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Quiet Smoke Machines


athos1666

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Few questions...

 

1) You definitely want smoke and not haze or low smoke?

2) How quiet is quiet?

3) How high is high output? A 500 seat theatre? A 100 seat studio space? A 5,000 seat arena?

4) How quickly do you need to fill 3)?

5) What is your budget?

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Few questions...

 

1) You definitely want smoke and not haze or low smoke?

2) How quiet is quiet?

3) How high is high output? A 500 seat theatre? A 100 seat studio space? A 5,000 seat arena?

4) How quickly do you need to fill 3)?

5) What is your budget?

 

Definitely smoke, not haze or low smoke.

 

500 - 1000 seat theatre.

Two machines, firing from opposite sides of an 11m Pros to make a large cloud in the centre

No Sound Effects to cover the noise

Two people onstage talking over the cue, no mics to support them

Low budget - possible long hire

Have un-successfully tried ducting the current machines

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What didn't work with the current machines / ducting

 

Everything from your description says "ducting is the answer" so it's just a technical challenge now of working out why it's not giving the result you want

 

Thank you, we tried with various lengths of ducting, but it affected the volume of the smoke too badly - we just couldn't get the volume of smoke we needed to centre stage.

 

When I mentioned high output, we're basically having each machine give a powerful 15 second burst, colliding centre stage and snowballing onto a cloud. Effect is great, but is very noisy over the dialogue.

 

 

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Noise is solved by diameter of ducting. Wider ducting = quieter plus longer ducting means you can locate the machine further away.

 

Make sure you have the proper air gap between the machine and the ducting. To big or too small will dramatically reduce the life of the smoke.

 

If the smoke is dissapaiting too quickly then you’re using the wrong grade of smoke fluid in your machines. It’s also important to be using a proper pro grade machine for this task; if it’s not at least a 2kw machine then it hasn’t got a hope of producing proper theatrical smoke.

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Noise is solved by diameter of ducting. Wider ducting = quieter plus longer ducting means you can locate the machine further away.

 

Make sure you have the proper air gap between the machine and the ducting. To big or too small will dramatically reduce the life of the smoke.

 

If the smoke is dissapaiting too quickly then you're using the wrong grade of smoke fluid in your machines. It's also important to be using a proper pro grade machine for this task; if it's not at least a 2kw machine then it hasn't got a hope of producing proper theatrical smoke.

 

Thank you, will try again!!

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Are you needing a single, big burst of smoke that lingers as a cloud, or a maintained cloud?

 

If the first... you are kind of out of luck. Burst means pressure. Pressure change = sound. You can increase the dimension of the pipe - which will lower the frequency of the sound (which is generally perceived as lower volume), but you will then need to increase the volume to maintain the same burst effect.

 

A maintained large cloud is a bit easier. Same principal, stepping up to a larger diameter pipe means smaller pressure change at a lower frequency - but you need to balance the pressure required to get the smoke out the duct and aloft.

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Is there no way to duct it to the centre of the stage? I'm thinking some rectangular dado trunking spray painted black fastened to the front of the stage, with a T piece in the centre to push the smoke upwards. You might even get away with one machine then. It seems that the 2 machines from either side is reliant on their "squirt" to get the smoke to the centre. That forceful projection of smoke is also the noisy bit.

 

As somebody above has said, ducting needs to have a gap between it and the machine. When I first started out I made the daft assumption that I wanted maximum smoke to get to the other end of the duct, therefore I needed to seal the gap between the duct and the machine. No surprises the results were pretty poor!

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