Another limitation of RGB color mixing is though you can mix to many different colors,
you can only mix to one color in one particular way. With x7 color mixing, you can mix to
the same color in multiple ways as to affect how it's rendering other colors. Now, you
can't see this on a white surface, so I'm going to use these strategically-placed Hawaiian
shirts because they have lots of colors in them. Right now I'm mixing amber from red
and green colored LEDs. This, of course, is how most LED products make amber and to my
eyes, this looks like amber but let's compare this to the amber colored LED. Almost immediately,
you see a major difference between the two. They're rendering the colors of the Hawaiian
shirts very differently and this difference makes a bit of sense. The amber colored LED
has a very narrow color range and doesn't render many colors so it's making the shirts
look almost monochromatic whereas the red and green amber, well it makes the reds pop
and it makes the greens pop. And it's not to say that one way is better than the other
but with Selador, you have a choice as a designer as to how you would like to light an object.
And in fact if you take red, amber and green and mix them all together, you get a very
vibrant, rich and lifelike amber light coming out of the unit.
So how do we use this in real life? Say you've been asked to light a mural on the side of
a restaurant and you've chosen to use LED technology because it's energy efficient
and low maintenance. If you use the typical RBG fixture, you could make a color that sort
of looks like white and although you can see all the colors on the mural, well some colors
are popping more than others. As soon as we add in the four additional colors of x7 color
mixing, like I'm doing right now, you can almost immediately see how the colors begin
to balance out to each other and the white light that's hitting the mural looks a lot
more natural than it did coming out of the RGB unit.
Now let's move away from the restaurant and into the theater and do something that's
typical. Light a night scene on an actor. Now of course it's a night scene so we're
gonna start off with the blue LEDs because that's just the natural place to start.
Right now I'm just shining the blue LEDs in Selador on the actor and everybody has
blue LEDs but we also have indigo LEDs. So we can add the indigo LEDs to this and get
a much richer and deeper color of blue. Now say this scene were to take place underneath
a full moon so I need to make a color that evokes moonlight in the audience. Well moonlight
isn't this deep colored blue, it's more of a silvery colored blue but we have cyan
LEDs in our unit and by adding cyan to this color of blue, we can really make it more
of that silvery color we're trying to accomplish. Now if we were to do this with a gel in front
of a Source Four®, that gel would inevitably let some wavelengths of red colored light
through it and that would react with the pigment in the actor's skin and they wouldn't
look so cold and drab like they do right now. So by adding just a little bit of that red
LED to this mix, we could really bring life to the actor on stage and hit dead on that
beautiful color of moonlight blue. Now let's move away from the theater and
think about lighting a sports announcer sitting in front of a window at a NASCAR race. The
challenge of this is that you have to balance your cameras white balance to the color of
light that's coming in through the window at various parts of the day. With Selador,
you can make a white colored light that's in balance with the window at closer to 5,600
Kelvin in the middle of the day and then as the sun begins to set towards the end of the
race, and it becomes dusk, you could readjust the white color coming out of the Selador
unit to be closer to say, 2,900 Kelvin. There's another limitation to RGB color
mixing that lies in fading from one color to another through many colors. Notice as
I take this cyc from green to red in a ten second count only using the green and red
LEDs. Notice that while I fade through some colors in the amber end of the spectrum, it's
severely lacking. Now let's compare this same ten-second fade to x7 color mixing where
we've not only added just an amber LED but we've added cyan, indigo, even red-orange
to the mix to hit all the various colors within the amber end of the spectrum.
Now that’s not to say that one way is better than the other. Sometimes you want to fade
from Color A to Color B through as little color as possible.
At other moments, say, a ten minute sunset on a cyc, you wanna go through many, many different colors.
With Selador, we provide the designers with the option of doing both
and this, of course, becomes much more pronounced as we go from green to red with x7 color mixing
using the cyan, indigo, red-orange, even amber LEDs through the blue end of the spectrum.
So the advantages of x7 color mixing are clear. The More Color in the fixture the Better the Light coming out of the fixture.