mac.calder

Also - depending on the generation of 518, they may be phase reversed on the DMX in. Back when Martin had their own lighting control protocol, + and - were on the opposite pins to what you expect to see on 3 pin DMX cables. They "Upgraded" the 518's to support DMX by flashing the firmware, but not by rewiring the connectors. Best bet is to make an adaptor that swaps pins 2 and 3, and put it before the first 518 in the DMX chain - and don't connect any other non-518's on the other end. There is also a spot on (from memory) the beam channel called autotrig (or maybe dimming... it may have been in the strobe area of the dimming channel?). Autotrig makes the light go through a 'test cycle' and strike the lamps. Depending on the firmware the units were flashed with, some only struck by setting the beam to auto trig. We used to have about 200 in the ballroom of my old venue, watching them do their auto trig dance in a dark ballroom was something to behold. And yes - their homing of pan and tilt is by running their pan and tilt motors for long enough that no matter where the mirror was, it's been run far enough back to be in a known position. It is a brute force approach to homing, but it works. It is a solution that many moving mirrors use - because it is cheap, and it works.

In Western Australia - all public entertainment venues are required to have Direct Brigade Alarms fitted to the FIP - so unless you isolate the DBA, yanking a wire is going to get at least 2 trucks and a nice little fine of $2400 per truck, plus whatever fine you get for not being an accredited fire alarm technician - at a minimum.

There is a lot to unpack in your post. Video is definitely an area where the golden triangle comes into play - Cheap, Reliable/Quality, Quick... if you imagine 1 at each corner of the triangle, and your solution is at a point inside that triangle.. the closer you get to one, the further you are from the other two. IF you install good quality cable (for video, shielded Cat6A), use a decent brand extender, use a decent laptop and decent software, with a professional panel you can achieve an extremely reliable, repeatable system that you don't need to futz with. Cheap gear, free software etc can bring the price down, but it is usually a tradeoff for a lot of human-hours of fiddling, tweaking and finessing to get it reliable and potentially significantly reduce reliability. Free software typically comes with minimal (or community only) support and minimal testing outside of certain use cases etc

If it is a contract for visiting companies (ie you are writing a general T's&C's), just make it a case by case basis, and don't offer anything up, rather, make them ask for what they want - and then take it on a case by case basis. I worked on a 2 act show where all safety lighting was required to be blacked out - but we had safety plans in place - including additional staff to assist with evacuations placed beside each emergency exit, who's sole job was to pop the cover off of the emergency exit signs, and we had the corridor outside the exits lit with red light and slowly increased brightness up the corridor to make sure that getting startled by transitioning to bright light was not so much an issue. I know they adapted the venue some what too around seating layout and capacity - but since that didn't involve anything technical it was less in my remit. It was a black light puppetry & laser act. It was really cool to watch, but they were very precious about light spill.

Moving mirrors are great for table spots in events venues as well - they are such a dream to program, as mirror pan and tilt directly corresponds to X-Y movement of the light, and you only need a hole the size of the mirror, so it can be really discreet. It is also a very different movement path than a moving head can make (ie you can do a constant speed V movement movement with a mirror, which you can't with a head)

For a school with a permanent auditorium/function space/hall - I find an installation of a couple of mid-range handhelds or a couple of handhelds and a belt-pack with lapel mic running through an easy to use DSP is often a good investment. As is installing some good antenna distribution if it's a hall. It tends to make the space usable for day-to-day "things" and then they can hire for events. It needs to be pickup and go though. I would never buy loose kit to sit on a shelf or rely on a system driven solely by a mixer unless there was a technician looking after the space. The rule of thumb I tend to go with is meet the requirements for 80-90% of the time. So, if you only use the space for a month or two of the year (total) - just hire what you need. If you use it for day to day assemblies, guest presentations etc and then there are a few major performances a year, then kit it out to deal with that day to day stuff. If you have a hugely active drama department that are running 4-6 large shows a year, each with a 2 week run - then you probably (a) are resourced to deal with the technical side of things and (b) able to justify kitting yourself out properly.

Might be worth trying local schools... even my small rural high school in country Australia had (and probably still has) a jacobs ladder and a van de graaff generator. Both mounted nicely on 40 year old wooden bases

