pscandrett

I didn't believe the outcome would be any different, depressingly, but I did have a vain hope that the transition period might be used as a, you know, transition period. We had four years to negotiate, agree and then implement/transition (and that four years didn't have to start when it did, either). As it happened we had nearly four years of faffing and fighting and everything but, leaving us with less than ten days to ratify, implement and live with the consequences (despite being told to 'get ready' for months beforehand by adverts). After the 'whole thing', it's /that/ that I'm angry about. Sorry, politics.

The AC Lighting show in Leeds is normally pretty good - a chance to interact with the companies as an individual rather than having to represent a business to have more than 2 minutes, a good range of seminars and a good opportunitiy to bump into people you've not seen for ages! Edit: Oops, it is of course now PLASA North and has been for a few years now! My point still stands though.

Thanks to both of you.

Yep - that was the guy who was posting answers on that forum and also a grid plan (technician p0rn for the youngsters). Well, I'm not young any more(!) but I'd be interested in seeing it - but I can't find it on any of the groups I'm a member of (and the FB search is terrible). Can you give me a link to it please? Which group was it? Thanks!

Also, if you want to get really nerdy, there's a definite acceleration and deceleration curve to think about - with large tabs coming in, it can take quite a bit of oomph to get them going and similar effort to slow them down to hit the deck without a bounce, so a straight go/stop on a motor isn't going to look realistic at all. You can probably model this mechanically with a non-cylindrical axle on your motor, or programmatically with a stepper motor, or no doubt there's an analogue equivalent too.

Since we've drifted onto photographic stuff... does anyone know where I can borrow/hire an APS scanner from? Companies will happily scan my (already processed) APS film but at really quite high prices. I have a few dozen of them from the late 90s when I was using an APS camera, and I have the prints; it'd be great to digitise them, though, and I thought it'd be best to scan the negatives. As far as I can tell the hardware is pricey... but so is scanning them all commercially.

Yeah, sorry, I mentioned that in passing really; it was a great radar system too. You link to Tom Scott's video - the accompanying mostly head-cam footage ('behind the scenes') is worth a watch, too, now that it's gone...

Someone's done a ten minute analysis in slow-mo explaining what failed and in what order, which gives some insight into what happened in those few seconds.

You understand I am trying to find a simple analogy I can grasp. Your organ thing... I'm not sure how close that is as resonance isn't quite the same as interference. Interferometers are normally used to measure small distances or disturbances (see wikipedia) The Michelson-Morley experiment tried to use this to study the speed of and nature of light. The best analogy without talking about frequencies I can think of off the top of my head is when you look through lots of lenses in a kaleidoscope - each lens gives you an bit of the image, but taken together you can see a bit more of it if you put all the images together. It's a really bad analogy but it sort of works. The interferometry is the method of taking each lens's image and sticking them all together. (Don't forget that a radio telescope doesn't give an 'image' in itself - it's basically just looking at a pixel on the sky, and gives a value of brightness, so you need to scan the sky anyway to get any sort of detail or structure.) This ESO page goes into it a little more, and uses the example of water waves interfering. This phys.org article explains it a bit too, pointing out that it's all to do with the path being slightly different between two telescopes, so it takes the signal slightly longer to reach one than another - and by combining it together carefully you can deduce more about the source. I fear the mods if I write more as we're not talking about anything to do with stage stuff, even tenuously, now!

The great thing about aperture synthesis using interferometry is that you get much higher resolutions that would be physically impossible otherwise (ie it's the size of the aperture - or essentially how far apart all the dishes are - that give you greater resolution). This can be then taken to the next level synthesising apertures the size of the Earth. One disadvantage is that the EM waves being detected by any telescope are /tiny/, and so a larger collecting area (and/or longer observation period) is vital to actually collect any signal at all. Interferometers are therefore good for looking at 'bright' things that you want to study in finer detail; large dishes are good for seeing fainter signals. (The unit used in radio astronomy for flux density is called the Jansky, and is of the order 10^-26 IIRC - W/m^2/Hz I think - which gives an idea of how tiny the signals are.) For this, a 300m Arecibo was great (but not moveable). But yes, the practicality of building lots of smaller dishes beats building movable large dishes hands down. I think the Lovell and other large telescopes that move have to account for hte shape of the dish changing under gravity, particularly when dealing with very short wavelengths/high frequencies, for example, and they're not terribly nimble. Did you see all the correlators and signals coming in from MERLIN when working at Jodrell? I always found that fascinating; all the signals needed to be 'lined up' so the signals are analysed at precisely the same time. Since the update to eMERLIN the amount of data has increased - but then again so has the processing power got better over the past 50 years! I have a soft spot for Jodrell Bank. As an undergraduate we did one of our lab experiments using the 7m telescope on site; others got to use the 42ft and, on one occasion when the 42ft was out of action, some students used the Lovell itself for their lab! The 7m we used wasn't originally built as a telescope - it was first installed on a missile range in Australia. Dragging it back on topic a little - when it snows, they have to tip the dish of the Lovell telescope as it sort of fills up otherwise and puts extra weight on everything... and wind is a major enemy, too.

