Light Minds Think Alike : selador

Lighting cycs with Selador luminaires

allisonsuchon — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:59:00 GMT

Selador cofounder Rob Gerlach discusses how to light cycs with ETC Selador LED luminaires:

It's difficult to prescribe the best approach for using Selador to light a cyc without knowing parameters like height, distance between the cyc and the fixtures, and available budget. The application note on ETC's website gives some good starting points.

Selador Vivid^TM strip fixtures can easily light cycs that are 40' tall or even taller. They have plenty of brightness, and their saturated color 'pops' more than the light from other fixtures. When the available distance between a tall cyc and the fixtures is relatively small (24" or less), it works best to place Selador units end-to-end in a solid line. For better results, use this formula: For every 10' of vertical height to be illuminated, the fixtures should be spaced 1' away from the cyc. Focus the fixtures so that the center of the beam hits the far half of the cyc; then use silk diffusion (like Rosco 104) oriented with the "grain" parallel to the length of the fixtures to fill in the near-half of the cyc with very uniform light.

If there is more available distance between the Selador luminaires and the cyc, the fixtures can be stacked vertically in groups of twos or threes - each cluster spaced farther apart. For example, one cluster of three 11" fixtures can light 4-6 linear feet of a 30-40' tall cyc when mounted 4-5' away from the cyc. In each group of three, one fixture is focused on the nearest third of the cyc, another on the middle, and another on the far third. Use wide-angle horizontal and vertical lenses on the near-focused fixtures (60-80 degrees), medium spreads on the mid-focus (30-40 degrees), and narrow spreads on the far-focused units (20 degrees or no secondary lenses). Silk diffusion helps to blend the edges of the three sections together. When the cyc is lit this way, brightness is extremely uniform, even when fixtures are hung on only one side of the cyc. Breaking the cyc into three verticals also facilitates beautiful effects (sunsets, rainbows, etc.).

Selador fixtures hold their own against PAR 64s with scrollers if the output is saturated color - particularly in the greens, blues, and purples. For softer colors and white light, tungsten fixtures may be brighter. The new Selador Desire^TM series is 20-40% brighter than the Selador Classic^TM line, depending on the color mix of the array, so they are even more capable of competing against tungsten. If the desired output is limited to certain ranges in the red/amber/pink family or cyan/blue/purple family, ETC's Selador Fire^TM and Ice^TM fixtures provide even more brightness and can definitely compete against even the most powerful PAR fixtures with gel. Users are universally surprised by how bright Selador fixtures are, even more so with Desire units. Because we're dealing with colored light, it is very difficult to communicate the impact of these units on paper. It is essential that any user considering them as a replacement for tungsten gets an on-site demo to see the Selador line's capabilities firsthand.

ETC Live!

allisonsuchon — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:51:00 GMT

ETC lights venues all around the world – theaters, museums, tradeshows, amusement parks, concerts and more. One of the main reasons our equipment is so popular is because we understand what lighting professionals need for their varied applications, since we’ve been in their shoes. Employees have come to ETC from all kinds of backgrounds and have their own experience in those industries. And every year, we get the opportunity to showcase our skills at an annual company picnic, art exhibit and talent show – called ETC Live! – held at our factory.

This year’s event, with a ‘Fire and Ice’ theme, took place on Saturday, August 7^th. The deluge of rain that Wisconsin’s gotten this year took a day off, so we lucked out with beautiful – albeit humid – weather. Nearly 1,000 people – ETC employees, our families and guests – joined a swarm of Wisconsin state birds (read: mosquitoes) to enjoy the food and fun. ETC CEO Fred Foster provided some relief from the humidity, peddling around the event on his ice cream cart and handing out frozen treats. And kids got to experience a fantasy land, with a bounce house, massive inflatable slide, magic show, games and crafts.

ETC’s Town Square was turned into an art gallery for the event. Artists and photographers throughout the company displayed their beautiful paintings, photography, sculptures and woodworking in the pseudo shop-windows. And the parking lot was temporarily turned into a car show, as ETC gearheads showed off their classic and restored cars.

Then the ETC Live! show started. ETC’s outdoor amphitheater was bathed in deep blues and reds, thanks to the Selador® Series LED fixtures in the lighting rig. Manufacturing’s Dan Woodson kicked off the entertainment with a rendition of “Sweet Caroline.” He was followed up by ‘Madtown Ballroom,’ a local Latin-dance troupe made up of ETC R&D’s Matt Garrison and friends, dancing Salsa Rueda. Alternative-rock group ‘Crew Member Mike’ – all teenagers, including a son of R&D’s Dennis Varian – performed song covers and an original tune. Next up was musical-comedy group ‘Ironsides.’ John Ironside from ETC’s IT department, along with his wife and others, took on hits by the Carpenters, interspersed with witty observations on the neurotic nature of the famed lyrics. Rob Raff from the Sales department of ETC’s Southeast office – fresh off his smashing opening act at ETC’s Rep and Dealer Workshop – serenaded the crowd with smooth coffee-house covers of favorite rock and pop ballads. He was backed up by Scott Aumann from ETC Repairs, and Curt Schreiner and Rob Bloch from Shipping.

