so I’m attempting to get the patch I’ve been working on (which I posted in a separate thread) working with my 4 channel lights; no luck so far. I was using the RGB profile with the 3 channel lights I have at home, and assumed that the RGBW profile would work with my workshop lights.
There seem to me to be 2 things I need to change:
in the [dict.pack] I need to add an extra channel, but I’m not sure what to call it. Looking in the RGBW profile, I can see that there’s a 4th argument - “white”. I tried that, but it didn’t work (and channel 4 wasn’t changing in Monitor.) [dict.pack red: green: blue: white: …]
Am I correct that that is all I should need to do?
If I’m right, then I guess it must be that the generic RGBW profile isn’t going to work for the lights I’m using? Which would mean I need to create a new profile?
The lights are BriteQ COB Slim100-RGB. They have a couple of 4 channel modes, but the one I use is called CH:04+. The only info about that in the manual says “R,G & B can be set seperately, with master dimmer on CH4.”
So I guess the question is, what command would drive that? I also tried dim: in the dict.pack, but that didn’t do anything either.
The Generic RGBW profile should work without any changes to your patch. Everything in the patch works with RGB which gets converted to RGBW when Beam converts the [beam.output] values into raw DMX.
The Generic RGBW isn’t the right profile for that light indeed. It’ll make the forth channel only go up if the color in the Max patch approaches white. E.g. full red (rgb 1. 0. 0.) would turn into dmx 255 0 0 0 which means the light’s Master dimmer channel would be off. Setting the color in the Max patch to white (rgb 1. 1. 1.) would turn into dmx 255 255 255 255 which would turn the light fully white too.
Is there a reason you want to use the CH4+ mode over the CH3 mode (RGB)? It seems like the CH3 mode would be controllable with the Generic RGB profile. I would recommend choosing the simplest mode if possible. While Beam has functionality to deal with the other modes too, simple RGB modes are the easiest to reason about and trouble shoot.
If you want to use the CH4+ mode, here are two profiles you can use:
CH4+ static dimmer.sbf: adds the Dimmer attribute on channel 4 and sets it to 255. This profile always keeps the Dimmer fully on regardless of the RGB values. I guess this is effectively the same as setting the light to CH3 mode.
CH4+ dynamic dimmer.sbf: adds the Dimmer attribute on channel 4 and adds a few transforms. It turns the patch’s RGB values into some sort of ‘RGB + Dim’ control. So an RGB value of 1. 0. 0. is converted into 255 0 0 255. An RGB value of 0.5 0. 0. gets converted into 255 0 0 128.
Thanks Hidde,
I think I started using 4chan mode when I put together the “environment” part of the patch, so that I could set a particular (non-primary) colour and then leave the colour set while it was faded up and down. The only other way I could think of doing it at the time (using the imp. Objects) was to attempt to proportionally fade the r,g &b settings for any Colour combinations up and down, and that just made my head hurt! So most of my existing installations have been reset to 4 channel operation, which didn’t require a lot of re patching.
But yes, now that I have Beam I can go back to 3 channel as fading a non-primary colour up and down is easily handled by Beam itself. I’ll do that with my workshop rig, and with future installations once I’ve got Beam completely sorted.
I’ll try and make time at the end of the workshop tomorrow to try the profiles you posted. The second one sounds like what I was expecting to happen. Otherwise I’ll try going back to 3 chan the week after next when we have it all set up again.
Makes sense! It sounds like the CH4+ dynamic dimmer.sbf will behave roughly the same as your old setup: the RGB values are ‘normalized’ and the brightness is encoded in the dimmer channel. But since (most of the time) you don’t have to worry about the DMX layout with Beam, I agree there’s not really a benefit anymore choosing CH4+ over CH3.
