paulears

LED panels - my video studio has gone completely to LED now - and despite having loads of theatre kit, the LED stuff is better - LED panels are soft, even and great for NOT creating shadows. Traditionally, video used key (often a Fresnel) fill - a soft light of some kind, and some kind of backlight. I put up some Arri 1K and 650W stuff, plus some tubular soft lights and while at this time of then year the heat would have been nice - the throw in my studio - which is only 6m x 4m in 'people' space made green and blue screen pretty dodgy with shadows spoiling the keying. I bought some Chinese LED panels and Fresnels - I tried a few because I had to buy more than I needed, and the ones I've got now I rather like and they are pretty sensibly priced. We've got rules on the BR about advertising, but I'll just show you the images for info - two kinds the difference being colour temperature - fixed at 5500K (which is what I have standardised on in the studio, or a variable one that has two sets of LEDs and one set is 5500, and the other 3200K - and a knob lets you go variably from one to the other. The single colour is brighter, because all LEDs are on in the same colour. The small 55W Fresnel is great as a key. I've just bought a 100W Fresnel, based on the Arri shape, with bigger lens, and frankly - it's rubbish. The 55W is brighter on the meter, but the arri shape fits the studio a bit better. TV now if you look at news is so much flat light. Dull, boring stuff - but you can perk it up with some colour, and stuff like that, and that, I can do with the theatre kit. Here is the LED Fresnel I recommend you do NOT buy - I was thinking about selling these but they're very poorly performing - very limited beam adjustment, and not at all bright!

We need carnets for moving goods WITHIN the United Kingdom? Please tell me this isn't right?

I'm getting very confused. I'm VAT registered and have a GB EORI - but have just realised I now need an XI EORI to go between England and Northern Ireland. I've got myself completely confused - has anyone done this and got sorted - the forms seem very confusing, and I've gone round in circles!

When people consider speed they forget that the appropriateness depends on travel height. So when a fast reveal is needed on a tall stage pros opening, fast me and VERY fast, while fast on a letterbox stage is quite slow by comparison. Initial acceleration to get them going might need a leap in the air and 15 stones of assistance. Absolute worst is single speed motor the absolute worst, never doing it right ever. Best is a skilful strong person and the best motor drive is nearly as good. In a model, mechanical motor and train set controller, but that was in 1969.

Please, can we stop quoting quotes of quotes. It makes it so hard to read. Editing on my phone to delete it usually wrecks things even more so please, can we maybe keep quotes to the relevant bit and not duplicate entire posts within posts,

I would NOT bank on the £390 figure at all. The current information from HMRC is that goods imported over value of £139 including the shipping will attract Duty - for our kind of items, normally 4% and the state of play is that the VAT limit for goods is £15, so if you order from Thomann, you will be charged NO VAT by them as the goods are being exported from German - but it will attract the 20% VAT when it arrives here. In practice, though, the German and UK VAT are very close, so I'm not expecting a price hike - apart from the duty. What is NOT good news is that the processing charges levied as disbursements by Royal Mail, Parcelforce, USP, TNT, Fedex and DHL are currently between £8 and £20 per consignment. Two tracking numbers for two parcels (if you buy PA speaker, for example) would be £20 each, if you used one of three Fedex schemes. Fedex are in a mess since TNT merged with them. The people sending the goods send them - and if they come via Fedex, the charge can be £11 or £12 typically, but Fedex Express can be £20 (as the one that arrived today was). Fedex Express don't even have a way to pay one type of invoice online, or on the phone - they expect, believe it or not, a cheque in the post - or you can risk a BACs transfer with your invoice number as reference number. Sometimes this actually works and you get the goods, sometimes they cannot find your payment to allocate it - so you get a letter in the post, you transfer and then you need to email three email addresss to tell them you have paid. They also add VAT to the £20 disbursement, so you get the item VAT, the duty and the service VAT. A real mess. The scheme as I see it is that Europe to UK consignments will involve 4% duty and the handling fees, and that is not controlled by the seller - it's pure luck who deliver it. VAT would have been levied by Thomann, for example to a domestic customer, but no extra VAT on import. In a few days, they will not charge VAT, and you pay that when the goods arrive in the UK. The handling will be what people complain about, because Parcelforce, or whoever settle the bill on your behalf, and charge you for doing it and you have NO control over what they charge. Small declared value items often have a lower charge - Fedex have in the past charged me £8, but the most has been £24. Just how it is. I don't think we need to worry about this. It's just the scheme that has been used for China imports for years. My guess will be that duty will be applied randomly - it certainly is for Chinese and US imports. Every repeat order I get from China is a different charge - damn annoying.

Took just four days from the 30th when I got my message. It does help!

