timsabre

Which ones are you using? We've been usin Silent Disco King and they seem good - they're not up to the standard of DT100s but they're ok. They are ch70 though.

I agree, there is really nothing out there at a budget price. It's a shame the chinese type controllers aren't easier to operate, a few minutes messing with the firmware and you could make them so much more user friendly...

I wouldn't recommend the showmaster type controllers for this, at least on the ones I have used you have to press quite a few buttons to get them operating in scene mode. And there are lots of other buttons you could press which would do bad things.

It's an Avo pearl ripoff, slightly modified

You might be better with a blackout and sound effects as Cedd suggested in your other thread on this. You can't run blinders more than a couple of seconds, the audience will find it very uncomfortable.

This is all reminding me of that scene in Naked Gun where he tries to keep people away from the exploding fireworks factory.

Completely agree. This is one of those common theatre situations where you just need to suggest an explosion rather than trying to make it "real".

I do enjoy a good maroon, but it is a very short sharp bang, it sounds nothing like what people recognise as "an explosion". Also it's so loud you lose the attention of the audience for a while as they try to resuscitate the person next to them.

What are you trying to achieve - a realistic explosion look, or something a bit more stylistic to surprise the audience? The nice thing about real blinders is you actually feel heat from them, which you wouldn't get from LEDs. On the other hand they use loads of power which you may not have available. The danger of this is it might look a bit naff if you don't have enough oomph. I am not familiar with the show and how the scene is staged but less might be more, e.g. can you have the "explosion" offstage and shine the blinders across the stage to represent the flash of the explosion. Or maybe do it all in blackout with sound. I have seen a good explosion sequence where they modified the sound after the explosion as if your ears had been damaged - all the HF disappeared and there was a very high pitched tone like ears ringing. It was quite disturbing actually.

That wasn't how factoring worked for us. The invoice was issued instructing the customer to pay the factoring company - it said something like "this debt has been assigned to xxxx factors." On the due date the factoring company paid us the invoice balance (minus their charge) then the debt and the customer was theirs, whatever happened. It was tied in with our bank overdraft facility so they had quite a lot of say in what we could and couldn't do. We had to factor all our invoices. I can't remember what happened about bad payers, if they could make us refuse them as customers.

Must admit I thought the same. Peavey speakers not well known for their controlled dispersion patterns.

I did invoice factoring for a while in my previous business which is pretty much the same as you are describing under a different name. The main disadvantage for me was that they were quite aggressive with my customers - showering them with reminders and then unpleasant threats as soon as they got a day over payment terms. You can no longer control what happens once your invoice is sent. This may or may not be a problem for you depending on the style of your business and type of customers you have - if you deal with big organisations with accounts depts they are probably used to that sort of thing but it is quite intimidating for individuals and smaller groups - you lose the personal touch, if that is your business style. Maybe was just the company we were using and others are different - but as they are there to extract the money on time, probably not.

We stream on YouTube and the stream is about 5sec behind live. Can you describe a bit more how you've set everything up?

OpenLP would make it easy, you can configure a "source" on OBS to be a browser window fed from OpenLP which can be keyed over the camera video within OBS. You can set up a custom output on OpenLP to format the song words into an appropriate place, it doesn't have to be the same as the projector output of OpenLP. So then you would just need to capture the camera. You don't really want to be working in composite these days... HDMI capture is readily available and most consumer camcorders output it. Most pro cameras will output SDI. I am not sure about propresenter though.

Would you need more than 1 capture card at each end? OBS will do it but the laptop might choke. We use OBS at our church for streaming with a blackmagic decklink card for capture, it is a very useful bit of software. You don't say what software you are using for words but if it can output to a web browser, OBS can do the overlay for you. It will replace a lot of aspects of a vision mixer, you can play in stills or videos very easily from files.

The great thing about using a router is having the dhcp server :) A lot of the higher end AP's have DHCP server. We have a few Draytek AP's and they will do DHCP, if you turn it on.

You don't want a router, you want an access point. As Hippy suggests the Ubiquiti products are the gold standard. Draytek are also good. Tplink are cheap but not very reliable.

I think that check is very biased towards HMRC's wish for everyone to be employed...

More confused than before now.

But you would need to be able to place the device at the pivot point of the crane arm. This is unlikely to be possible as the crane's own power feed will already use that point.

But how would you plan to submit the excel file to hmrc?

So coming from the manufacturer side, for Matt's basic moving light without gobos and Stuart's sound desk with no preamps, why do you want to miss these things off - are you hoping it'll be a lot cheaper? The thing with both of these is that manufacturers want to make a product that ticks as many people's boxes as possible, they don't want to be making 10 different products for a bloke who wants gobos but then another wants 5 prisms and someone else needs animation wheels. The extra cost to add these features is not great, an X32 without preamps would be maybe £25 cheaper in parts cost but the extra r&d / production to make a separate product would push the cost back past that again.

How will they know you have used cut and paste though? I have had a letter from HMRC saying that I must register and can no longer use the HMRC website for my next vat return.

We are using a desktop version of quickbooks, but I don't particularly want to have to buy the latest version to get this facility, so the bridging software is looking best for us. I suspect hmrc will only allow this for a transitional period though.

Yes unfortunately. What a waste of everyone's time. I will be using one of the excel "bridging software" solutions where you have your vat100 figures in a spreadsheet, the bridging software submits it to hmrc for you. Basically just like it was before except you have to paste your figures into the spreadsheet rather than typing them ob on the hmrc website. 123efiling.co.uk is looking like a good option at the moment, currently free for 4 vat returns per year.