paulears

For me, HDMI and HDMI converted to SDI is always a punt. Even worse, so many computer monitors are locked to very precise frame rates, and TV's that have HDMI inputs are much better at producing a picture. You grab a camera, it says 1980x1080 and you discover it has SDI out, so grab the blackmagic converter and stuff a short (because they're more reliable than long)HDMI cable in to the monitor, and get a framerate mismatch message, or worse, nothing. You plug a camera with HDMI out into a monitor with HDMI and it doesn't work - maybe 1080i not p, or maybe the length of the HDMI is just a tad too long? I've never found the answer, but it's infuriating.

Over the panto season I made a series of youtube videos, and I picked one to share - somebody asked me what I put in my show reports. Might be interesting to newcomers, and old lags too!

Over the panto season I made a series of youtube videos, and I picked one to share - somebody asked me what I put in my show reports. Might be interesting to newcomers, and lags too!

'Takes' sort of works, but we'd also use clips - but using your example, if I'd recorded them I'd probably describe them as Capture 1 close, capture 1 medium or capture 1 distant, or capture 1 position A etc. Describing them I would be happy with "listening to clip 3, distant perspective" or Clip 14, position 6 ..." Personally, I'd probably use clip or capture almost interchangeably In my head, I'd use 'take' for clips that are re-recorded over and over again - so take 3 would be the third attempt. I have 'capture' more as a good word for a process, so the microphone in the recorder would capture the sound in the room, and stick into a number of audio clips that can be collated and used later? So for me 'capture' would be really a verb? Does that help? Other may well have other terms they'd use. As it's all digital nowadays a file could be a good description, but I don't think I'd use in in your context? 'Takes' sort of works, but we'd also use clips - but using your example, if I'd recorded them I'd probably describe them as Capture 1 close, capture 1 medium or capture 1 distant, or capture 1 position A etc. Describing them I would be happy with "listening to clip 3, distant perspective" or Clip 14, position 6 ..." Personally, I'd probably use clip or capture almost interchangeably In my head, I'd use 'take' for clips that are re-recorded over and over again - so take 3 would be the third attempt. I have 'capture' more as a good word for a process, so the microphone in the recorder would capture the sound in the room, and stick into a number of audio clips that can be collated and used later? So for me 'capture' would be really a verb? Does that help? Other may well have other terms they'd use. As it's all digital nowadays a file could be a good description, but I don't think I'd use in in your context?

None of my expensive or cheap LED gear flickers - a thing of the past really. Garden or workshop floods are hardly that useful for event lighting - but most of those are flicker proof on video now.

None of my expensive or cheap LED gear flickers - a thing of the past really. Garden or workshop floods are hardly that useful for event lighting - but most of those are flicker proof on video now.

I guess a Lee swatchbook and thumb through or an RGB LED and white screen and experiment.

Yep - get the other things, but such a shame that theatre is one of the three most impossible areas for young people to work in. I even tried to enable it for a university student, and discovered that while old enough to be outside the Childrens Act blanket ban, the insurance in place did know about the legal issue and had determined that any student required serious paperwork with responsible persons having to supervise and sign off - and I could not, as a visitor too, be that person. Clearly theatres are far too risky places, full of iniquity and danger.

Pantone Reflex Blue seems to be the colour, but apparently this is very difficult to match to both RGB LED or Gel colours as it's one of those colours that isn't quite what is seems and attempts to create it only get close. Just one of the colours that works as subtractive in reflection, but doesn't work by illumination. Like Lee 126 violet - where to the eye the colour of the gel is obvious but when you look through it red and yellow get sort of reversed. I suspect it will be a torch and swatch book - because the look up calculators fail on this one - producing a purple that is not in the flag version.

Sadly, this will probably be a non-starter in any theatre who know the law. There are three places where it is illegal for people in school, so up to 16, to work. Abatoirs - I get this one Nightclubs - this too really, but Theatres. My local theatre were approached by the council for a work experience placement. I mentioned the law, they laughed and said don't worry - but then in five minutes, discovered it was accurate. It even applies to amateur theatre - unless chaperones and licences are done. Of course you might find somewhere where they don't know ....... but what if there's an accident? TV is OK, but theatres are on th naughty list.