The main event of ETC Live! opened with teenage band ‘The Last Minute,’ which included sons of ETC’s John Masino (Manufacturing Engineering) and Lisa Patzka (Administration). The group handled clean covers of hits by Jane’s Addiction and Stone Temple Pilots and performed an original piece. ‘The John Masino Band’ took the stage to close out the show. Fronted by vocalist and guitar-wizard Masino – who was backed up by Aumann and Schreiner among others – the group wowed the crowd with incredible music, including classics by Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, David Bowie, The Foo Fighters and AC/DC, as well as the band’s own original hits.

At the end of the night, everyone packed up their lawnchairs and picnic blankets to head home. On Monday, we came back to the office to display our other talents – making award-winning products and providing outstanding customer service.

Selador Vivid Fire and Ice: a designer turned from skeptic to fan

allisonsuchon — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:23:00 GMT

Lighting Designer and Guest Blogger Chris Rynne talks about his first experience using the newest members of the Selador Series of LED fixtures, Fire and Ice:

Last year, I was in a conversation with David Lincecum, marketing manager for ETC, and in that conversation I mentioned that I’d be in Madison, Wisconsin, (home of ETC) this April to design lighting for the Madison Opera’s production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at the Overture Center for the Arts. When I mentioned the show, he offered me an opportunity that some would not refuse, but that I had to think about. He offered me the use of 30 brand new Selador Ice and Fire fixtures to use in my plot. The caveat was that I’d need to use them as real full-stage lighting, not for lighting sky drops or set pieces. For those of you that aren’t familiar with ETC’s Selador line of fixtures, they are a family of high-quality color-mixing LED units (using red, green, blue, indigo, red-orange, cyan, and amber for much richer color-palette capabilities than are available through an RGB fixture) for stage use, and the Fire and Ice units are a new sub-line that each use only five colors and are tuned toward the red and blue ranges.

Getting back to my reluctance to immediately take David up on his offer…. I just wasn’t sure that these fixtures would do the job that I’d been using 750W PARs to do for the last 15 years of my design career. So, ETC sent me a couple of samples to play with and I put them up against my beloved PARs with color filters. It took me a couple hours of reviewing literature, specs, photometrics, and feedback, as well as going back into my garage a few different nights and blasting my neighbor’s garage door across the street with my testing (thanks, James) to convince myself that I was ready to take the leap of faith. But then I jumped in.

I just returned to San Diego on Sunday after spending almost two weeks with the Fire and Ice fixtures on my show and I have to say I’m really impressed. They not only replaced the blue PAR backlight wash and red PAR sidelight wash that I was originally planning, but did so with a vengeance. Not until the other day when someone had asked me how it went with the Seladors did I realize that the smoothness of dimming was indistinguishable from that of its tungsten-based buddies, even with long crossfades or completely fading the fixtures out. Having instant access to a large color palette from a single fixture without worrying about mechanically moving glass filters or plastic-sheet color media was wonderful. I was able to run through a gamut of moods over the span of the opera with these dynamic paint brushes….and feel good about the green-ness of it. I took a rig that would’ve been done with about 35,000 watts of tungsten-sourced lights and did it with under 7,500 watts (they’d only consume that much if I’d run all the colors at full on all the units, which I never did). And, as I noticed after programming, I only ever went as high as 40% of the output potential on the Ice units, as putting them up to full power would’ve been just too bright for the show. All that firepower from a lighting tool that can fit nine 21” fixtures into one 20A circuit.

I have to say that, after my recent experience, I’m a believer. ETC has created an awesome pair of flexible LED fixtures in the Fire and Ice that deliver much more than I would’ve gotten from even 1000W PAR64 fixtures fitted with color changers to meet my blue and red lighting needs. I believe that their color flexibility, smooth dimming curve, long lamp life, low heat, low maintenance, and energy savings will help the Selador line find homes in schools, theaters, music halls, churches, television studios, and architainment projects as an important part of the lighting design toolbox.

