alistermorton

I think we have a pair of 49s too.

The only preludes of ours that drooped were indeed the 16/30 variant.

OK, that's worth looking for; thanks, Brian. It's also not to outputting anything, so I'm wondering if there's a single chip that handles input and output.

We have a Win 7 Ion classic which serves us well. We use it connected to a Mac via midi to interact with Qlab. We could use OSC, but midi has always been more reliable for us (we've had dropped go commands over osc). The midi ports appear to have died. We've tried to get it booked in to our disti for troubleshooting, but they have a 6 week lead time on the workshop, so we were wondering if it was likely to be a simple chip replacement we could look at doing ourselves. Does anyone know if the midi circuitry on the expansion card has an easily replaceble device, or even if there are spares inside. There appear to be spare drivers for the DMX ports, so we were kind of hopeful. Thanks.

Don't know if this is any help, but much of the circuitry is similar to the GSX/LBX consoles MX technical manual

Ah - when our GSX has been allowed to discharge it usually won't power up properly after charging, displaying all manner of checksum errors and using the (admittedly very small and hard to spot) white button is the only way to progress. It's a shame if there isn't something similar on the MX.

I'm not sure with the MX-48, but the GSX and LBX had a small white button on the front edge of the motherboard which you hold in during power up to do a full factory reset.

Yes .. sorry, bit of an old online joke. Members of AOL were somewhat prone to piling on to requests for stuff with "Me too, I'd like this", AOL became shorthand for "Me too". Don't worry, it had been a long day, and I'm interested in the COBs too.

AOL!

Nuneaton isn't really convenient for Caterham, I guess. I do know the Pageants still lit up last time they were tried, and as far as I recall they still have big ol' bubbles in them.

Got a couple of pageants that might look sort of right, even though wrong era.

Bowens heads still go for "proper" money, as do most of the other major flash manufacturers. Recycle time can be rather less than 10 seconds (by turning down the power), but yes, not as fast as a stage strobe.

We were surprised by how effective just using LED fresnels with the curve set to immediate was. We have an atomic too, but for the effect we wanted we felt it was not directional enough, and just a couple of flash buttons on two of the fressies worked a treat.

Done it - our projector has black as one of the screen colour options.

Bummer of a job, though.

Something like this perhaps?

Now that's how it's done.

The non smooth dimming is down to the relative difference in brightness from one step to another. When you move the fader, it changes from 0 through to 255 in steps of 1. At the bottom end, the difference between successive steps is relatively larger than the difference between steps at the top. Low end LED fixtures reproduce this faithfully, so you see each step. Halogen lamps have thermal inertia, so they ramp between the levels, so they fade smoothly., Better LED fixtures use more intelligent electronics to move more smoothly between levels. So if you have budget fixtures with no inbuilt smoothing they're going to look as steppy on a MA as they will on a Scene Setter.

Thanks, @Tomo, that's useful to know.

That's a whole different skill to learn. If your venue is supplying the operators, and they are (and can demonstrate they are) highly competent, enough to rival a "hands on" spot op you might get acceptance, but I'd still expect scepticism.

It's a project that came out of ETC; based on an arduino, it adds a couple of encoders, a display and some buttons, and it was originally intended to be used with Nomad setups. It has since been extended by various developers to add more encoders. It works with Nomad and eos consoles such as Ion, Gio, Element2 and so on. I have no idea whether it would work with a colorsource console, though.

We have some MP75 fresnels and they're OK, about equivalent to a minim. The "tungsten" curve smooths the dimming quite well. There is a 180W fresnel from elumen8 which is about 750 quid a pop which we intend to investigate at some point. It's RGBALC apparently See here might be worth a look. For control you really want something that does 'fixtures' rather than ' channels' which takes you into conventional consoles or console software on a computer with some sort of wing.

Would a lighthack work with a ColorSource 20?

It's a combination where if you buy a "main" (usually a sandwich or pasta salad), a "snack" (usually potato crisps or similar) and a drink, all from a specified restricted selection, you get them for a discounted price. The savings over buying the items individualy vary, but it can halve the cost of the purchase.

Hi. If you're looking for that foggy graveyard effect, maybe you should be looking at low foggers, in the style of the venerable pea souper or glaciator. These use either dry ice directly to create the "smoke" or a chiller to cause dense fog to remain low lying. I'd be looking at hiring rather than buying, and there are plenty of options from the various manufacturrers, it's more a matter of what's available in your area. Speak to a proper, professional stage equipment hire company about low lying foggers. You don't say quite how big the stage is, but you will be quite surprised at the speed and volume of fog generation from a professional unit.