I love a logic puzzle.  Some programmer friends and I were discussing the need to be mindful of using lighting colors that suit all skin tones on stage.  One of us programs in Ballet rep and pointed out the challenges of cueing with an A, B and even C cast for each piece.  I thought back to an old trick from live music programming- the Color palette overwrite trick.

The idea in music is you want to be able to have a two cue cuestack that bounces the odds to a just-chosen color, and then releases those and pops the evens to the same chosen color.  The programming isn’t complicated- you record the cue list with a new color palette.  On the first cue, you use Release (for Eos- in Blind) on the evens, then in the second cue, you use release on the odds.  This allows whatever original source is coloring those lights before you triggered the list to keep going in the background.  The only “trick” is to use a new color palette (999 for example) to be the color palette in the list.  If you want red in the moment, you then have a macro that fires: 

Color Palette Red Copy to Color Palette 999 Enter Enter

You deliberately overwrite the data with a known color palette from elsewhere.  It’s a simple trick and it’s really fun for busking.

But it occurs to me you could use this for dance rep.  Obviously, I’m assuming that your fixtures are color mixing.  But you could lay out a row of the key colors for the piece at 6001 thru 6010.  If you like, you can create this row by copying your color palettes for the A cast into these slots.  Program with the new copies, then when you have your B cast- quickly figure out what color palettes in your template flatter their skin tones the best (or make new color palettes NOT in the 6001-6010 range).  Next, line up your substitutions.  For example- if 6001 was a lavender, then you need to find a substitute lavender that works for the B cast, and for each color, you find a substitute new color.  Then just use “Copy to” to overwrite the color palettes 6001-6010.  In Eos, the labels come with the palettes when you copy them to the new location, unless you copy the data using Blind.  Example:

Blind>Color Palette 6001 Enter

Select Active Recall From Color Palette B Cast Lavender Enter

With the Blind example, the macro would need to each color palette one at a time.  Without going to blind and accepting the copy of the labels, you can do the whole range at once.

Advanced consideration- you may find that certain substitutions are brighter than others, as typically a “cooler” lavender will be brighter in LED than a “warmer” lavender.  If this happens, you could rewrite the cool color palette with all the emitters a little lower to account for that.  The idea is to set up your file so the color palette macro is the only thing you need to do to have the show look good from cast to cast.

Hopefully this trick is useful to you in either form- the busking example or the Ballet rep example.  It certainly opens up possibilities for your programming if you start thinking of creating data you mean to overwrite.  Are you part of a multi-cast programming company or project?  What other techniques do you use to address the variables?  Hit me in the comments.