People for the ethical demonstration of Selador

allisonsuchon — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:19:00 GMT

ETC Field Project Coordinator David Hilton discusses an important issue facing lighting designers:

There’s a tragedy occurring every day in this country – a tragedy that affects lighting designers and technicians alike. This tragedy is unfolding right in our backyards. I’ve personally seen it firsthand, and I struggle to mitigate its aftereffects. You may have been witness to these horrid events and didn’t even know it. The tragedy is simple: seeing a lighting demonstration of a product outside of its natural environment. The most egregious example of this, for the purposes of this blog, is Selador.

Lighting products, especially of the entertainment variety, are sensitive creatures. They are conscious of their surroundings and react very differently when taken from their natural environment. I have traveled the country far and wide and have seen time and time again people placing a Selador on trunnions four feet in front of a wall, and it sickens me. ‘Don’t they understand they aren’t even giving it a chance?’ I often think to myself. ‘Don’t they know how beautiful that light wants to look? How much it yearns to be back in a theater, hung in the air, lighting someone?’ The only thing that calms my spirit is the fact that these tragic demonstrations of the Selador product are indeed innocent. For years, people have taken other LED products and have shined them on a wall, which is what those fixtures were built to do. How could they know that Selador is so different?

As a man trying to perpetuate the ethical demonstrations of lighting products, I ask this: do you remember the first time you saw a Source Four? Was it on a floorplate pointed at a wall three feet in front of it? Sadly, some of you will say yes, but that is a tragedy of a different magnitude. For most people, the first time they saw a Source Four it was hung on a pipe in the air, and it was there, in all its natural beauty, that people first saw the beautiful, sculpted light pour out of the front of the fixture and hit the waiting stage below. It was there that someone placed a set piece or an actor and you saw in front of you the sheer quality of light at which it illuminated those objects. And it was there that the Source Four felt at home.

Selador and Source Four are similar in this way: they feel at home in the theater. Selador feels comfortable lighting people and objects on a stage. Placing them on the ground and shining them on a wall give them a hollow existence. And why would anybody want to hurt a Selador? All they want to do is play with you. Selador yearns to give designers the options of changing their top wash from rich ambers to subtle lavenders to brilliant magentas. It yearns to light an actor in a light that looks as natural as a tungsten source, then grins when it suddenly changes to moonlight blue. It knows the lighting designers in the audience are scratching their heads, wondering if there is some sort of a color changing device on a Fresnel. What’s even sadder about the tragedy of mis-demonstrating Selador is that the designers suffer as much as the Seladors... and they don’t even know it!

I’ve begun a campaign in the Western United States. This campaign is aimed at one thing: to save Seladors across the country from unnatural demonstrations. If Seladors want to show themselves off as a top wash, I say let them. If they want to show off their color-mixing and lensing capabilities by lighting an entire cyc, I say it’s their right to do so. If they want to light a human being in 3200k, then in 5600k, I say, go for it!

And ETC is behind me on this. We are increasing the opportunities to save Seladors and lighting designers alike from horrible demonstrations. Come check us out at tradeshows where different types of Seladors will be playing with each other. Make an effort to see a Selador demonstration by one of our qualified ETC Field Project Coordinators (FPCs). FPCs are located and travel throughout the country, and they’ve been specially trained on how to take care of Seladors, to make them shine their best. Or see us at the Selador Roadshow, a marketing event headed to a local college or university near you. You will not only see how Seladors behave in their natural environment, but you’ll get an opportunity to play with them and see which one you want to take home!

Help my efforts to end these psychotic wall demonstrations! Let us come together and finally put Seladors where they want and deserve to be!

Fire & Ice

allisonsuchon — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:25:00 GMT

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

dlincecum — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:27:00 GMT

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!

Which Pizza would you prefer?

dlincecum — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:19:00 GMT

We held a celebration of the Selador integration in to ETC yesterday. Everyone got free Pizza and a chance to look at the new fixtures and understand the technology and what makes them different. Fred had the idea for a pizza display using an RGB fixture and a Selador fixture. Brilliant! Which Pizza looks most appealing to you?

Welcome Selador to ETC - a new home for the x7 color system

rgerlach — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:00:00 GMT

My name is Rob Gerlach. I am one of the co-founders of Selador. Today we announced that ETC has acquired the Selador LED product line. This is, of course, a really big day for me and fellow co-founder Novella Smith, but I think it’s also a big day for our industry. Things are going to change a lot because of this. That sounds like a PR-approved message, but I truly believe it.

We all know that LEDs are all over the place. Go to any trade show, and you’re bombarded by them, and I get as sick of the hype as anyone else. Yes, they’re a great technology. The power savings and longevity and durability they can achieve are in a whole different league than conventional lighting. But in my mind, these benefits kind of miss the point. For me, the truly wonderful thing about LEDs is that they are absolutely beautiful little light sources that can do things that no other lights in the world can do.

