alistermorton

Certainly having a part intended to fail under fault conditions and not make spare ones available shrikes me as conceptually the same as expecting users to replace an appliance if the fuse blows. 

What's the rating of the lamp? 

Out of interest, David, what sort of latency do you get? The guy in the states reckoned about 1/2 a second.

It's one of those "It depends" questions. Depending on the colours, you may find different fixtures are close enough, but not always. To take an extreme example, there's no way that a budget "bowl of M&Ms" RGB par can will match say a colorsource PAR on very much at all, let alone subtle shades like gold tints, pale blues, straws, pinks, even whites will look off. But it's entirely possible that, especially at the less expensive end of the market, different manufacturers will have bought in the same emitters and just packaged them differently (sometimes even just bought in entire fixtures and badged them) so they'll be close. 

I've seen one guy (on controlbooth) who uses a local mumble server for his talkback system and is really happy with it, but even on a quiet local network he still gets 1/2 a second latency, which can matter for cueing, especially, as Tim says, when you're in the same room as someone, it's really off putting.

It's not entirely unheard of for self terminating fixtures to stop terminating because the little switch in the thru socket that switched the terminator in to circuit has failed. 

10 hours ago, bm794 said:

Huh, I always thought that was the other way around (DMX cable unsuitable for audio). As you say though, I've never had any problems in my small deployments. 

It's one of those "it will work, until it doesn't" situations. You can send DMX down 3-core mains cable and it will probably work (but it might not) most of the time, but it's one of those why tempt fate scenarios. Always use correctly wired DMX spec cable for DMX (regardless of whether it's 3 pin or 5 pin XLRs on the end) and always terminate each run and you've reduced the failure modes.

You'll find plenty of "experts" on Farcebook who will tell you that in 50 years in the industry they've never used a terminator ever on the biggest shows going, terminators are never needed, indeed that "it's a scam" (yeah, right) but they're just wrong.

If thee pump works with external power, but not when controlled by the board suggests maybe the triac controlling it, or whatever is controlling the triac, has failed. That would be my relatively uneducated guess. Triac swap should be relatively cheap and easy.

Also do you want a profile, a fresnel or a PAR equivalent? 

I doubt you'll get a decent white, warm or cold, from a plain RGB fixture, but add in lime/mint or WW +CW and things get better. We use ETC colorsource which are RGBL and they make a decent fist of whites - not perfect, but good. 

These adapters work fine (for limited values of fine) with software that is designed to use them, such as freestyler or qlc+ for example. Where specific hardware is called for you're sunk. Thus they don't work with, for example, Qlab, which needs the processing of things like enttec Pro or dmxKing Pro, or magicQ. If vista needs specific hardware, which seems to be the case judging by the website, drivers aren't going to help with this adapter. 

Is it on the the list of compatible devices?  You may need a device with processing like an enttec Pro, rather than a simple device that relies on the cpu to keep refreshing it. The Web site says that the vista dongle is compatible, for example. 

Edit: from the website "Please note: Vista by Chroma-Q only supports proprietary USB to DMX devices."

These days you can get LED that looks remarkably like incandescent. They're not cheap, but they needn't be eye wateringly expensive - we use some elumen8 ww fresnels as rehearsal lights. About 300 a unit, roughly comparable with a patt123/quartet in o/w, and some you can program to be a single colour and just use 1 channel (so a bit liked gelled conventionals), but that seems a waste. 

Also a nice looking place.

A nomad setup can really use at least a bunch of faders if not a full wing. There are ways to make inexpensive MIDI faders work with nomad. 

That said, I often do whole shows now without anything on the faders on our Ion. Sometimes a fogger or hazer. The only thing permanently on a fader is the house lights. It's just a different way of working, especially with an LED rig. Others in our group still use subs faders.  

Great looking theatre space- hope it comes together for you. 

It's not a file from Linux Show Player, is it? Gzip tends to be used on linux/unix based systems in preference to zip or 7zip.

Looks remarkably like this from ALPS which is 11m square and 28.8 mm high (close enough for jazz?).

Edit: Ah, Bruce posted as I pressed the save button.

Well, life's a gas. 

I've seen some of that collection at WL before when they had a little corner in the warehouse. Be good to have a proper look around. 

Ooh, wish I'd had more notice, I'd have booked time off and gone along. 

We've got what I think is a pattern 252+an effect wheel (clouds) in our theatre loft. Really heavy and large to rig. 

You  could just put a halogen fresnel or profile on a dimmer, but you've got heat to consider, plus will the lamps continue to be available?

If you just want some more light to see the presenter, we've used elumen8 MP60 WW fresnels as rehearsal lights and they'd probably work well for that. Can be set up to use a single DMX channel for dimming. Small and neat, zoomable and come with barn doors to control the spill if need be.

I'm guessing low side light as used to illuminate a dancer's legs. Helps to accentuate the movement. See also "shinbusters" - lanterns mounted low down in the wings (where you can smack your shins?).

34 minutes ago, sunray said:

It's a good tip but be aware the flutes of a drill bit are sometimes bigger than the shank, far more so on larger sizes.

Given he was talking about small drill sizes, I think DrV had that one covered, Ray 😉

Thanks for the inspiration, Tom, I've passed this on to the production team. 

In the past we've done the lights under the logs effect, but for this I'm told they want the effect of the flames suddenly leaping from the grate.

It's an interesting idea. I'm not entirely sure how interested Dimplex would be in sponsoring a 10 night run at a ~200 seat amateur theatre, though.