Fixtures

In scenario, fixtures represent a source of light. Now, we're going to use the most generic one we have, which is just light. And we're going to add it to the diagram here. You're going to see that it has some of the properties of exposure calculation. Uh you can change the beam angle just by dragging here. You see the minimum maximum there. Um, and if we target this actor, which you do just by dragging, and because I have snap off, I'm going to hold shift to target that actor, you can see that it actually has no output data. So, it's because it's a generic fixture, ones that have output data will show it there. But because it's targeting, you'll see that um it will turn to follow that item wherever it goes. And if we switch, it'll do the same thing. Now, both of these do have height. Uh, you can edit those in three dimensions. Uh, if we open up the details, we can see the height here. And for this, the height is at zero. Let's go ahead and change that to something a little more reasonable for a fixture. And we can also in the details there, we can change the scale. So, if you want uh an item that does exist, but you want it to represent something a little bigger, you see you can up the scale here. If we turn on snap, it'll work in bigger increments. And we'll set it back there. So those are the basics of fixtures and we'll get more into um how they do exposure elsewhere. The other things you can do here is you can add gels to fixtures. So you can go and add them and they appear right here. You see that it does affect the exposure and you can also show their DMX channel. So that is just toggled on and off here. And then if you go to if you double click on it and you go to set it then you can make changes to it there. So those are the basics of fixtures.

To get an overview of your fixtures DMX information, you can use the patch list. It's right up here. Or hit command P. And now you can see we have this sorted into four categories. Those that have both channel and address, ones that don't have an address, but they do have a channel, vice versa. And then if they have nothing. So to edit these, all you need to do is click on it. And let's give these a uh let's give these 20 channels worth of space. And now you can see that that moves up to the channel and address. If I want to go down here, go ahead and call this three and give this let's take a look at something here. We'll give this the same address as channel one. And now you can see it does have both, but it's going to give you a little warning because can't have that. So, go ahead and change that. And then we'll add this last one here. And that's all it is. You can also add notes if you'd like. And there are some undo, redo buttons. And that's pretty much all you need to do. You can see these are now all lined up. That's how it works. The other thing you can do with the patch list is share it. So if you go to share and patch list, it's going to generate a page for you. It'll do multiple pages for uh for multiple fixtures. And you can also choose to have a portrait landscape. Once you have that, you save it to your device. You're good to go.