Having seen a few, the real killer is toppling - the audiences are very excitable - so anything tall has to be stopped from falling over. It's not cheap to do this properly and safely. The simplest and most stable one I saw was 4 lengths of ladder truss - the two chord stuff that was a square about a metre bigger than the ring on all sides - suspended on 4 wind up stands. They hung lights, then four people wound it up and it seemed pretty stable and solid.

That sounds a bit like sales blurb Steve, they're not exactly cheap!

No, the wrap is simply to get enough friction - if the cable is now a bit short. a few less turns will be fine. The killer is always that you must work out where the travel starts, and of course no joins at the winch end during the travel. What usually happens is you run out of good cable and discover you can only open partially. They're just fiddly.

Madscans! I'd forgotten about them. The plastic covers I managed to break on all of them, but they did the job and were not bad really. I asked a friend about manufacturing. He's an engineer in a non-theatre/events field and he looked at that video and told me that that is perfectly acceptable engineering in the non-mass produced assembly style. He said that jigs really do not have to be ultra sophisticated. All they need to do is be precise enough for the job in hand. Location setting and angles being common. He said he looks for different things when assessing manufacturing. It's the removal of manual tools for mechanical ones. So you have screwdrivers and spanners replaced with at the first level, rechargeable power tools, then the next step is air operated tooling. Tools that are quick and efficient but are not limited to single processes. You can make a simple jig that is automated, quick and requires minimal operator skill - but you then need people to fix them, and when they fail, everything stops. The manufacturing processes are quite straightforward, but if you are going to make a batch of 200 units, that is very different from 20000 - if you want 2000, that's a difficult one. Spend a lot and hope you eventually need 20000, or just continue the 200 system. I guess we all see the Chinese equipment continually change. we complain that after 3 months the DMX attributes may have changed or the 3 facet prism is a 5 facet prism. That is just their product evolution. These things won't ever be mass produced. It's a bit like loudspeaker production - you could automate so much, but slapping sheets onto CNC machines manually, and then assembling by hand seems the way they still do that. People with filler and sanders.

Hi - this is a common request, but the answer always depends on what you already have? Don't forget we're mostly European/UK, so while we do have members in the US, our answers have a bit of bias. In schools here your budget would be blocked by two things - The supply of old fashioned lamps is drying up and increasing in price. Most pro theatre, events and even schools think buying old incandescent kit is foolhardy. Your school are crazy to spend money on equipment with very limited life. Electricity costs and the green lobby mean that old kit is being sold at dirt cheap prices- just look on ebay. LED is the only way, and it is expensive. Even Chinese LED is hardly cheap. Questions - do you need to be able to project gobos and have hard edges? If not, then tight zoom LEDs are much cheaper - and you can get Chinese ones for your budget - just. 6 fixtures is not a great deal of choice, but you have too little for Source 4 LED (or even Chinese versions) so even though you have a grand, that's not a huge amount of money. Worse - as a student, it means you will blow the budget on what next year's students will see as a waste. It's nice they've trusted you with a budget, but you cannot buy what you need, so face the unhappy condition of blowing it on a compromise - effectively perhaps wasting it. Give the money back to a member of staff who's job includes making these decisions. It's really dreadful they've put the responsibility on a student. It always backfires. Comments down the line will be "we trusted in-sanity, and they blew the budget on junk" - when somebody next year needs 7 people to be lit, or your choice won't go wide enough, or the amazing deal on a job lot of source 4s needs $500 for new lamps and there is no money. Giving students real money to spend is ALWAYS bad news for the student. Duck out, and tell them you cannot get a good deal that will do what they want.

I had lots of messages before I did the last one, saying please share what went wrong - then ironically a reply yesterday saying he actually came to the show and it was good - when it was the most stressful so far - ASM off, and one of the Flawless dancers pulled a muscle - so frantic re-arranging to sort that, and of course I had to cover the ASM stuff - including one line where it said "put on costume and make a dick oif yourself on stage" - as in snowmen! We have a flying scooter that flys out into the audience and while being very happy with how her controls work, it occured to me I didn't have a clue where a couple of things happen and worse, discovered the controller is variable speed, and I'd never given that any thought - so some handing off of critical stuff. You might well be the boss, but part is recognising when you just cannot do it as well as others who've done it thirty odd times. We sorted everything, and good to notice that somebody in the audience didn't even notice anything.