They're possibly not a problem due to the frequencies radio astronomers observe at and perhaps appearing 'invisible' due to their proximity to the apertures. Moreover, Arecibo, because it had a spherical dish rather than parabolic (as well as its massive size) was also used for /transmissions/ - using it as a radar system to analyse planets and other objects in the solar system. Also, by using red/blue shift (ie doppler) it could work out how fast things were moving to a fairly high precision and accuracy. Handy if there's an asteroid heading our way. It's been a while since I've done the physics of all this; it is true that Jodrell Bank has also been used for transmissions (bouncing signals off the moon, for example, and intercepting early transmissions of pictures taken by Russian probes). It was also used for tracking things like Sputnik as well as more nefarious things like possible missiles in the cold war, which helped with funding to get the thing built, so other instruments might be able to do this too. It's just that the /size/ of Arecibo was so large, with a huge collecting area; 300m diameter (compared to the Lovell at Jodrell at 76m, for example). Even if there's the want to replace it, the funding just won't be there (unless someone can again tap into a defence budget somewhere). Scientific programmes are constantly under financial pressure and although Arecibo produced loads of great science, I suspect the case isn't there for building a replacement when other telescopes like Greenbank and Jodrell (itself 60+ years old) are still going strong - particularly as they're used together on things like VLBI, eMERLIN and other collaborations. </off topic>

You might have some luck with OBS squirting its output into zoom (potentially as another user) using a virtual webcam/video source. I've not done it, but have been told it's fairly straightforward. It means then that the playback of things (in OBS) is indepdendent of zoom capturing things. You might even be able to get VLC to do this too?

Just idly exploring the web on this topic - so I've not used this! - but Thomann have this two-universe Stairville unit for under £200. https://www.thomann.de/gb/stairville_replay_show.htm Is this the sort of thing you're after? Artnet/dual DMX in, dual DMX out...? I was sort of presuming that you'd checked Thomann (probably the first place to look with your budget, not that that's bad!) - but if you haven't, they have other promising looking products here: https://www.thomann.de/gb/dmx_recorder.html Looks like Chauvet do a single universe version (DMX-RT) for under a hundred pounds, too, so that might be a solution to explore also. Hope that helps.

It looks very similar to the battery iron I bought recently - a Sealey one for three times the price... Sealey SDL7 Looking at the specs it doesn't look that different. I do wonder if its the same manufacturer.

If the 500s are like the old 250s then you're right, the drivers do sometimes go; however, they're socketed so you could try swapping them around (3775s, IIRC?) to see if faults move around. If none of them are working then yeah, new ones are the way to to go to try; I think the other effects (colour wheel, gobo etc) drivers are different drivers? In the past IIRC I also cross-swapped pan and tilt looms (after boot) which helped narrow down where the fault was - it could well be the loom with a break in it somewhere, too, as they're quite fragile (and the 500s are old units). Do ANY of the pans or tilts work on any units? Re the lamp relay getting stuck - I was taught them getting stuck sometimes means they don't strike, not the other way round, but it /could/ be that, I suppose. The recommended solution for that was a short strike with a screwdriver handle to the relay to try to loosen it. (Do this while the unit's off!). To check that it is the relay, perhaps turn auto-strike OFF on that fixture - and if it still strikes, it seems like a good things to focus on. PS You mention oiling. Be careful oiling things that definitely don't need it!

If one end is moving, can you do a 'local hop' to a nearby basestation and from there 'up'link it using the highly directional antennae? (Or whichever way round it is). You then have a solid long-distance link and you can just cover the performance area in what you might call 'standard' coverage to account for the movements.

Collection from where, please?