This inherent beauty is what drew me to LEDs in the first place. I wasn’t a lighting person before starting Selador, but when I saw how LED technology was changing about 10 years ago, I became obsessed by it. LED color is spectacular. It’s deep and vibrant and controllable with a level of precision that designers could only ever dream of. To see the difference between LED color and color from a standard source with a saturated gel, look at the following two graphs. If you have a lighting background you will easily recognize the visible spectrum of light within these graphs with Violet at the far left and Red at the far right.

You’ll see that not only does LED color have a much narrower spectral footprint, it is also more cleanly defined. Where many gels will have multiple peaks of color of various widths at various points in the spectrum, LED color always has just a single, narrow peak at its dominant wavelength. On its own, this characteristic is neither inherently good nor bad. The trick is that in order to be really useful, especially when adding multiple LED colors together, this color has to be managed in the right way.

There are shortcuts to color mixing. Red, green, and blue (RGB) can get us kind of close, and this approach is fine for many applications, but it’s a weak substitute for real color control in those situations where the quality of light is critical. Here are some more graphs:

Some marketing materials like to throw around the term “Full Spectrum” when talking about color-mixing LED luminaires. Clearly from the above graphs, it can be seen that color-mixing LED fixtures are not full-spectrum sources, particularly RGB fixtures. Even with the seven colors we use in the x7 color system, there are peaks and valleys. The x7 approach has far more spectral content to work with which is one of the big advantages. I think it is unlikely that a color-mixing LED fixture will ever produce light that exactly matches sunlight’s spectral power distribution (sunlight is a truly full-spectrum source.) However, with the proper management of the various colors in the mix and their brightness relative to one another, the output can be made close enough to full-spectrum to be broadly useful and very beautiful.

Many people have seen these next two diagrams. The first diagram at the right shows the color capabilities of a typical RGB fixture. When you only have three points of color within an additive color-mixing fixture, the range of color that the fixture can produce can be defined by plotting the three colors on a chromaticity diagram and connecting the dots. Everything within the connected dots is that fixture’s color gamut.

The second diagram shows the Selador x7 system color gamut.

With seven points of color, the fixture’s color gamut covers a much larger part of the chromaticity diagram. After years of research, Selador was able to show that the more colors there are in an LED light source, the more saturated and vibrant the color mixes are. We also showed that this multi -color approach produces the most satisfying, natural-looking white light and soft pastels, particularly when illuminating people and objects. In order to make skin tones and colored objects render correctly, you need lots of points of color within the color mix—basically you want to reduce the magnitude of the peaks and valleys in the spectral makeup, smoothing them out somewhat by adding more colors across the spectrum, and match the spectral power distribution of sunlight as much as possible. Without this, LED fixtures don’t work very well in conventional illumination functions. RGB light does very odd things to skin. It always produces pink / ruddy or greenish-gray skin on people, which I imagine is not generally a desirable thing. Colored objects under RGB light look unnaturally red or green or blue—the objects’ colors are hyper-real and difficult to tell apart from one another. Hence Selador’s unique seven-color system. It’s the only way I’ve ever found to get LED-based lighting that is predictable and intuitive, that does natural things to people and objects, and that doesn’t have that obvious, electronic look to it that I despise. It is also very rich and appealing to the human visual system, which over time has evolved to be deeply connected with the full-spectrum light we see each day from the sun.

There are other components of Selador fixtures that are critical for them to look natural to the eye and seamless next to conventional fixtures in a rig. Selador fixtures have newly redesigned circuitry within them that allows for exceptionally smooth, analog-looking dimming. I have to say that this was surprisingly difficult to achieve with a light source as responsive and non-analog as an LED, but I am extremely pleased with the results. Selador is also known for terrific beam-shaping capabilities. No, we don’t yet have a Selador ellipsoidal (it will come) but the fixtures we do have can be shaped very nicely with specialized secondary lenses. We get a lot of compliments about this.

Among a whole list of things, ETC brings to the table a ready-made world of control. I know that seven-color mixing can be daunting. Within an ETC system, it’s all simplified. ETC makes Selador color mixing quick, intuitive, and predictable. In fact the latest software for the Eos and Congo control systems already allow designers to control the Selador fixtures by calling up gel colors. The fixture libraries in these systems are calibrating and I have to admit the color matches are very good. I’ll discuss this in more detail in a later entry. I’m pretty excited about it.

There are many more things we plan to do. With ETC taking over, our combined efforts can now produce new products and introduce enhancements that have been on the drawing boards for a long time. There is exciting stuff in the pipeline, and I’m very happy that I get to be a part of the development team at ETC for new Selador series products. More to come. . .