I did a few videos last year, but did some more as we rehearsed and then started the show at the Grand Opera House, Belfast. If you've never done a panto at a fairly big theatre = or never done one at all, you could find some of this interesting. Older and wiser folk will realise where I've cut a few corners, but might find a few bits entertaining. Part 1 - getting there! Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 - Ghosts? Episode 5 Get-in Day Episode 6 - got zapped due to copyright issues Episode 7 Episode 8 Episode Extras I tried to be careful with music - but one had lots of background music being played and I had to lose it. Only another 34 shows to go ................ as of Boxing Day!

Interesting reactions. I suppose it’s just what buyers want that they produce for. Five hundred or five grand? It’s consumer driven. I’ve bought Chinese products for years now and the thing really is that you take the cheaper prices and take the consequences. When things fail they’re often not repairable. Power supplies being a common one. Sometimes they’re fixable as the parts can be genetic but often they’re not economic to fix. A new one has screw holes in different places and different output terminals and cables wont reach. However the fancy very expensive robes and Martins don’t seem to be much more reliable but have spares. The Chinese I buy from I deal with on whatsapp now and they’re driving electric vehicles and live in nice apartments. the model they use with an office and workroom is very efficient, and yes, they do move from product to product but that’s how they do it. The cooperative nature works so well. Standardised parts so if you want an extra lens rather than a gobo you can have it! Not just lights. I buy microphones and radios. I mentioned I couldn’t find any ribbon mics and next day they’d sourced in the building done motor assemblies and a housing and built me two as one offs. My view is it’s a great way of producing cost effective kit. Another thing in the radio world is that there really are no brands as we know them in europe. Well known brands are just labels. One firm I buy from also makes a very well known Japanese brand and the Chinese version I buy shares so much with the more expensive one. Reliability is really very good too. I’ve had getting on for 150lights. My graveyard currently has less than ten non workers and they’ve been robbed for parts. Some of the washes are 15 years old and owe me nothing and still in use. I suppose it’s just a buying decision. Like all the others? But don’t knock their methods because clearly they work. Jigs and big batch production make little sense with limited quantity runs.

Interesting to see how it's done.

Bnc to phono cable but the audio is a problem that unit requires line level audio. And the camera mic needs phantom power. Have you checked the menu to see if that is switched in there! You could then use the headphone audio into the audio input if the recorder with a bit of experimentation with levels

It’s got composite video on the bnc output so something like this would work https://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGITNOW-Capture-Digital-Converter-Records/dp/B01DJCDYKI/ref=asc_df_B01DJCDYKI/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=309964054975&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=14676178837484174543&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9045208&hvtargid=pla-592922918364&psc=1&mcid=527e1bd5919e358f874ffc53ec8b7d29 just be aware the quality is somewhat soft compared to say, an iPhone. It will be at least on a card format for you

