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mac.calder

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    Working in the industry
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    Self Employed / Audio Visual & Services commissioning supervisor BPI Enc
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    AVIXA
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    Michael Ashley Calder

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    http://www.av-create.com
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    Australia
  • Interests
    Lighting, Sound, Video, Automation, Rigging, Flying, Programming

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  1. At that analogue IO count, I would hands down go with Q-Sys - a Core110 with 8in 8out 8flex will meet your needs. Soft-license the additional channels of Dante. In my opinion it is the nicest DSP to work with, with the best troubleshooting tools available (probes, injectors, hover monitor etc). And it is pretty cost competitive with other DSP's in the same ballpark of IO.
  2. Don't know of many movers, but it was fairly popular for discharge studio lighting. The Arri Compact 575 used it, amongst others. GX9.5 based 575's were more popular around that time with the MSR 575/2 (although that may be because my primary exposure was Mac 500/600 and Robe)
  3. In Australia at least, Panasonic is the brand that excels in a quality for price comparison. 12k single chip would probably be okay at controlled lighting levels of a theatre at walk-in - that seems to be the sweet spot at the moment. Rrp that's about AU$28k including a 3.58-5.45 lens. So, competitive bid through an integrator, would be around 25k. If you only need to project at show lighting levels you may be able to drop to about 8k lumens which is about 15k rrp inc lens. Hope that helps.
  4. Not a cheap solution. A front silvered or surface-first mirror is needed. And it needs to be prefect. This is just increasing your throw distance at the cost of and brightness and clarity. Most ultra short throws work exactly this way.
  5. It depends on the quality of your haze, and the quality of your UV. Ideal UV lights are not visible to the human eye - If your UV light, when pointed at a surface, looks dark blue... well... it's going to show up. Combine that with "poor" quality haze (large particle size, white and dense), you are 2 for 2. If you are using a nice, fine haze and a good UV source you should not end up with everyone appearing to be in a cloud of dark purple/blue.
  6. No matter what type of lens, ultra-short throw means you need a still background... The longer the throw, the more forgiving to slight imperfections along the distance plane. To be honest, projection is not the answer in most cases for theatre at small scale. Especially if you only have a meter of throw to play with. That implies you may need to be lighting things in very close proximity to your screen surface. Any direct light spill will seriously wash out almost any projection in the sub 4000 lumen range - especially when 'distributed' over a large surface. Ultrashort throw optics are also woefully inefficient.
  7. I think it depends on lifecyle replacement policy; I'm in a university, our AV lifecycle is 5-7 years and we have about a 2-3% annual budget for maintenance. The closer the median age gets to 7 years, the more that we need to push that higher. That said, we tend to base our budget figure more on past years experience for 'ad hoc' things, and then do project funding where there are troublesome devices we wish to expunge... ie we have a model of lecture capture recorder which is getting to the point where they are now a support burden, older units needing to be reset every week or so - we have 80 of that model left, so next years plan is to replace them all. Our total maintenance, capital works and operating budget (excluding employees) works out to about 25% of the total asset value.
  8. The "thing" is that none of the information that is needed is in any way commercially sensitive, so restricting its access is ridiculous. What? Another venue might copy your risk assessment? Aaaand... it's not a competition. A competing venue might match the same lx desk as you? As if you are not already sharing techs and they have access to that information anyway? Sometimes there is reason not to publicise information ... but this is just gatekeeping for the sake of it.
  9. You can't even get weight limits? That's a BIG red flag... as you can't just eyeball motors and go "Yep, I got x SWL here..." - you pay good money for an engineer to do that stuff... I would also expect at bare minimum a technical specification of the space detailing all those lovely important details, numbers and figures be made available well before even booking the venue... Are they a "proper" venue? or are they a local community hall type thing where you are dealing with the front desk person for the shire council who also takes bookings for all the multipurpose halls etc - and the extent of their event management is usually collecting the 50 quid for the hall hire and pointing out where the tea urn is?
