Something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time is manage fixture dimming separately from color mixing, so that I can re-use a set of dimming/pixel dimming patterns across multiple color presets. I did see the thread that suggested some ideas here: Dimmer and Color in different clips using Beam? – but so far this doesn’t meet my needs.
Spoiler: I discovered a way to do this via custom fixture profile modes, but it’s way out on the skinny branches, and I’m not sure yet whether this is a supported use case.
I had some specific goals:
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Create a track containing MIDI clips with notes that trigger specific fixture dimmers (or individual pixels in my pixel fixtures). Beam devices’ ADSR section does this nicely – different clips contain MIDI notes that trigger different dimming patterns, and I can use MIDI effects to generate all kinds of fun dimmer behavior. You could do the same thing with clips that automate a beam device’s dimmer Intensity parameter, but doing this with smooth crossfades isn’t trivial.
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Create a series of color preset tracks for the fixture, each of which contains a beam device set to a specific color (or set of colors, for my pixel lights). For each preset, I want to use Beam’s color box for a friendly way to see and set the color. I don’t want to have to use clip automation to set beam device color parameters. This is opaque, harder to maintain, and typically results in color jumps.
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Crossfade smoothly between each color preset (aka track) by automating the volume, fading up a single color track and fading down all others – I’m using ClyphX to do this, and it’s awesome. There are other ways to crossfade between fixture presets, but this is my favorite.
With this approach, I’ve finally been able to:
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Trigger a set of dimmer preset clips that automate the intensity of my fixture (or pixel fixture), usually through MIDI notes and the ADSR settings in Beam devices. By using the attack and release settings, I can smoothly switch between dimmer preset clips in the dimmer track without jarring jumps in intensity.
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Crossfade smoothly between fixture color presets, with Beam doing the color mixing. This can happen independently from the dimming clips that I’m triggering.
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Edit each color preset/track using Beam’s color box; no clip parameter automation needed.
The only fancy part here is using ClyphX to smoothly fade up/down each color track when I want to switch color presets, without having to use clip automation for the fades.
To do this, I added two fixture profile modes – one to control the dimmer only, and the other to control color mixing only. So if I have a fixture with a 5 channel mode (IRGB+Strobe), my profile modes would look like this:
Dimmer mode:
(edit: no idea why the editor is nuking my formatting below)
"Mode 1-Dimmer": { "channels": { "Dim": { "address8Bit": 1, "highlightValue": 255 }, "Strobe": { "address8Bit": 5 } }, "modulation": { "stroberate": { "channel": "Strobe", "mergeMode": "weightedaverage", "fallback": "none" } }, "colorspace": { "colorspaceType": "dimmer", "additive": { "intensity": { "channel": "Dim" } }, "subtractive": {} }, "cells": [] }
Color mode:
"Mode 1 - Color": { "channels": { "Red": { "address8Bit": 2, "highlightValue": 255 }, "Green": { "address8Bit": 3, "highlightValue": 255 }, "Blue": { "address8Bit": 4, "highlightValue": 255 }, "Strobe": { "address8Bit": 5 } }, "modulation": { "stroberate": { "channel": "Strobe", "mergeMode": "weightedaverage", "fallback": "none" } }, "colorspace": { "colorspaceType": "rgb", "additive": { "red": { "channel": "Red" }, "green": { "channel": "Green" }, "blue": { "channel": "Blue" } }, "subtractive": {} }, "cells": [] }
In the first mode channels 2, 3, & 4 (RGB) are missing, and in the second mode, channel 1 (dimmer) is missing. Beam seems to know that both modes have 5 channels because of the Strobe on channel 5. Obviously this won’t work for every fixture.
To make this work, I added two fixtures to my patch, one using the first mode (Mode 1 - Dimmer) and the second using the second mode (Mode 1 - Color). Both fixtures are set to the same DMX address. The result is that each fixture (and corresponding Beam device) manages different subsets of the fixture’s DMX channels, separating dimming and color management. I’m still testing out this approach. I’d particularly love some feedback from the folks at Showsync; I’m not expecting this to be a supported scenario, but feedback would be wonderful.
David