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Houselight Control


IRW

  

62 members have voted

  1. 1. Can you control your houselights from the lighting desk?

    • Yes, solely
      13
    • Yes, with a secondary means of control
      31
    • No, but it would be very useful if we did
      16
    • No, and we wouldn't want it
      2


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Hi All,

 

Just doing a bit of research into the common ways people control their houselights! If you answer (4) No, and we wouldn't want it, I'd appreciate it if you could expand on why.

 

Just to clarify, by 'houselights', I mean the ones that will dim up and down for audience to walk into, not working lights that you may do the fitup under.

 

Thanks,

 

Ian

 

 

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We have just what you describe above in that we have 2 sets of dimmable houselights - some mini-PAR lamps which cross the auditorium as a soft wash and then a row of Multi-PARs above each stairway lighting the walk to the seats.

We then have switched LED work-lights which are the day to day cleaners'lights and fitup working light.

 

Other than that I see no reason to have general workers on the show system.

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Solely from the desk, but I'd really like to have a secondary control system. Something that FoH can use for the really simple "talk" type booking, or if LX has gone to sleep at the end of the show.
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Our houselights are currently 75W PAR38 halogen reflectors but we're looking into replacing them with LED.

 

However, in the auditorium they are arranged in two zones, one circuit is the central zone over the middle of the stalls, the other circuit is two stalls side zones and the rake, with auxiliary outlets on stage on the same rake circuit. This means that when we transform into the round or arena the centre of the stalls, which becomes the acting area, can be isolated from the surrounding "ring" which may include extras that get rigged on stage on the aux circuits if there are audience sitting there.

 

The two circuits are under exclusive control of the desk when it is on. When it is off, they are under control off the wall panels. There are separate floods for fit up which are on completely separate circuits and not part of the house light control.

 

EDIT: spelling.

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Solely from the desk, but I'd really like to have a secondary control system. Something that FoH can use for the really simple "talk" type booking, or if LX has gone to sleep at the end of the show.

 

A small standalone DMX desk, and a DMX merge?

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We used to many years ago but in a way that would totally baffle most visiting users. Control was inverted so fader up would dim them down and fader down would put them up full. I think it was so that they could always be switched on by non-technical people even if the desk wasn't powered up.

They're now on a separate pot mounted in a box by the LX desk. The rest of the system isn't clever enough to support any kind of priority / merge / digital control.

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I have a separate system in place from a secondary control board running through an old 12 way Permus rack. The patching for this is on the standard hard patch panels on dedicated sockets with the ability to, if ever needed, have 12 different channels of house lights as we have flexible seating.

 

However I don't use it anymore. The reason being that most lighting designers nowadays want to have the dimming of the house lights to link into and be part of the design of the show and this is more easily achieved with everything coming from the same board to the same dimmers.

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IMO there will be several "best options" largely depending on the (if any) other uses that the venue has. House lights in the desk will satisfy designers who "want control" but not any other hirer who then has to pay for a technician to put the house lights on at the beginning and off at the end.
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Whatever the best way is, the worst way is a mixture of incandescents and LEDs on the same dimmer, as they have totally different dimming characteristics.

 

Actually no, that's not the worst way; the other venue I use has dimmable incandescents for most of the house, and then a row of LED downlighters under the balcony, which don't dim, they just go off when the majority of houselights have got to about 2%. Its even worse fading up, dark, very dim glow, then bang! all the downlighters come on full pelt...

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Our house lights are controlled from the consoles, and also from an standalone analogue 2-way controller, on a HTP basis. Plus they're also switched by relays controlled by regular-looking light switches behind a closed cover.. Overnight we leave the analogue controller faders up and the cleaners turn them on and off via the light switches.

 

It also means I can program them into cues, but leave the house lights up at 30% on the analogue controller during rehearsals without worrying about recording them into cues.

 

The only downside is if you forget to turn the analogue controller down at showtime.

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MY old venue had everything on control .

workers and main houselights were DMXed, with points in patch boxes (these included 25/50/75% house) +in the box, AND then on the desk as well . With a "night mode" that turned workers to houselights and then after 5 mins dimmed to 0.

 

The pain was it was in a system that was too clever + didnt get given access by installers for things like editing night mode, and faking that 80% was 100% to save lamp life.

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we have Chille dimmers with several identical remote control panels with presets.

 

use fluorescents as workers/birdies at a couple of settings/

 

off and on with birdies is a fade preset.

 

operated from the box or floor

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We have Mode Lighting dimmers and wall panels to control our house lights.

I think these are the Tiger series but am not totally sure.

 

The wall panels have programmable scenes (although I recall it being fairly complex to program) and there is also switches near the doors for a walkthrough state. When we send a DMX signal to the dimmer it disables the wall panels and walkthrough switches.

 

 

Tim

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