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Effect Question - Multiple Intensities


scodavis

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I am currently sequencing some songs and I came up with an effect I wanted to try.  Since I don't have controllers yet, I can't test out my effect, but I was wondering if anybody else had already done something similar.  This effect would be done with LOR controllers and full-wave rectified LED lights.

Imagine that I set all of my red channels to 40% intensity, and then had some of the channels go to 100% intensity every beat (and then back down to 40%).  My questions are:

  1. Can the LOR controllers handle this?
  2. Is the difference in intensities great enough where the beat would be obvious?

I hope this makes sense.  Thank you, everyone.

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1)  Yes, the controllers can handle that just fine.

2)  With LEDs, you may need to make the 40% lower to get the effect that you are really looking for.  You may want to hook up just a few lights to try the lower intensity so you don't have to change a bunch of sequences after getting the lights up in November.

 

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1 hour ago, k6ccc said:

1)  Yes, the controllers can handle that just fine.

2)  With LEDs, you may need to make the 40% lower to get the effect that you are really looking for.  You may want to hook up just a few lights to try the lower intensity so you don't have to change a bunch of sequences after getting the lights up in November.

 

Thank you, Jim.  I have every intention of hooking up lights to test things out - but since I haven't actually done a show yet, I don't have any controllers.  I will be purchasing my show controllers during the mad grab sale this year.  Until that happens, I can't really test anything beyond using the visualizer.

Am I correct in assuming that your statement about reducing the intensity further is due to the fact that running an LED at 40% intensity doesn't mean that the LEDs will be at 40% intensity, due to their nature?

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58 minutes ago, scodavis said:

Thank you, Jim.  I have every intention of hooking up lights to test things out - but since I haven't actually done a show yet, I don't have any controllers.  I will be purchasing my show controllers during the mad grab sale this year.  Until that happens, I can't really test anything beyond using the visualizer.

Am I correct in assuming that your statement about reducing the intensity further is due to the fact that running an LED at 40% intensity doesn't mean that the LEDs will be at 40% intensity, due to their nature?

Not having controllers does make it a bit harder!

To be a little picky about the 40% question, it's actually that the dimming curve for an LED is quite different than an incan light.  The LED actually dims far more linear than incan lights, so 40% on a LED is really about 40% of 100%.  The problem is that human eyes are also not linear, and are much closer to the dimming curve of an incan.  Therefore, to us human beings, the incan light dims very smoothly and the LED does most of it's dimming at quite low percentages.  That means that with LEDs it often takes a far greater dimming than it would with incans.

 

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Scott,

My experience using LEDs (full-wave rectified) is that you'll need a 30% intensity setting for what you're trying to do.  Anything greater than that and you won't notice much difference in brightness on your beats.  What you're doing, by the way, looks infinitely better than flashing the lights on and off.

And Jim is totally correct in how LEDs fade.  It's around 40% where you begin to visually notice a difference, and between 15-20% when they turn completely off.  Keep that in mind when you work with fades.  If you're doing a long fade, like more than 3-4 seconds, your LEDs will be totally dark a LOT sooner than you might want them to be.  I'm to the point where I set my low end of fades at 15% and that's just about right.

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2 hours ago, George Simmons said:

And Jim is totally correct in how LEDs fade.  It's around 40% where you begin to visually notice a difference, and between 15-20% when they turn completely off.  Keep that in mind when you work with fades.  If you're doing a long fade, like more than 3-4 seconds, your LEDs will be totally dark a LOT sooner than you might want them to be.  I'm to the point where I set my low end of fades at 15% and that's just about right.

 

One note about what George said.  I assume he is talking about 120V light strings (such as what you were asking about).  Almost all of my LEDs are either 12V dumb strips, or 5V or 12V pixels.  In both of those cases you can go a lot lower than 15% before they go off (like 1% and they are still on).  Keep that difference in mind if you start using RGB pixels or strips.  Different technology with different rules.  I do have 6 strings of 120V strings that are used for Christmas and they do behave very similar to what George said.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I wanted to thank everybody for their replies.  I was able to borrow a LOR controller from a local friend and do some testing with my full-wave rectified light sets.  As George mentioned, having 30% intensity as the base and then pulsing to 100% for the beat was perfect for the effect I was trying to achieve.

Once again, thank you all!

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