Quasar Science - Help Center

[en] Bit Depth

[en] Bit depth is a measure that describes how smooth the transition is between the darkest and brightest tone of a color.  Generally speaking, the trade off with Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) LED arrays is smoothness of fades versus the highest frame rate a fixture's light output will support.

[en] Not to be confused with 8bit vs 16bit DMX profiles: With all RR-R2 firmware before 0.9a the internal LED dimming engine's light output was dithered to 12-bit in order to maintain fast performance.

[en] With the release of firmware 0.9a we have optimized performance to allow the dimming engine to take advantage of the 16-bits of resolution supported by the hardware while maintaining fast response times.

[en] The biggest benefit will be seen at low intensities, especially slow fades at low intensities. They will look different between 0.7/0.8 and 0.9 firmware. (As-in look a lot better)

[en] When combined with a 16-bit DMX Profile from your control source (i.e. Lighting Console) the fixture greatly benefits when fading off-white Hues at low intensities because of the 65536 steps of resolution versus the 256 steps with 8-bit DMX profiles.

Figure 1. [en] DMX Profile resolution difference

[en] Choosing a 16-bit DMX profile will give much smoother transitions across the color spectrum as well as fading from low to bright intensities.

[en] If you need to match older firmware for some odd reason, you may change the RR-R2 to the 12bit engine by navigating to [Config Menu] → [Output Bits] to set the Bit mode to "12 bit" and the fixture's dimming will behave as it did with prior firmware.

[en] That said we strongly recommend upgrading your fixtures to FW 0.9 to take advantage of the better 16-bit dimming engine.

[en] Frame Rate

[en] The other reason to change the Bit Depth is to accommodate the Frames Per Second your camera is recording. The default 16-bit dimming engine supports up to 500FPS or a Shutter Speed of 1/1000 second.

[en] The 12-bit dimming engine will support up to 2000FPS or a shutter speed of 1/4000 second.

Figure 2. [en] Bit Depth Menu

[en] You can change the bit depth of the fixture by navigating to [CONFIG] ->[OUTPUT BITS] menu.