I bought the Warnex semi-matt from Thomann to match the textured paint on my JBLs - horrible stuff but decent finish that matched pretty well and the texturing is tough (and sharp)

This is good stuff - all my old 263's were 263W's - I never realised. I had one student at college who insisted on giving everything her own 'nicknames' - 264s became Beasts, I have no idea why? At the theatre we still have 8 T-spots, hated by everyone, on the FOH bars, and 8 of them can be seen when you raise the faders in a face light add in. Fair enough, 8K of white light is quite a bit, but they're far from useless.

Not sure - I have 263 and 264 - and the only difference is the shutter assembly - both have conventional PC lenses. I thought the slightly different beam angle was simply due to the slightly shorter lamp to lens distance? None of mine have a stepped lens? How does this fit into the chronology? I've never actually seen a stepped lens version. Probably one for Jim Laws.

I still have some functioning ones, and while not the brightest, the shutter system was brilliant. For me, the amusement value of removing blown lamps and wondering what weird shapes they'd be was the mystery of them.

I logged in, and a member had used the report button on the post that was here - so I had the strange job of moderating myself. Never done that before. I take the point though. Paul

Maybe the old lamp died because the socket was arcing - where the pins fit in - so the lamp holder is faulty, not the lamp? Did you see any broken filaments? You need a test meter - even a cheap one that can indicate continuity. Pin to lamp holder, then the other side of the lamp holder back to plug, and of course across the pins of the lamp.

Who suggested using old or bent truss? We're getting carried away here, making huge assumptions. Nobody as far as I can see suggested anything about buying old damaged truss. I doubt anyone here has anything better than the Mk1 eyeball for determining truss condition. See a dent, or a crack, or signs of repairs and you don't use it? Even riggers don't carry X-Ray machines do they?

What I do know is that I'd buy from a supplier who offers a warranty (which is probably a bit pointless for what will be static truss, and lightly loaded compared top capacity) at a price you can afford. Second hand is perfectly possible if the same criteria apply - branded truss with a loading far below what it's capable of. If the venue intend to get the support kit inspected regularly - annual checks seem quite common in schools, colleges, universities and smaller theatres - then you make sure that visually, you, as the user cannot see anything damaged, cracked or bent - and then rather than wait a year, get the first rig checked before you use it. The usual theatrical engineering firms will happily do this and as you're not going to constantly fiddling with it and throwing it on trucks, that would work for me, and the kinds of insurance companies I dealt with. If you buy 4 chord truss like Global Truss F34 cost wise new, it's more expensive than 3 chord truss like F33, but more flexible if you want to make different shapes. 3 chord truss has two versions of some corner/jpint sections to cope with apex up or apex down lengths which (as I discovered) does confused a tad - but 3 chord truss is something like £100, vs £150 for the same length. If you buy carefully your possibilities are OK. In college, we a pile of 3 chord truss and most of the things we did with it stood on 4, 6 or occasionally 8 legs, each one two sections of 2m, sitting on a baseplate. We added to it a couple of years after purchase - an ebay purchase, through an intermediary as we were not allowed to buy direct from ebay sellers. I looked at it and was happy with the condition. This would have been probably around April. In the summer the engineering firm came in and examined it and looked at the new bits we'd got in the store. They spotted a dodgy weld - probably just a bit fill-light and repaired it and included the new stuff in the inspection report which kept the powers at be happy. We used the stuff for nine years and it was never fixed down, always freestanding and the top just lightly braced - which wasn't actually needed, but did stop the top wobble when movers all moved at the same time.

It's easy to use scaff outriggers with wall plates and non-damaging surfaces to prevent any lateral movement if you think this important - but I doubt you'd even need to fix to the floor - the weight of a ground supported grid tends to be perfectly solid for most applications, and also 'alterable' if you need cross positions in different places. A pile of truss parts and you can be creative - maybe even incorporating the truss into the set - hanging drapes from it and making it a feature?

I found exactly the same thing - teaching is pretty relentless and unlike real shows, you never get the 'completion', they just merge into the same thing. For me - the very best thing was the students. Some are now sending their kids to uni and I'm real friends with a great number and even nicer, I have worked for some of them - a real role reversal. Looking back at pictures on Facebook, you see faces you instantly know who they are, and others that you don't remember at all. Having no recollection of one face, but knowing lots about the person sat next to them makes you think why? Some of them look older than me which cheers me up - some haven't changed a bit. Some of the thick ones are now clever and have amazing jobs, other clever ones at 18 are now useless and unemployable. I stopped 16 years ago, but it still seems recent, but the age thing Junior 8 mentioned - I solidly think that fits me to a tee. Not just relating, but the ability to deal with some of their stuff just fades away.

