I am using a selection of RGB stage lights and have set up presets for various scenes (for a musical production). I have added these to my dashboard as solo buttons.
I am trying to get a nice smooth crossfade between the buttons on my dashboard. Using a fadeout on one button and a fade in on the other button appears to make the lights fade out briefly before fading in to the new scene. one of the benefits of RGB lights is that it’s easy to blend the values on each channel from one value to the other, but the Photon dashboard doesn’t seems to do this, which looks a bit odd on stage having the lights almost fade out before fading in again.
Perhaps I am not setting the best values for fade out and fade in, I’m not sure but I can’t seem to get it to work well.
I use Photon advanced mode. I have noticed on my budget Amazon pars that if I fade out to zero on one color (R G or B), it does it on all 3. Cross fades don’t seem to work smoothly in my setup for that reason. The DMX schema on that fixture is a single dimmer shared among the 3 colors. Another forum member mentioned creating multiple groups addressing the same fixture. I tried that, putting a dimmer on the first group on red, and a dimmer on the second group on green. Interestingly I can fade one group independently but not the other. It seems like the last created group has independent dimmer control (light stays on when fading the other) but not the earlier created group (light goes off when fading the other).
That seems a bit odd. The PARs I’m using are Beamz Pro and have separate dimmer channels for each colour, but even the cheapest PARs I’ve had in the past have had a dimmer channel each for RGB - there is normally a master dimmer channel too. How many DMX channels do your fixtures have?
So I don’t think your scenario is related to mine. I would like to see if there’s a way of properly cross-fading between pre-set buttons (which are using the same fixtures) to get a smooth transition between one colour scene and another rather than fading out then back in again.
I’m guessing that by “advanced mode” you mean this. This is the way that photon works in that you don’t really use separate channels to fade RGB up and down. You can get round this by doing a fixture definition that uses custom individual channels to match the RGB channels in your DMX profile rather than using the fixed RGB channel selection.
I meant ‘Custom Controls’. My fixtures have 7 channels which include a single dimmer and separate channels for R G & B, along with mode, speed and strobe. I tried creating a dimmer control in the Live panel with only the color channel but without the dimmer channel, that doesn’t work. CaliCreed (John), whose videos have helped me, talks about Photon not supporting cross fades when using Custom Controls, which he favors for a number of reasons.
I have a couple of Kam PartyBars, If you dim them from 100% to 0% then at about 40% the lights are off. So if you set one to dim and one to fade in then at the cross over point to 50% on each they are both very dim. As you say, looks like its getting dark before getting bright again. Not sure what the answer is to this. May be make the fade in much faster than the fade out. I don’t need a fix as I never do fade out of one and fade in of another.
Thanks for the reply. The RGB pars otherwise work fine on the dimmer channels 0% to 100%.
It just seems that the fade out on one dashboard button is processed fully before the fade in on the next dashboard button is processed. Having said that the fixtures don’t go completely “black” so there must be some sort of cross-over going on.
Most of my gigs are based on “setting scenes” either for plays, orchestras, and sometimes for bands. for each of these it would be a lot better for the various “colour themes” of each scene to blend from one to the other when selecting the next pre-set button on the dashboard rather than having the appearance of slightly fading out before fading back in again.
Other lighting software I use manages this fine with the same fixtures and similar dashboard set up of switching between scenes using pre-set buttons
Hi Andy, Do you only have one scene at a time. If so you might want to try making each scene button a solo. That way you only have to tap one button and it will fade out current scene and fade in the new one. I did a quick trial last night and found that it would appear to do what you want. You might find setting fade out to 3 seconds and fade in to 2 seconds gives you what you want, Also you only have one button to press to change from one scene to another.
Thanks for the reply. I do have the scenes set as solo buttons, so it switches from one scene to the other. My problem is that I can’t seem to get a nice smooth cross-fade between the scenes - the fade-out from the original button appears to activate before the fade-in of the new button. There does seems to be something of an overlap (crossfade) between them but it’s not smooth and regardless of what timings I put on the fadeout and fade-in the lights appear to “dim” briefly between scenes which doesn’t look great on stage.
To me, fade out and fade in are different to crossfade - I don’t want a fadeout to run before the fade in of the new scene - I want them to overlap to make a smooth transition between scenes.
