Tiny Tip: Cloning Color Palettes to New Fixtures in EOS

By 5 commentsCategory: Uncategorized

I have a gremlin’s delight every time I’m able to add another fixture into my my template.  The process takes some time and it’s always worth it for me.  But what if I don’t have the time?  Sometimes the fixture is just handed to me (Surprise!) and I’m expected to start programming it within minutes.  There’s a solution.

I start by patching and taking a quick peek at the light and its color characteristics.  Is it an RGBW fixture or a CMY fixture?  What color temperature of white does it have?  But most importantly: does it remind me of a light I’ve already done palettes for?  Once I know the light a little, I can decide what fixture I already have in my template most resembles it and copy those color palettes to the new light.  Let’s keep the numbers simple and say that my reference fixture is 9101 and my new-to-me light is fixture 1.  Let’s also assume you would want the new color palettes to be By Type.

Important note: We are about to have all of your color palettes selected at once in Blind. It’s easy to change a lot of data all at once here, so save a backup and then double check your command line before you press Enter.

[Blind]

[Color Palette] 1 [Thru] [Enter]  (Not specifying the end number means EOS selects the whole range of color palettes in your file.)

Channel 1 {By Type} [Recall From] 9101 [Enter]

You’re done.  Exit to Live and give things a quick test.  Obviously, the color palettes will not be perfect.  But at least you have something in the board and hopefully you will be given time to fix things as you go or some time later.  

What are the “Surprise!” moments as a programmer that you like to tell stories about?  Comment below and thanks for reading.

5 comments

  1. Chris Stokes - Reply

    Mark – This is great. I understand the concept of picking the fixture style (CMY, RGB, array Mix) that is closest to the new fixture you are adding. However, the way Eos calculates the color parameter information to a new fixtures is the same regardless of what type of fixture style you start with,. In short it’s all based off of the x/y coordinate.

    If you had 3 different fixtures all set to L141 for example, they all have the same X/Y coordinate. When you copy it to a new fixtures/array style you will see that they all create the same result for the new fixture.

    Now, to your point, if you are the type of programmmer that tweaks each fixture so the “Light Blue” matches as much as possible then I think you’re philosophy holds true. If you took an RGB fixture to have a bit more Red and Green (different x/y space) than an RGBAW fixture in the same color palette using the default x/y position for a gel color then I could see why you would pick a specific fixture to use to copy to your newly added fixture.

    • admin - Reply

      I am very much the type of programmer that matches divergent light sources to match a unified color palette. That philosophy very much informs my work.

  2. John Scrip - Reply

    OMG thanks for this. I have – whatever – A bunch of Seladors, ETC CS Pars, etc., etc., yada, yada. When I make any substantial changes to the plot (like anything that changes a channel number) all that info is gone. I’m doing a re-channel / design tweak in Augment3d and ran into this several times and it drives me mad. I’ve been at this for years – thrown in, not trained in if you know what I mean – and some of these little “tricks” that most people might know have escaped me. Thanks for posting it.

  3. Marcus Doshi - Reply

    You may have covered this in other posts (I’m new to your *excellent* blog) but I have a little shortcut that I use for this: I’ve created a few dummy fixtures in my base file: one is just RBG, another CYM, etc. So when I get a new fixture, I home the new fixture in all of the CPs, then copy the appropriate attributes from the appropriate dummy fixture. Now, here’s the rub: most of my CPs are H/S these days, so I just copy the H/S info. However, it doesn’t always transfer correctly… I’m looking forward to trying out the new release to see if it behaves better…

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