Since 2014, ETC's ColorSource family of products has fought back against this epidemic of bad LED lighting by providing affordable, high-quality luminaires and effortless power control. Now, with the announcement of the new ColorSource and ColorSource AV control desks, the family is poised to really take control of the issue - one venue at a time.
Approachability is key for a small console; many venues are staffed by students, volunteers or visiting artists, and operators need to be able to walk up to a board, learn it quickly and bring up great lighting looks.
"The ColorSource console is a simple machine, not a simplistic machine," says Adam Bennette, the R&D technical director involved in the desks' development. Each ColorSource desk boasts a sleek design and hands-on control, with an onboard, seven-inch touchscreen and 20 or 40 pageable faders that can control 40 or 80 channels or devices.
The touchscreen interface brings colour selection, record and other commonly used functions to the forefront, while a wealth of deeper features can be accessed using the intuitive menu system. If first-time users get lost, they can quickly find their way again with built-in, multilingual help functions and video tutorials.
The desks are designed to make setup a breeze. ColorSource consoles streamline the patching process by doing most of the work. They offer comprehensive RDM (remote device management) support - a unique feature among small desks, which identifies on startup any intelligent lights in the rig and populates their profiles in Patch. Within minutes of setup, the fixtures can be assigned to channels using the touchscreen and dragged into position on the onscreen stage map for easy direct-selection and programming.
When it comes to colour, the console thinks like a lighting designer: "Fading colour with ColorSource consoles works just as if you had two gelled tungsten lights and faded from one to the other," explains Bennette. "It sounds basic, but many LED lighting systems these days can't do a reasonable fade from, say, pink to sky blue without passing by some ghastly shades on the way."
Unlike other small lighting consoles that operate in a limited range of colours, ColorSource desks support the colour mixing systems of all mainstream fixtures, including the extended gamut of ETC's seven colour Source Four LED and Desire® luminaires.
(Jim Evans)
