ojc123

Some people detest them, but a Behringer LC2412 does provide 12 channels of 0-10V analogue out on a 15 pin D connector.

Useless for the OP as a) he needs PLUS 10v for his racks and b) his budget is around £20 so unless he can get a second hand desk for that.............

The LC 2412 does 0-+10V according to the manual. However, making a connector is time consuming, and would probably push towards £20 in parts and cable unless they were lying around.

Your call but Demux on ebay at £30? We have had one of these for years and it's worked perfectly apart from needing to replace a smoothing capacitor in 2015. That and MagicQ on a £10 dongle and you're off.

Not all cctv cameras take that long to swap. We use a cheap one from cpc which swaps in a lot less than eight seconds. We have eight of them covering the stage, wings and FoH areas. They're adequate for our purposes.

Whether the image is good enough for your purposes, I can't say. However, it may be worth investigating some other CCTV cameras before ruling them out altogether.

Link to Horth Halifax Grammar School Vacancies page.

This is my job because I'm retiring. As usual, it's not as grand as it sounds. Most evening work is scheduled well in advance so it's possibly compatible with other work and/or family life. If anyone wants to ask me about it then DM me.

We're just on our way back from this show. They got ten seconds into the second half of part two. The music stopped. After a while, the lights returned to the first state in the second half. A while later they got as far again then cancelled the show.

Has anyone heard anything or able to say anything about what happened?

This is really horrifying - and whilst we in the Industry allow ourselves a smile at the gross design incompetence, the reality is that these things will be used in homes and small halls for kids parties and similar events, due to the very low cost of buying it.

 

Trading Standards Officials must be made aware of this product and UK supplier - and I appreciate that there will be many other similar dodgy items for sale - but this seems so dangerous and lives could easily be lost.

I picked up on a £7 ebay disco light with a counterfeit plug and fuse at a child's party recently. It is scary that this can be happening. It's not so easy to get people to take notice.

You only have to look at what other items the seller has to gauge the level of support available in the event of a problem.

That which has been seen cannot be unseen!

tape insulting one inch,

Where can I get this insulting tape? Sounds like something I'd use quite a lot.

Ive. Found the opposite is true. An amateur youth drama group were forever popping tweeters and I lent them an old pair of single 12" cabs with no hf units.Schools and powered speaker have always been a recipe for disaster, especially if it's a portable system.

I can see that would work in a different way. If there isn't a tweeter to pop then that solves the problem. I haven't found the powered speaker to be a "recipe for disaster" but everyone has different experiences.

Edit to remove duplication.

Many years ago we had this problem in school. As has been said above, the best answer is to get better speakers. For a while I had a stock of cheap horns from ebay and just regarded them as disposable. In fact my first visit to the Blue Room in 2005 was to find out what to do about a broken HF unit.

My argument with the bean counters was that replacing the horns every month or two in parts and (my) labour was soon going to cost more than getting more reliable speakers.

I've found powered speakers less prone to this possibly because they're more matched up speaker to amplifier and/or they power on and off more effectively? We've had a pair of these for about ten years and they put up with all kinds of abuse.(Other makes and suppliers are available.)

https://cpc.farnell.com/pulse/pls00550/ground-loop-isolator-3-5mm-to/dp/AV25544

I think I'll be having a couple of these! Thanks.

E2A And a couple of these too. My link

Following my post above, it occurs to me that it might not be impossible to take the power from the head like we did. More difficult would be getting the video signal out. The video cable needs to follow the same path as the existing cables so it doesn't get caught up and twisted. That might prove to be rather complex. I wouldn't go near trying it on a decent fixture.

I'm no expert but I'd imagine that wifi cameras would be a bit laggy for followspotting.

From our experience with our moving camera, it's quite disorientating watching the action through the camera while controlling it. We tended to point it at something, project, swap projection to a different camera, move our moving camera to point at something else and then swap projection back to it. In the end we just had some preset positions set up as execs in MagicQ.

In other news, we had some success using a Showtec Phantom 50 as a follow spot by controlling it with a games controller over ArtNet with MagicQ. The sensitivity can be changed and teenagers are remarkably adept at using the controllers. It worked tolerably well when the subject of the follow spot wasn't overly vigorous.

Both of these were largely projects for the students to explore ideas and we used them once or twice in small shows just so they could say they had done it. Neither resulted in professional quality results.

Not sure if this is what you mean but we had something like this. It got dropped and the light source stopped working.

At that price it wasn't worth bothering about so a couple of the students made it a project. They stripped out the light source and optics. They trimmed back the casing and tidied it up. They used the 12v supply for the LED to power a cheap CCTV camera. They used silicone to attach the camera to the mounting plate. They also attached a counterweight to balance the extra weight of the camera otherwise it was a bit jerky. There were spare wires from the LED which they used to attach the output from the camera to a trailing RCA socket. It worked for a couple of years until the DMX board gave up the ghost fairly recently so we disposed of it.

One of them arranged it so that it could be controlled by a games controller using MagicQ over Artnet. I don't know how he did that, I just left him to it.

They used it occasionally above the stage for a live feed to projectors showing odd angles. It wasn't great quality but the lads learned a lot from doing it.

I consulted Big Clive before they started and his master hacking advice was much appreciated.

I've no particular expertise in this area. I've looked around and I'm a little overwhelmed by the range of kit on offer from £2.99 to £299.

Can someone please recommend a slightly more robust CAT5/6 cable tester? We've had a couple of variations on this kind of thing but they haven't lasted well. We're basically only checking continuity so we don't need lots of functions but we do need reliability.

Thanks in advance.

We used these in black a few years ago along with the spray. Cheap and cheerful. You can always get one and try it.

We trained the actors not to spray the serge drapes on pain of death or worse. It doesn't come off so easily once it dries.

We just didn't have cars.

It's horses for courses but my approach has been that the talent needs to see the conductor bang on time so analogue is the way to go.

We're doing school shows with the screen showing the conductor 15m from the front of the stage. We use a dome camera, a cheap video amplifier/distributor and a 32 inch screen. Never been any problem for the last four years. Talent can always see the conductor and zero latency. Whole lot for about £200 including cables.

E2A We also send a show relay to various outputs using the same kit. Nobody needs any more than to see what's going on at the time and to see what's going on in the dark.

My £0.02 FWIW.

I've seen hundreds of school shows and cannot remember one where followspots added anything to what I saw.

Following my post above where I've said how we've done it, I've only used followspots twice in the last thirty years for school shows, both were occasions where a new director insisted and I provided the equipment and training. On both occasions they agreed in retrospect that the show would have been better without. I think followspots are awful if not used properly. My first line of argument in this case would be to try to get the director to abandon them.