When you're putting together your lighting list, one of the most important things that you're doing is figuring out whether what you're choosing is the right tool for the job. And a big part of that is, is it bright enough? What's the exposure going to be in any given situation? Uh there are a lot of ways to do this, a lot of tools out there. The math is not super difficult. Um and there's your own experience to draw on. But one thing that scenario does is it actually does it where you're already working. So all you need to do is decide what your settings are and then target something. So let's take a look at how that works. Uh we'll start with uh details. And this is with nothing selected. So it's just the details of the diagram itself. You can do this in looks or in foot candles. Um but we're going to do it in f-stops. So, set up your ISO, your camera settings, um what your exposure time is, and then does the space have any ambient light that you want to work with. And then what is your target exposure, your midtone, um you can also adjust it up or down. Um this is if you want to push or pull, some kind of aesthetic adjustment, compensate for filters, that type of thing. Um but it works the same way that it does on a light meter. So, let's take a look at how this works. Um, this is all you need to do. Target. And now you have a readout. That's it. Wherever you move it, that readout is going to adjust to how far away it is. And it's also going to adjust to how you have it spotted or flooded. Um, now these are from the built-in library. This is a generic 5K, a generic 1K. These are kind of average values across different manufacturers. You can pull actual values if you use cloud library fixtures. So here's an aperture fixture here and you can see that it has the actual uh value of what this is going to be. Now one thing that we're doing is we've added a height element. It's still a two-dimensional diagram but you can see that we have now these fixture and actor heights. Um, and this is going to calculate distance in three dimensions so that uh the actual exposure can be calculated in three dimensions. Um, so now let's target with another one here. Now we have a couple things. You know, that one's not quite as bright because it's a 1K. Let's uh let's give this person a little room to breathe. Um, and now you can see that they're getting into a little more reasonable ranges. Now this is only a stop and a half over. Um, and this one is still three stops over. So, this is a little bit bright. And, um, if you if you need to if you need to just like show what your desired exposure is going to be, you can always dim this down. So, this will give you just a linear curve of what the intensity, what the output from the actual fixture is going to be. And you can see as we get lower and lower, the uh, the color here gets cooler. It's kind of a false color thing, but let's bring this up and see what we can do with some diffusion instead. That's a little more of a real world case. Um, first of all, we can put lights or we can put gels directly on the fixture. So, let's say we added some half CTTO. We see that backs it off a little bit. And you see that we're up here that we are losing half a stop from that CTO. Um, but let's throw some frames in the mix as well. This is where it gets really fun. So, and now we're going to double up on the warmth here. So, let's um let's go ahead and get rid of the CTO and instead throw in this 4x4 frame. And you can see that all I need to do is put it in the path of the light. Now, we have that. Now, you see that we're still losing a little bit here, but if we want to get rid of that, just get rid of it. Now, it doesn't affect it. So you can see when we add it or remove it, uh, that basically just says, okay, this is not actually in the path of this fixture. It may look like it, but you know, maybe it's above or below it, that type of thing. We'll keep it in there. And now we'll add diffusion. So this is a full white. And again, just drag it into the path. And you can see a couple things have happened. One is that the edge of this got softer. You can see here we have a tiny little gradient here. This pretty hard source. Um, but if we add a frame, we're actually going to make that more soft. And you can see even as we get closer, it wraps around even more. This is just to give you a sense of what your what your wrap is going to be like, how soft those edges are going to be. Um, just so you have it in your head. It's going to show you what each of the uh stop losses are. And uh and as you can see, we are actually treating this as another source um and then mixing it with the original. So it's going to give you a pretty decent representation of what this particular diffusion is going to give you. Different diffusions will have different values. Now you can still do things here with the beam. So you can see that if we get the beam narrow enough, it's going to show us an approximate spread for how it's going through that diffusion. A lot of permutations of of how this can work. Um, but overall it's just going to take those into account and give you a pretty solid uh exposure estimate. Now, we talked about having that ambient before because if you select the target, it's not just going to show you the one fixture. It's going to show you all the fixtures that are targeting it. So, you see now we have that there. Uh we have what our ambient is giving us over here and we have what our backlight is giving us here and all of these are in three dimensions. So that is a pretty good start. Now, let's give ourselves a little fill here and let's do it with a bounce frame because bouncing is getting much more complex with how we need to uh how we need to calculate things. So, I want to do let's see we have an unbleached muslin here. Let's open up this side. Say we're going to do it this way, you know, because let's say the camera's here just for argument sake. So, we got our camera, we got our angle here, and now we want uh let's use another 5K here. We'll go ahead and just copy this over. But we don't want it to target the person, we want it to target the frame. So, now this fixture is actually targeting the frame. And when we select this frame, we see that we have the ability to target with the frame. Now, frames are a little bit different. you know, we still we still uh are able to rotate them freely because we got to fit them in the space. And you'll see that we have an angle of incidence, angle of reflection thing happening here. So, it's going to show you what the kind of ideal bounce angle is for this particular frame. Let's, you know, let's optimize that. Let's get it to there. We see that we're losing point4 stop. This is unbleached muslin. This is uh you can select different things um different materials and it's going to give you different bounce values. It's going to take away a little less that type of thing. Let's go back to our unbleached. And now if we want to get a a reading here, we just got to target it. So we'll target the actor. Okay, that's that's right on. That's pretty good. If you want to get rid of the target, just get just do that right there. And the cool thing is it is cumulative. So now if we want to add, you know what, I want actually a little more out of this. Or let's say we only have a 2K or something like that. But uh let's just add another one that's still targeting it. And now we see we're getting more out of it. We got almost a full other stop, which makes sense. We doubled it. But uh the other thing that this is doing is it is compensating for that angle. You see it's getting kind of complex around here. Um, but if we're going off access, it's not going to give us as as good of a uh as good of a reading there. So, it's taking that into account as well. So, now we have more going on. All right. So, that's how bounce frames work. Now, there are other things to consider when it comes to fixtures. uh mostly that some of them don't really throw out light in a linear way. We think of them as more omnidirectional. Space lights are a good a good example. So, let's copy our actor here. We have our original one there. And let's take them over to another space that we've created that has some space lights. And look at that. It's starting to pick them up already. So, we have some space lights and these space lights are what we're calling omnidirectional lights. You see this very small circle of uh exposure. The reason that that's so small is that this is at a height of 16 ft. And um this circle tells us where midtone is going to be for any given fixture. You may have noticed with the other fixtures we're using um the beams, these beams actually now go out as far as midtone for whatever you have this set to. So you see I'm getting longer when we have that and a little shorter when we get to uh when we get to midtone there. Um so that's something to keep in mind. But the beams here represent midtone. And you see as we go lower down that midtone gets bigger. Let's take it back up to our height. But with omniirectional fixtures they are just going to figure out whatever is in range and that range is three stops uh three stops under. So if something is more than three stops uh under so dimmer it's going to lose it's not going to be affected. See but if it gets within that range it starts to be affected and it gets affected more and more as you get within that range. And then as you move through that range, you start to get a sense of where everything how everything affects it. So, you know, use space lights with care is the moral here. And this applies to other other omniirectional lights such as a uh such as a big balloon. We have a big balloon over here. So, you can see how it's affecting getting a little spicy there, but that's because the height's at zero feet. Let's put this up more like where a balloon would be. You see our circle got smaller. And now we just don't want to get too close. So the last thing that you saw a second ago was the sun. Let's move ourselves back away from here and over to this space. The sun is uh is unique in that the normal rules of fall-off don't really apply. Um you know it's so far away, it's so bright that really all you need to know is which direction is coming from the So the sun works like a fixture. You target um but that's all you do. It's not giving you a beam. It's not giving you anything like that. And what we have here is we have some presets. You can choose um among any of these. These are just fixed values and it's going to tell you what the exposure is going to be. But if you happen to be in a space and you know exactly what the exposure is for the sun at a certain time of day, just set it to custom and say, "No, this is going to give me, you know, exactly this." And that's what it'll be. No matter where where you move it, it's going to be hard source and it's going to be um whatever exposure you have set it to be. But it also plays by the rules of bounces and just want to duplicate this. Let's do this paste here. Um yeah. So, let's say instead of the targeting directly, or actually here's a here's a good uh here's a good example. So, instead of the targeting directly, we'll do this. We'll have one target the frame, one target the person. We want them to be at roughly we want them to be at the same angle basically because that is how the sun works. And so, now we know. Okay, so we have that direct sun that's there. But if we use some unbleached muscle on this bounce, we can at least get that there. So that is how all the various uh components work for exposure. There's obviously a lot to play around with here, a lot of permutations. Um, but hopefully it'll give you a better idea of exactly what you're walking into on the day. And ultimately, if it's kind of getting in your way and you just don't want all this stuff on here, go to layers, go to types, and turn off light estimates. And then everything just works without the exposure component. Enjoy.