Palette Config

Chris Priest

Active Member
Hi All,

After many hours soldering up a Y adapter, I can now drive my Yag and my white light at the same time! Yippeee :)

Now comes the fun part, the output of the Yag seems considerably less than it used to be running under it's native software, I think this is due to the blanking/intensity signal not being at +5v when projecting a single beam, projecting a full image seems to run at full power, probably something to do with the amount of blanking required!

My question is, how can I adjust the palette so that both projectors output at maximum brightness? Most of my work involves beam shows, so obviously I want to get the maximum brightness possible

Can the palette be tweaked so that the colour projector maintains it's color palette but at full power and the yag does the same?

Thanks for any input/advice!

Best Regards
Chris
 
Hi Chris,

This may actually not be a pallete problem. If you are outputting just a single beam, this may have relatively few points (anywhere from 2 to 100 or so, depending on a large number of factors).

In the PROJECTOR SETTINGS dialog box, you will find a slider that controls the "Minimum Points". By default, Pangolin sets this slider to a value of 200. This means if you are outputting fewer than 200 points, the QM2000 will "pad" the output with blanked points to achieve at least 200 points going to the scanners. In general, this helps the scanners and can protect them under some circumstances. In your case, it may be more "harmful" than it is beneficial, in terms of effectively reducing the brightness of a "beam" that is defined with only a few points.

You may try reducing the value of this control and see if that improves brightness. I think it will. You may reduce this all the way to its minimum value of 4, but I don't recommend you go below 100 for scanner wear reasons. If you use our default settings, you will find that your scanners last longer than if used with competing software. The "minimum points" setting is just one reason, and there are many others.

For beams, we generally recommend that you put a number of visible points in each beam, such as 25 to 100 points in each "beam". This will solve your brightness problem and will also allow you to continue using a more typical value for the "minimum points" setting. This also can provide for a safer show if you are doing audience scanning, but this is the topic for another forum...

Bill
 
Thanks Bill, I'll give that a try.

Quick Q, How do I add more points to a beam, is it a case of just drawing additional points around the existing one, or is it a setting?

Regards
Chris
 
@John,

Yes, you are correct, it would be nice to incorporate the beam features of LivePRO into LD and/or Showtime. Many times how we work at Pangolin is, we develop a feature in one program, then eventually distribute this feature to the other programs. Projection Zones is an example which was developed in LD/ST, the distributed to all other LD2000-compatible applications. We will incorporate an enhanced beam functionality into LD/ST one day, unfortunately this is not slated to be one of the features that will be in the upcoming release 3.50.

@Chris,

The way that you increase the number of points in a beam may vary. You may for example use the "renumber" or "resample" tools, or what I do is move the point slider to a visible point, then press and hold CTRL+A for a while. CTRL+A means "add point" and this will duplicate the selected point. I am sure that there are other ways and perhaps some other users will chime in here with their preferred methods...

Bill

[ December 10, 2003, 05:21 PM: Message edited by: Pangolin ]
 
another way to add or delete points is to activate caps lock, then you only need to go to the point the same as Bill said and press A or D (no need for CTRL button) :p

I find 100 points in a beam is as bright as you'll get with an AO without using too many points up..
 
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