As some members know, a few of us BR members are involved with collecting and saving old lighting equipment, and I've started to notice a few things that are making me think. I think I'm more impressed by the old equipment I have never even heard of, than the popular stuff. Of course, some 'rarer' brands are really quite awful, some are still able to do a really good job. My favourite is the non-theatre Hewetts - a great shape and really nice beam quality. Weigh a ton of course. So many old lights, all lighting things up, but clearly doing it differently. Some easy to adjust, some more tricky, others that burn you, others that have sharp edges, but the light that comes out of them easily holds their head up. Perfectly usable. Even the ones many people disliked, like T-Spots and Patt 45's. The T-Spots still do a good job, although they're quite yellow with the old lamps and glass which seems yellower than I remember. Even the 45, with no reflector, always teased because it really was a candle in a box can do OK if retro fitted with modern COB LEDs. Our experiments suggest these, with no rear light output to bounce off the reflector are not as good as real old fashioned glass lamps, but in the 45, appear to offer a very good 'fit' to the single small lens. So far, we have found very few disappointments. Our experience so far with controls is far less good. The old wire wound dimmers, up to and including the Junior 8 work just like my memory suggests, but once controls went electronic instead of electric, we're having trouble. Two of us have been slowly working through the carefully stored and bubble wrapped controls, and very few power up and work! Fair enough, a backup battery dated 1993 is unlikely to work, but basing the controls around that little battery means many will never work again. We have a few examples of Strand GSX, and some are in really excellent condition, but it's going to be a long job, fitting the batteries and hoping the floppy disk drives will read the one set of operating system disks. Oddly - it's the little things that are making controls and dimmers difficult. Two versions of analogue control, with positive and negative going protocols. Ignoring the pops and nasty smells from ancient capacitors, we've got the analogue Strand and Zero 88 dimmers producing lights. So many connector types though. At least 3 different 'common' ones so far. The worst thing is the controls with D54, and I won't mention the AMX ones. We can do D54 to analogue and DMX of course is fine - but at the moment D54 capable dimmers we don't have. I do have a few in the theatre, but they're still being used. Only a very few controls light up and function, and those that do seem to operate VERY differently to how we are now used to. One I was working on is an Arri - and connecting up a monitor mad eye realise how far we've come. I spent hours working out painfully how to actually patch the dimmer channels. Something I assumed I'd be easily able to do, but I ended up doing it channel by channel. The ease we now do it with simple syntax - and often syntax that even works out what you are trying to do and does it for you. On this Arri it took probably twice as many key strokes than I expected. It has just 6 subs, and just 70 odd channels, but actually recording a cue, by trial and error was torture. Another really annoying feature of some desks was power supplies - 15V and 25V for some, and even +17/-17V for another. I'll have to donate a bench power supply with variable output and meters and make up a few adaptors. Earth leakage means we have lost power a few times when the trips do their thing, but not too bad really considering that they are so elderly. It's really nice to power up a huge 48 channel 2 preset control and discover it has a DMX socket alongside the analogue outputs. Even better the fader suddenly makes a light come on! The Strand M24s were clearly far more popular than I thought as we have a number of these, but sadly just one functions. The others have all kinds of error messages. I had not realised so many makes collaborated - I didn't know ADB and CCT shared so much commonality and development, but it was a surprise to find that one Coemar control was clearly an identical chassis to one of the Strand controls. That link I had not known. We're slowly putting together some more in-depth material on the lighting gear, but it's taking time - far more time than we expected. It's just annoying that it's little things that delay us - DC cables, power supplies and daft things like keys. One of the controls actually has one position marked OFF, and guess what it's set to? Ten minutes to dismantle it once you discovered the captive screws, half an hour to find and link out (in a restorable manner) the mains power AND the DC power to the control and fader PCB, only to find the power supply is faulty. Finding weird sized Metric, BA and Whitworth nuts and bolts for the lights is one thing, but strange value and length fuses, unusual components, usually unmarked, missing parts, disconnected wires and backup batteries unidentifiable because they've been eaten away make the control restoration much more difficult than I expected. It seems a 30 year old light is an almost modern one, but a thirty year old control is elderly in the extreme - but a 40 year old one will probably work! One thing I do know. I have been guilty of dismissing the green and red stickers and PAT testing regime many of us endure simply because failures were quite rare, and usually occurred on things you guessed would fail, but with old controls the tests are vital. So many old ones have the potential (pun intended) to give shocks. Listening for crackles fizzing and pops from old dimmers makes you take testing them a bit more seriously than I have done myself in the past. Some of them don't just fail, they massively fail. Oddly, the controls look quite modern, and seem to not deteriorate badly compared to the lights where 70's and 80s equipment is often in pretty poor condition. Some of the older ones seem to have been painted black multiple times in their lives. The Rank Strand green has done pretty well, as have some of the earlier silver Strand items. Clearly, the condition of the metal, prior to painting was pretty vital. We have some Italian products that have faired pretty poorly even though they're from the 80s and 90s. What I smile about are really old products that get a new lease of life when they get re-invented and many people assume they are brand new designs.

Sadly, he's not been back since March - so I doubt he will read this.

I never got a reply - read into this whatever you fancy!

The Historic Stage Lighting Collective know this problem too well! It's one thing saving the rare and interesting old kit, but making them light up is another! All I can suggest are forum requests like this one, and also searching the archives for questions about the item you have. If you discover a post from ten years back from a theatre with one, sometimes a request to them direct works - as they may well have scrapped the light, but forgot to scrap the lamps hidden in the store?