  10. If they require you to follow their policies and procedures, one would think it would be in their best interest to share. I only spent about a year as a tech manager of a receiving house, but my standard "welcome packet" to visiting shows included a 'tick and flick' risk assessment (ie if you tick no to all of these, I am not going to ask to see your RA and pass it by our OH&S committee), a copy of our policies, the venue information and a bunch of other more admin things. I will note - we did not have a boilerplate show risk assessment to share. What we did have was library of safe method work statements relating to a range of common tasks. Basically, if you ticked no to our tick and flick questionnaire, our SWMS should cover you. . If they are a receiving house with no staff and no infrastructure, they may entirely rely on the visiting companies. Is this the right thing to do... no... Can I foresee some venues being run that way... yep.
  11. So there are 2 options that were my go to with churches when I worked install land. Option 1: side by side systems - I'd use something like a QSys DSP - select channels went through the DSP and then were made available via dante to the mixer before any processing - alternatively I would do an isolated split before it enters the DSP. Audio from mixer goes back into the DSP and then to FOH. The general user control was given via touch panel or button panel. Option 2: install a good mixer and recall presets on the mixer via a control system (or via instructions on a laminated A4 sheet) Option 1 is a great user experience, there does tend to be a couple of little things the sound engineer needs to know (ie certain channels have phantom power managed by the DSP etc) Option 2 is when I had a client who (frankly) didn't care about the user experience and wanted maximum control when they were running a service... Because option 2 relied on no one overwriting presets on the desk, or turning it off, or any one of a myriad of other things.
  12. Extended leader screens often suffer really badly from warping and rippling, as the leader and the screen area react differently to temperature. Something to be aware of.
  13. Asm used to make a steel band hoist that was pre asembled on a unistrut-esq beam with 2 attachment points. Jands used to make a derivative here in Australia which we used to use to create large double deploys for screens. It even came with the option of lighting bar with cable management if desired. They may still make it, it's worth a look.
  14. Ooof... catering... The majority of my live career was corporate events in venues where we were contracted as the in-house supplier. Generally I was in large 5* hotels with 600-1000 pax ballrooms. Some times you got good clients who would pay for crew meals - and the crew meals would be a guest mains. Tasty meals, even if we were eating them on our laps at ops 2 hours after being plated because by the time they were served we were 30 minutes into the next bit of formalities. There was however a >30% chance if you were meant to get guest meals that they would decide NOT to serve them for reasons unknown (actually I do know, it's because they either under-catered or decided to feed the serving staff... there was also the time they put all our meals in a crew room and never told us that there WAS a crew room...) The okay times, we might get sandwiches. Usually at a time where no one is hungry (served prior to 3pm rehearsals for example... with a midnight finish). Main problem here is that they would typically make "gourmet" finger-sandwiches with weird combinations (I assume, trying to clear the fridge of leftovers?) ie: no ham, cheese and tomato - more often than not it would be pickled capsicum, camembert and chicken or some other weird choice. The bad times, nadda. 9ish hours from rehearsal to close, no catering - and a groan when we flag someone down dare to ask for a pitcher of water. Sadly this happened more often than not - and there were a few shifts where we would operate for 45mins a man down so that someone could go do a food run.
  15. At the end of the day, design should be born out by the end user stories.... OP says "build an accessible theatre"... which I interpret to read "A theatre, who's intent is to provide a space for people with special needs to demonstrate their capabilities within theatre, a space optimised for those with accessibility issues". Ie: this is not a theatre intended for the 'common man' but rather is being built specifically for a special needs school or community group or similar and by extension the design should be optimised to enable this group to self-manage as much as possible I would approach that brief very differently to how I would approach the brief of "A general use theatre, with a remit to maximise accessibility where possible." In the case of the later I would make sure there is both ramped access and elevator access to the stage, a couple of UAT accessible backstage change rooms, accessible bio box... I might throw in a few additional cue light stations than I normally would as well... and then the usual stuff to make it compliant with building code (including hearing augmentation, appropriate signage and lighting etc).
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