consumption savings. See why it’s easy being “green” in ETC’s USITT booth.

8. Smart dimming

ETC will show off the newest additions to our Smart Solutions™ family of lighting gear, SmartBar® 2 and SmartModule™ 2. Reliable, portable and affordable, SmartBar 2 and SmartModule 2 are the next generation of dimming.

9. Portfolio rescue

Students will once again have access to the ETC Connect Lounge at USITT, where you can get last-minute help putting together your portfolio. We’ll have computers, printers and scanners for you to use, with ETC staff ready to answer questions or offer advice.

10. Apply for LDI

ETC is launching at USITT the application process for our LDI Student Sponsorship. Apply online or pick up a hardcopy at our USITT booth, for your chance at an all-expense-paid trip to the LDI tradeshow, October 22^nd-24^th in Las Vegas.

We hope to see you at USITT!

Fire & Ice

ETC Fixtures Product Manager Tom Littrell discusses the newest Selador Series fixtures:

Vivid Fire and Vivid Ice have just released. In an environment where every LED offering touts its ability to make full-range color, you may ask yourself why we decided to build fixtures with a more limited color palette, especially when our own Selador Series products make the best full-range color of all.

I‘ve got to admit that I was a little skeptical about a limited-range Selador variant – especially after spending so much time looking at all of the great color possible with Selador fixtures. But sometimes I like to pretend that I’m a lighting designer. And I’m working to light acting areas and objects in theaters already equipped with tungsten fixtures designed for the job. It’s especially comforting when they are Source Fours.

But somewhere in the process, I start to think about adding deeper colors – just like real designers do, I think. Toning the stage with cool blues, warm blues, indigos, ambers, reds... you name it. But dropping that cut of R26 or L181 in front of a tungsten fixture chops out a LOT of light. The area I lit with two 575W Source Fours needs multiple fixtures, times multiple colors for toning. Or scrollers. Or moving lights. I’ve run out of fixtures or pipe space or dimmers long before I have the deep color I really wanted to pop those costumes and sets.

Enter Fire and Ice. LED reds are very efficient. Fire can equal two-and-a-half 575W PARs in R27. And blue LEDs have an unrivaled blue power. Imagine: the power of sixteen 575W PARs in Congo blue in one 11” fixture. By limiting the color output to ranges where LEDs have the most efficiency, we have created LED fixtures that can punch through bright tungsten stage lighting. And by adapting the x7 Color System for these two color ranges, you don’t just get a ‘blue wash.’ You get an R68 wash and an R79 wash and an R83 wash and a L181 wash, and, and, and… all from the same compact, low-wattage Vivid Ice fixture.

Hey, I like to think ‘green’ so let’s look at some ‘green’ numbers for blue downlight on 15 acting areas. Three rows of five 575W PARs gelled in R68. And three rows of five 575W PARs gelled in R80. So, two colors of blue downlight equals 17,250 watts. Now replace those 30 PARs with three rows of five 125W Vivid Ice fixtures. I’ve got one downlight system capable of warm blues, cool blues, dark blues and light blues for 1,875 watts of power. Yep, that’s about one-tenth as much electricity. And don’t forget the smooth crossfades from color to color and the Selador dimming ability in slow-timed cues.

The reality of my world – right now – is a stage or other space where tungsten lights dominate the inventory. The performance I’ve seen from Vivid Fire and Vivid Ice says that they will work in my world, right now. I can’t wait to use them.

Why additive color mixing matters

I guess that is a mighty 'heady' title for a blog post from a guy who has been silent on this Light Minds blog for months. Well... I am breaking my silence. Fact is, I have been busy, but now I feel motivated to write, and hopefully that will continue! You can encourage me by offering your comments please!!

Why does additive color mixing matter? I'm talking about LEDs here. We entered the LED market about one year ago and I've spent the last year really thinking about how and why LEDs matter and where they are useful. I can't tell you I've reached a state of enlightenment (pardon the pun) but I have learned a lot along the way.

We have a new white paper posted in our shiny new Support area on etcconnect.com. The paper is about color mixing and how and why the multicolor system we use in our Selador Series LED fixtures matters. Additive color-mixing is in play here. Most of us who have designed lighting intuitively understand what additive mixing is. Those of us who have used watercolors get it, too. We add multiple colors together to get a new color.

Working in pigments, we normally think of this as red-yellow-blue. In lighting, we know that red-green-blue are the primary colors of light and we understand how to combine them from a theoretical point of view. But we also know it more intuitively. Led by intuition, we know that we can cool the lighting look down by adding blue. So, we work with the colors we have selected or the color changing devices we have, and we paint and layer. Contrast this with the fact that most of the color we are adding has been produced via subtraction, namely gels or CMY systems. Putting gel in a fixture invokes subtraction, and it feels quite normal.

While Cyan-Magenta-Yellow color mixing systems are subtractive mixing systems, they feel strange because they are 'active' systems. You have a cyan color (blue and green) coming out of the fixture - you add magenta and you get... well, what exactly do you get? Blue? That's intuitive! The magenta you are "adding" is actually a filter that is subtracting the green. In more recent years, we started controlling color using hue-saturation-intensity controls -- like color pickers -- adding a new skill to our design arsenal. We let the console -- and its knowledge of the color mixing systems -- do the adding and subtracting. So, my point is that we have many ways to manipulate color, some of them more intuitive than others, each with a set of strengths and weaknesses.

Enter LEDs. Colored LED systems use additive color in the fixture. This is a slightly new concept. Instead of using a powerful light source generating "white" light, then subtracting the colors we don't need, we begin with nothing and add only the colors we do need. From the designer's perspective, not much changes, right? I mean, you want yellow, you bring up red and start adding green. This is vastly more energy efficient, as long as the fixture can reach the color you are seeking at the brightness you want.

RGB is great in theory, but most designers who have worked with these "16 million color additive mixing LEDs" will testify that it is not that easy and your results may vary. I first learned about the difficulty of doing RGB color-mixing in college. I dutifully hung a cyc wash with scoops gelled in Rosco diffusion RGB. Then I began to explore the 16 million or so colors I should have had available. I found that it was very hard to get the color I wanted, at the intensity I wanted it. I felt as though I was working in more of a 16 color mode rather than 16 million color mode. Many of us probably learned over time that hanging a four-color wash improved our results. Then we discovered that if you wanted a particular color and had the luxury, hang that color!

We were figuring out imperially that "more color = better light." That is the very principle that the company that ETC acquired last year, Selador, brought to their LED fixtures. ETC Selador series fixtures start with seven different LED colors. Sounds good, huh?  It does until you start from zero and now want to build the best-looking golden straw color you can. You can start with amber, add some green maybe, not too much. Should a little cyan play in? And doesn't that color actually have a touch of red? Well, you could try it. Actually, you could sit all day and try things like a kid with an endless supply of paint, water and paper.

When we combined ETC and the Selador concept, ETC simplified things a bit. We profiled these fixtures in our Eos, Ion, Element and Congo consoles and made them respond to our gel libraries. The fact is that LEDs are not perfect and can vary significantly from bin to bin and fixture to fixture (we are working on that problem, too!). But you can start with a language you know. Call up your Selador fixtures in a Roscolux 80 and you will get close. 

Now I come back to the subject of this very blog post: additive color mixing. When you see what your ETC console and your Selador fixture present as Roscolux 80, pick up your brush and personalize it. We give you seven colors of toning to play with. Add a touch more cyan or red, save it as a color palette and use it again. In this model, additive color works intuitively. The designer gets to play. So... have fun!