richard

Quite reasonable - about £11 for a 7m length

FYI for future reference I eventually found a UK company that sell long lengths of fire rated tinsel and are very helpful - festive.co.uk - don't have much on their website but are really helpful when you speak to them

Thanks all - that is a very strange video!

Hi All I need to find some long (5m ish) lengths of tinsel in various colours for a set, and ideally it would be fire-proof. I had always niavely assumed that in our safety obsessed culture tinsel would be naturally fire proof but it appears not. I have found one supplier of something that seems ok but they only do 2m lengths I want to avoid trying to flambar other tinsel as I am using it to create a curtain and I think flambar will quickly rub off Thanks! Richard

I have a 520i sitting in central london that worked in 2021 when I last powered it up (had a leaky battery but I cleaned that out and replaced it) If you want it let me know.. Would be nice to give it to a good home

the classic gear was definitely the highlight for me!

Thanks all - your answers pretty much agree with most of what I've been told, although one supplier has told me the "place of supply" only changes to Holland if the hire is a wet hire (in the UK), for dry hires they believe VAT is still payable in the UK. I think the main thing is that the supplier in question won't want to take the risk of HMRC disagreeing with their interpretation and making them re-pay the VAT - and unless we want to pay them for a load of accountancy consultation they probably won't change their mind!

Hello I have a Dutch company bringing a show to our venue in London, they need to hire some stuff locally. They have been given advice by accountants that the UK supplier shouldn't need to charge them VAT on the hire of the kit as they can do a reverse charge into the Dutch system. I've looked on line and I *think* think may be correct, however it isn't clear. The supplier in question is currently saying no - as they aren't aware of how this would work. This is obviously up to the supplier, but it would be good to know if anyone has experience of this and if so anything I can tell to either side to get it resolved happily! Thanks! Richard

Thanks - can i check if these work with w-dmx or some kind of similar wireless DMX thing, I am trying to work out from the supplier if this will do wireless control with anything other than a phone!

Ah interesting - do you have the details of who you got from? I've had mixed results from Alibaba in the past..

Hello I'm on the lookout for some (or decent second hand) new wireless battery uplighters. Don't have a lot of budget and need to get at least 12 - ideally 18, for if possble under £2k. Does anyone know if anything good is out there? The Beamz ones seem cheapest and most prevalent - are they any good? They are for use in a venue and will be used once or twice a week so won't be out on tour or anything Richard

Thanks all - useful information..

Hello My uncle is having an issue in a school where he does some am-dram where the electricians are failing the old Pat 60 floods due to the lack of a grill covering the lamps. His view (which I agree with) is that no grill is required on this type of unit as they are not at risk of exploding (not being halogen) Does anyone know if this is the case and whether there is any documentation around about it? Thanks Richard

I find it frustrating how little importance console manufacturers seem to give to the programmer being able to see the stage - granted these things do appear to do some clever folding which may help, but I still find some benefit to a classic ion where I can put the screens to the side and not have to stand up all the time. In an ideal world they would make some kind of magic arm to hold the screens, allowing them to fold out sideways. Or produce a console of this spec but without the built in touch screens (at the top) at all, which I could see being very popular in a lot of cramped theatre control rooms!

Hi All We should be doing the long awaited update to the site over the next couple of days - this will involve the site going down for a day or so as the data is converted and the DNS etc updated. Hopefully everything will work fine once we are back but do keep us posted with any issues A big thank you to everyone who donated to support the site - it's been great to see how valued the Blue Room still is. That being said if anyone else would like to donate anything please feel free to do so at https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=CQDFW5AYBEJHC - we will have ongoing costs so anyting helps! Also a massive thanks to Bruce who's been an invaluable help getting the technical details of the upgrade sorted out - Thanks Bruce!! Richard

Hi All Thanks to all who have donated so far - it's been great to see how much the site means to people! We could always do with more money though so if anyone else can help out the links are still active! As an update we are currently working with Invision to work out how to get our aged forum upgraded - many thanks to Bruce on all his work on this. I expect we are looking at another week or two before we undertake the actual upgrade, at which point the site will go offline for a period while we perform the actual upgrade and fix the DNS - we hope our downtime won't cause as much chaos as Facebook's! Richard

Thanks to all that have donated already. As well as the "donate" link above I've also created a paypal.me link if useful. If anyone wants to donate another way let me know..

Hi All As you may have noticed the forum software is getting rather old - with this in mind we are planning to migrate the site to the newest verson of IPB and will be transitioning to a hosted service in order to reduce the liklihood of any issues in the future. This should give us a much fresher looking site and reduce the load on the hard working moderators who have been battling to keep things going. This upgrade will come at a cost, and since the site already runs at a loss this cost will come from my pocket - if anyone felt like donating a bit of cash to help keep things going it would be much appreciated - we've had some very kind support in the past and since advertising doesn't pay what it did there isn't much cash coming in otherwise! We have looked at a number of options and this seems like the most sensible - we really don't want to lose the archive of posts as we feel they are an important record of the industry, and sticking with IPB ensures that the database shouldn't get corrupted If anyone has any thoughts please do let me know - hopefully this will keep the site running for another 20 years! Richard

That is a bizarre story - although when I read about the plans initially I was suprised that they seemed to think they could get the place open for only £500k so it always seemed dodgy

But performance of plays to less than 500 persons, before 23:00 is clearly deregulated - and so do not require a license, or a TEN (see gov.uk Which I think is pretty clear.

I would disagree - I usually try to use colour coded cables - especially in patch bays as it makes it much easier to see what's going on (and means that each department can manage their areas of the patch more easily)

It's worth bundling often, but I would expect that the first venue will be when you get the actual levels properly set and tweak timings so usually that will be the version you use going forwards. Another thing to note is it's generally worth allowing a bit more time at your first venue to get the lighting and sound correct, and then always going back to the file from that first venue at each future venue, otehrwise you end up with a very messy file after a few dates.

A few things to be aware of if touring qlab: 1/ I would suggest making a "bundle" of the show after the first venue (through file->bundle) which will give you all the files in one place. Keep this on a usb stick totally separately to your computer (and ideally also on dropbox) so that if you have any issues with your laptop you have a decent backup. For venues who have qlab permanently installed email this through before you arrive and they can get it loaded on their machine 2/ Be really careful of plugging your laptop in with just the stereo jack to venue's mixers, I have more than once heard of people who's sound card has been fried due to the venue having phantom turned on - putting 48v into your laptop's sound card. I would suggest buying a cheap USB sound card or a DI box and connecting through this to protect your machine 3/ If you have live "dips" during the show these can still be programmed into qlab - you can insert cues which simply fade a running cue up or down as required. There are some great tutorials on the figure 53 website Richard

Emergency lighting in the floor is pretty common in some countries (I saw a lot of it in Beijing) and I can see how something like this can work - however I very much doubt that regulatory authorities would agree to an emergency exit signage solution that only gives you directions to the exit when in a certain mode. The reason that emergency exit signage is always on in most venues is so that people know their way out before an emergency..

depends on the show really - for some shows I will often simplify the house rig by having a single channel for my warm/cold front of house, and for the colours overhead - that way irrespective of how many units the venue have they always are patched as one channel and so appear in the right cues etc. Moving lights get more complicated but if you have a show file with sensible presets/palettes in place then you can help yourself, although I'm not sure how advanced the FLX is in its ability to clone fixture or change the type while retaining data