Tony Waldron from Cadac, now retired was totally opposite and campaigned for close to assassination for any reputable manufacturer if they considered it. In the late 90s, the arguments even spawned a website - still up My link Hard work reading but Jim Brown was probably the person most concerned about it. type fixed

I'm confused. Wasn't one of the great things about connecting via Cat 'anything' cable that there was no ground connection brought from stage to FOH - which cured lots of the old hums and noises? If we now connect the two via the cable, won't that have a potentially serious problem with fault current when something goes wrong? The audio 'rule' of never connecting the shell and keeping pin 1 aways from the chassis has been turned on it's head?

That tariff has been in place since the late 70s. That was when the Japanese started the 'E' versions or the '01" on the end of the model. Cameras with a blanked off video input BNC so they were not video recorders. I'm not sure why they just didn't increase the price and pay the tariff - we're they worried about grey imports? I seem to remember Sony in particular were. I remember kitting out a Shell Oil studio with DXC 1200 cameras and the domestic models we wanted to interface couldn't record video. Wen had the same thing with the cameras Gary likes many years later - the 300 and 370, marketed here as 301 and 371, the '1' not having a video in. I do remember our video service engineer discovering that Hitachi had simply taken the video connector off the board, sealed the case hole and then used a firmware update to prevent the menu item being engaged. He did one of the fix pixel fixes done by powering up while holding down a button and discovered the greyed out menu item came back. He soldered on a socket and bingo the camcorder could record. He did the mod on half a dozen of the ones we sold. When you were spending maybe a couple of grand on a product back then, a few hundred extra in duty really wouldn't;t have put people off.

I never knew it was a requirement. For jobs where damage to the cable was likely, I often ran in two ordinary cables without the XLR termination - i.e. just a Cat5e cable - 50m, from Cpc. I'd run in two of them, and just use one, with the other as spare. It never occurred to me this was wrong!

I know Canford D size splitter boxes are marked as not for powercons - 3/4/5 pin XLR and speakon are OK - but I have found with a little er, adjustment and proper shrouding they're rather useful for daisy-chaining lights on a bar. certainly. A small enlargement of the holes in the Powercon spades, some 2.5mm2 and a little trimming of the plastic and they work really well. You can do ten for around £50 excluding the Powercon sockets. Not Tony's requirement I know, but they work for me.

Don't forget an important part of the process is to be seen cleaning - one unguarded picture on Facebook gets you into all kinds of trouble with complaints and nasty comments. Knowing what you did before and after doesn't convince the fireside generals. How about visible bins - cleaned and uncleaned for public storage? Seeing a mic come out of the bin marked clean is a real confidence booster for those who genuinely are really worried.

We're closer in age than you think! I don't have much faith in anyone protecting me, other than me, to be honest! Clearly if you are vulnerable, then isolating is the most sensible step, but what makes me think now is that for year, we've all been doing our own risk assessments to protect ourselves from danger, but now we hand this over to a homogenised, statistically balanced scientific generic danger statement. I've just decided to risk assess my work activities based on the up to date advice, existing science and practical circumstances. I'm confident with what I do, and have determined there could be a small risk when the plan gets modified while it's working, but I can handle it. It worries me when people drop below my safe risk assessment, potentially impacting on me, but often, the pre-assessed risk in practice is less. For example, droplet contamination. Masks stop the nasal and mouth ingestion, but the eyes are another route, and eye protection is much rarer. Faced with the problem of no gloves, because the three pairs were used up quickly, and the necessity to pop an IEM into a singer's ear, because my instructions just didn't work - I decided that if I approached from the rear, I could pop them in for her, with acceptable risk, and with santised hands before and after, this amount of touching contact was acceptable. A blanket ban on this kind of thing seemed too OTT for me. With the correct approach, I think my procedure was safe. Maybe with another person, I would not have risked this - I don't know. Self-protection comes first, then the danger to others from our actions. I firmly believe that it's possible to be safe with appropriate precautions.

I think we should talk care not to over dramatise this. It's perfectly simple to use alcohol in liquid or a spray form, to wear masks and eye protection if deemed necessary and of course to ware gloves. Bodily fluids as in, poo, vomit, blood, snot, sweat and even tears need cleaning, and offer plenty of contamination potential - and we've been dealing with this in one shape or form for years if you work with performers. Some of these diseases can be life limiting and far more dangerous that Covid - so we need to put it into a workable framework. Some equipment we use cannot be totally sanitised without destroying it. Microphones are typical, but the risk is lessened by them being in the main receptors, not emitters. Potentially covid infected moisture will land on a mic, and some may well enter grills and vents. Wiping the outside will not kill what is not external. We can pull the grills of say, 58's and spray them or even steam them, but we can't do 57s. The external wipes down I believe is sufficient unless we suck what is inside, out. Old 58s are usually full of spit inside anyway, but has anyone ever caught hepatitis from a mic? I would find a wipe down with suitable cleaner sufficient. I am also still fitting personal mics, and fitting IEMs for people who can't. I believe I can do this safely - from my perspective and the person I fit them to.