to be honest, I would say the vast majority of shows with performer flying have MAYBE 2 people dedicated to performer flying (outside the performer) and a few mech/deck staff trained as spotters etc during the run. There is usually the person trained in operation, rescue, maintenance and routine inspection, and there is the 'other guy' - that is trained in the operation and rescue plans. If you are lucky, there is a flight captain or an acro captain within the company - but more than likely that will be a higher duties role of one of the performers. System design, engineering, installation, any system programming and the like will generally come out of the flight company - and they will tend to fly-in, fly-out and (if you're lucky) will also be contracted for routine inspections too. Used to work in a house with a permanent Foy rig - about 12 axis IIRC. We had 2 full time riggers who did a couple of weeks with Foy to learn inspections, Pegasus software, the winches and correct harness sizing and basic harness repairs, as well as how to re-rope the system and perform other bits of routine maintenance. Essentially when a new act was built into the show, if it was more complex than some fairly standard moves - ie new apparatus, using multi-axis for 3d flying, or where we were swinging loads significantly, we would bring a flight director in from foy, and potentially an engineer to choreograph the act. If it was a basic act, our riggers programmed it themselves. When it Foy did 6 monthly inspections along side our riggers, and when we did major maintenance (such as a re-roping of the winches) we would bring Foy in then too. But yeah - we could put on some pretty complicated flying shows with 2 riggers (one on the deck, one at the console), a flight captain and a bunch of mech crew who were given task specific instructions by the riggers. Strictly looking at what the OP was wanting to emulate, I would strongly suggest that a system with absolute positioning is required - and with the amount of load shifting, it would need to be a nice beefy motorised system

Tait are definitely the big name in complicated stage automation. Some others that are heavy in international performer flying are Foy (Website) and Unusual Rigging. All of these guys can rent you the rig and train you on the safe operation of it. And assist with the engineering. Even if they cannot assist, they normally have local suppliers all over the world that they use for local crew etc. At the end of the day, if you are trying to emulate that youtube clip, that is a single axis performer flying rig. Not overly complicated - most of them are zero fleet - and are designed to operate with a computerised automation system - so moves can be pre-programmed - but the structural work is not an insignificant thing to consider. Performer flying is typically at or above an 8:1 safety factor - so you are talking a motor capable of lifting 3 people + wheel at around 1.5meters/second. This needs a fair chunk of engineering behind it.

Brightsign. Designed for signage and media playback. Has GPIO's, so very simple to wire a button in to make it play back.

If the budget stretches, this is probably how I would go - and then I would leave the 2x1m's connected (or if 3m transport isn't an issue, connect pairs of 1's and 2's. With most truss systems in circulation these days, a join is often stronger than a continuous section, as counter intuitive as that sounds**when properly assembled**.

You cannot save streaming presets - but pretty much everything you can do through the UI you can do through the command line (including, with some futzing, watching the video rendered in ascii art) - and if you can do it through the command line, you can make either a shortcut or batch script to automate it - both at the receiving end and the serving end - it is what makes VLC awesome, as you can trigger starting and stopping streams - as well as opening streamings using an SSH connection into the clients.

There is no argument that large scale touring is/was incredibly wasteful. Festivals and smaller/local events much less so. In the before times, it was cheaper to pack a show in it's entirety into a cargo jet or 2 and pay for the extra avgas than it was to locally hire and rig from scratch - since you were already doing that for set, re rigging and adjusting shows for local stock availability was not worth it. Numerous big name tours would fly US to Australia with basically their entire rig - bar a few basic bits and pieces. It was just an accepted fact. Especially where there were highly mechanised sets, performer flying and tight integration of set and technology. Transit - absolutely an issue at so many venues world wide. Designed for cars and not serviced well by mass transit. There are arenas in the US with car parks an order of magnitude larger than the stadium they surround. Catering etc - I think it's slowly getting better. Unfortunately, safety and security policies (no rigid/glass/aluminium bottles etc) at a lot of stadia are creating huge amounts of waste that is often incorrectly recycled - but it's getting better. Sadly,most venues are not making use of their huge surface area and high vantage for alternative power (even it if was just to look after base load - interior lighting, mechanical and hydraulic services etc) and even new arena/stadiums are constrained by their primary focus (get punters to seat, handle huge surges of people, sell overpriced beer) which means that typical green engineering often goes out the window (highly controlled air circulation, thermal insulation, energy recovery etc).

Yeah... Martin have gotten to be (relatively) hopeless with service manuals - I used to have a login to their magical service website which was phenominal, and then they did a site upgrade and a lot of those documents vanished into the ether... and then my login stopped working... The plus side, belts and limit switches are fairly standard bits. The fixture construction is in no way modular - it's more like a big sandwich. Even with the service manuals, take photos.... The poor dears will be getting on in life - the first mac600's came out Q1 of '97... so possibly due for retirement soon :-)

USB2.0 over ethernet is relatively easy actually. Extron and Crestron both do extenders capable of this (they also do point to point - but their networked stuff can do virtual USB hubs etc... it's kinda cool). KVM over IP is also very doable. Bandwidth wise, you need 480mb/s to get USB2.0 speeds. So technically a 802.11AC can do it (ehhh... very iffy, and needs a lot of tinkering). Wifi6 can definitely do it if correctly configured. But you would need to bridge between access points and then use the hardware at either end. There is a BIG but in here though - some devices are fussy. Extenders can also count as 2 devices in the 7 device limit of USB (depending on the extender)... so that can be a real pain. And lets not talk about usb3 extension - and the fact that USB4 is just around the corner.

For museums, we have used the Dakota FA-602's... They are moderately narrow beams... big array of small drivers.