Browsing around the subject I found this marketing article: https://www.efixx.co.uk/Articles/new-cable-simplifies-ev-charger-installation talking about data and power for electric vehicles. The article says 'EV ultra' is made in Doncaster (at http://www.doncastercables.com/cables/17/77/EV-Ultra/Power-and-data-connectivity-combined-in-one-cable/ ) so you might have some luck sourcing it, or something similar, in the UK at sensible lengths...? Edit: 4 quid/metre from toolstation (code 56272). Pricey, but it might be a start. Edit2: Sorry, that's a single twisted pair version, but they do a cat5 version too. I'll stop editing now!

One company I work for has stacking 'trays' and matching wheelboards; the trays take 12-16-24 legs (appropriately sized trays per leg size) and for a job you take as many trays as you need, stack them up, wheel them off and away you go. It seems like a pragmatic solution and means you don't double handle them (you can count by seeing there's a full box) and you don't send out more than is on the prep sheet. It also has the benefit of allowing you to easily check to see if you've got all the legs while on site, so you don't leave any behind. Another company I do stuff for seems to go for the 'chuck them in a flightcase' approach which I'm less keen on - it just isn't as user-friendly. I don't favour bags for legs (or indeed tripods/stands, but that's a personal preference) because it means you have to lift them everywhere!

Asking for interest, through ignorance, and it's probably irrelevant to this discussion, but... is it possible to do a 'popup' low powered DAB MUX for this sort of thing, so you can indeed broadcast to the DAB radios in the viscinity?

Because just because you can doesn't necessarily mean that you're allowed to or should...?

Do you know if you have to be an ABTT member to watch? I'm not one, but there's some things there I wouldn't mind seeing.

It's a capable desk, and I reckon it's fine for permanent installs of churches and small venues. On paper it's got lots of good features - in practice I still think some of those still aren't quite there, but they're improving. Coming from more powerful desks I find it's often quite frustrating to use, but recalibrating my expectations and trying to be rational it's actually pretty good for what it is. Churches who use similar states or effects most Sundays will find it great, for example, and I suspect a small venue like yours will also fall into this category. My opinions on it have somewhat been coloured by me fighting loads of bugs in early software releases, particularly using 'theatre mode' when dealing with large cue stacks - above about 50 cues it kept crashing during programming. However, most (though not all) of those bugs seem to have been ironed out. There's loads of little niggles with it - for example, you can't copy cues, and rearranging cues is a bit of a faff - but as you point out, its featureset is otherwise quite impressive for the price point. It doesn't do tracking, but IIRC it /does/ do basic automove while dark, which I was pleasantly surprised by. Artnet out is also a bonus. Don't expect seasoned lighting engineers to get on with it straightaway - although that might be something that's appropriate to say about many smaller desks and not /specifically/ the QuickQ. That said, there are benefits to it being part of the Chamsys range as the showfiles are broadly compatible, which can be useful, but it can also lead to frustration ("but why doesn't it do this?"!). IME things like the default colour palettes often bear little resemblance to what comes out of your actual LED lights (even Chauvet ones) but you can work around that and define your own common palettes if it's an issue. I've never really got on with it for busking - but then for bigger shows I've normally got a bigger desk available (TBH Avo, but also Chamsys) so I've not spent ages getting to grips with it for gigs. I did supervise a show that I programmed at high speed just before the virus hit where I programmed a load of scenes as subs for some teenagers to operate - they seemed to like it (for the time they used it for) so perhaps it's just me being an old fogey! The remote app (I run it on a tablet) is useful as a riggers' remote, but that's all I use it for (again, perhaps coloured by my first experience when the tablet and desk got horribly out of sync and fell over on me). I'd really recommend getting your hands on a desk and playing with your fixtures in the space for a day or two - I mean, that's good practice anyway. Had you asked me a year ago to recommend it, I'd have said definitely not; having used it more recently for some succesful shows (one with 120+ cues in it) I'm more likely to say yes, it's alright :-) Full disclosure: I know James (above) and work with him a fair bit, and our experience of the QuickQ 20 has been through using it with/for the same company, as freelancers. We can recommend that company to supply it if you need it (though you're in the US? We're UK based) if you wish.

Crewcover is one standard answer, which comes with PSA membership. I've been with them for some years now, and have been happy. The PSA membership is reassuring in times like this, and I've used their business support line a couple of times too. The policy is designed around the industry but a bit 'one size fits all'. If it's appropriate for you, great. https://www.crewcover.com/ HTH

I can't see it on the list of .hed files that Chamsys have (and nor is it showing up in my version of QuickQ Designer); you can request one to be created for you here: Ask for a new head file Hope that helps.