I stand corrected.

Both TV studios have them - as do the mini's - the 'traditional' ones don't.

You say you can't put fixtures like rope and strip on the floor - what about EL wire or side illuminating neon? A third (but probably cost prohibitive) option would be VynEL - which is essentially EL wire in a flat panel format. These things are millimeters thick and can be walked over without incident. You could do some really cool stuff with el wire and then cover it with clear vinyl to hold it to the floor - not sure what you are doing, but inscribing runic patterns etc along the path could be really cool.

Tricaster maybe. I have an avid HATE for Analogue Way. When I was first asked to do an actual event using one, I asked a colleague about the experience - he said "be careful... they are French - and they operate like it" - and yeah... the operating experience is just a bit off in a number of ways. Everything just feels slightly off. Most memorable was the 'smartfade' (which we used to call the dumb fade). It had some really poor documentation that left out some really critical stuff... like that the switcher didn't have an internal clock for genlock and instead used input 1 for timing. So if you didn't know that, and plugged your 'just in case' stage input into it for a conference... you spent hours trying to figure out why the switcher was randomly glitching and slow to switch. It's these little idiosyncrasies that I have found throughout all AW products. I love the E2 - and the S3 - but they have a specific application that is very different to an ATEM. Barco - great for multi output where you need to composite multiple inputs - but the cost per input means that quite often it is better fed by a separate camera switcher etc. If you are doing mainly medium sized events and don't need the canvasing - hire it when you need it. TVOne CorioMaster can do similar canvas style work for a lot cheaper... but is less live-engineered - so has a few of the same issues Spyder has with a live workflow. Barco did not fall into those same traps thankfully. The ATEM has much bang for buck. If it will do most of what you want, go for it and the TV studio has a scaler/format converter on each channel, which is essential for corporate. If you are heavy into web streaming and looking at a multi-m/e style workflow - Tricaster is a lot of bang for the buck. And NDI converters are relatively cheap - as are NDI cameras. If you are not heavily invested in inventory already, tricaster as the basis for your inventory can be extremely versatile. If you feel like rolling your own - NDI converters and VMix or OBS can actually produce stunning results for surprisingly little outlay. As above, cannot recommend AW. Nor can I recommend Kramer. Extron and their seamless switchers will always have a place in my heart, but is probably a bit exy for the feature set. So the other options are all more broadcast switchers - like Ross Video and Grass Valley. They do some great switchers, but you need additional equipment like scan converters in a corporate setting to make these work for you.

Cost and availability.

In general AV etc - nope. In instrumentation - yes. BNC is a pretty common connector to use for probes on oscilloscopes for example - you want to be able to set your own reference ground in that instance and not be tied to chassis/electrical ground. In OB situations - maybe - not sure.

Only if you need an isolated ground. Generally you don't.

Without knowing your stock... I would probably install straight power distribution in a new build - my company has done a number of school builds - our standard for that now is patchable power distribution - with a couple of spare 3 phase outlets beside the power distribution. Want to bring in dimmers - go for it. These schools tend to request far fewer circuits than I would put in a standard theatre though... so this makes sense. A receiving house, I would probably go for a mix. I would wire the venue with 50% patchable power with either sinewave dimming or a switchable dimmer/distro combo, alternating the dimmable sockets on bars with the other 50% being hard wired hot power to the db board. Remote actuated contactor across the whole supply so that you can turn off the grid from the bio box and side of stage. Or I would just provide hot power and some nice chunky 3ph supplies all over the place - like up in the grid or on the fly floor and sides of stage as well as each a few on each FOH bridge... And maybe keep 1 or 2 12ch portable dimmers in stock. By not having to put in either an acre of dimmers or patchable power and also make facility for a dimmer room or similar in a venue with a couple of hundred points, hard wired hot power can really save some significant coin - and have very few downsides. Even if you had an existing stock of 60 or so incandescent fixtures, it would be cheaper to throw them in the bin and buy new LED fixtures over putting in a propper dimming system for a moderate to large receiving house of 300-600 physical points. And I mean decent replacements like Lustr 2's. Maybe my experience is slightly different to some others hear, I tech managed as 2300 seat receiving house in Australia for a short while - it was fairly rare for a show to bring in fixtures that needed our dimming (sometimes we would augment our stock and hire in at their request fixtures that would go on our dimmers, but we were hiring in to match our rig, so would have just matched with LED's if we were a LED house). Typically a show that toured with a full rig would be touring with dimmers - or more commonly a fully cabled dimmer/distro rack, pre wired with soccapex or weiland ends to live side of stage.

There is a WIDE range of cables that fall under the RG6 category. I would be looking at something that can carry at least 3G SDI (supports 1080p60) - ie Belden 1694A can do that about 90m , 1694F will get you just over 100m. 1794A will get you 6G SDI to just over 100m and 3g over 200m - so depending on venue cable paths 1794A might be the better option if you are nearing 100m a run in the wall.