delicolor

These look good for the price, but how are they 25, 45 and 60 degrees? Or is it just shoddy cut & paste?

Standing at the sky's edge at Sheffield got pretty loud during the scenes of chaos before the interval but the loudest theatre show I recall was Memphis at the Shaftesbury, the last song was gut wrenchingly loud but but very clear and not painful.

Way back in the ‘90s when I was an the CCT project office, we had a job come in for a Robin Hood themed attraction. (A farmer had bought the scenery for the movie Prince of thieves and decided to jump on the bandwagon). They wanted the impression of arrows whizzing through a forest. After much discussion of possibilities weighed against price, they settled an six or so Minuette Profiles with arrow Gobos and a box of tricks to one-shot chase them on cue from show control. It worked fine and they were happy with it, but it was the sound that carried it off, it just looked like a gobo chase to me.

Also join the Zero 88 support forum, the guys are very helpful and responsive. There are links to it via their website.

Cheers, I have passed this on.

Someone contacted me via Facebook asking if I knew of anyone still servicing and reparing Rainbow scrollers. Apparently they have about fifty of them and they are keen to sort them out. Any pointers? Thanks, Ian

I think it was an aluminium casting but I’d have to check. (It is in bits in a bag at the back of the garage). Most of the weight is in the heatsink.

The LEDJ Performer 200 is very bright but perhaps too wide at 120 degrees. It has a RGBW 200W COB LED source. https://cpc.farnell.com/ledj/performer-200-quad/led-par-can-rgbw-200w/dp/DP36276 (Don't try dismantling it to fit in a 23, not enough room and you now have optically a LED version of a Furse SPK.

I have been acquiring bottom of the range mid-range fixtures for a price conscious venue. Elumen8 MP75s are RGBW fresnels that work very well at 5m trim and are in your budget but would probably lose oomph at 8m. The next one up (the TZ350) has certainly got the throw and intensity but it is big and heavy, reminiscent of a Patt. 43! It does have DMX zoom which can be handy but it is noisy unless you inch it. (Something else to go wrong of course).

Yes, but he was running a business back then, not a museum. He has already started to clear out that barn in anticipation of making it a viable display space. However Jim is getting on a bit now and Beccles is not exactly a busy metropolis so the idea is that the contents of the museum can readily go to a better home if/when the opportunity arises.

Alas, David Sandham’s project has foundered after the Regent Centre board withdrew their support. Jim Laws has offered a barn in Suffolk to achieve the same end, more anon.

I seem to remember that you would see a small arc inside the CSI lamp if it didn't want to strike confirming the presence of HT, provided the pip hadn't popped. (Unless I'm remembering what Xenon lamps do, I had a projector decide not to strike a few hours into lamp life once but it was fine with the spare). One other thought which is probably a red herring- 765s were originally designed for CSI lamps and you have a CID lamp there. I don't recall if they were entirely backwards compatible with the early models although later data sheets show 785s as CSI/CID. The CID apparently gave less light but looked brighter due to the spectral distribution. I suspect they probably were backwards compatible as not being so would have hopefully stuck in my mind. However we are talking 40+ years here...

I recently picked up an LEDJ FS100 followspot for circa £350, also seeking an affordable narrow profile. pros- it is tight and bright for 100W led, it has an iris, regular zoom profile lenses and sharpens/softens quite nicely. You can DMX control intensity and colour on two channels. It has native cold white with warm white as the first colour on the wheel. cons- no framing shutters or gobo runners. The dichroic colour wheel is not in the order I’d want and a couple of colours are insipid. The bottom end of the dimming curve is fierce, it leaps to noticably on with DMX level 001! It is an affordable low end followspot/profile and suits our need to tightly light an organ console but would have liked stripping shutters or even just a top blade. Worth a look for the price.

A picture in glorious Rank green here: BETA

For a low budget situation, have you looked at the LEDJ 200 cob? Really wide beam angle, RGBW, 8 channel in basic mode, £169 each. https://prolight.co.uk/product/ledj490 I took a look at the LEDJ 200 Quad. It is very bright, smooth and wide. However the fan fires up quite quickly once there is light coming out, is a bit noisy compared to many and it doesn’t support RDM. (Although it lights up if it catches a sniff of an RDM discovery sequence). The RGBW saturation is probably no worse (or better) than other cheap non-calibrated fixtures. If I wanted a fixed angle wide wash and had a limited budget I’d consider them, but probably not for non-music theatre. Get on to Prolight and see if they can demo them.

I’ve just obtained two Elumen8 MP75 Fresnels, which have been on back-order from CPC. Curiously, one is a Mark II, the only obvious physical difference being a Powercon and 5 Pin DIN connectors rather than captive power and 3 pin. The Mk 1 supposedly only had two channel modes (5 & 7) but both units have the same firmware (1.03) which supports 4 channel mode as well. They appear to have the same optics and the four colours are additive power wise unlike the Pulse that seemed to use the same power on full as just one colour (so got brighter if you went from say purple to blue). The MP75 has lead screw focussing and is much more precise than the Pulse was. I haven’t tried the two different lanterns side by side yet.

There is no reference to power consumption in the instruction booklet (which doesn’t include photometrics), just that the power supply is auto ranging. The leaflet says the fuse is F1A but the signage says F2A and that actual fuse is F3A! I just noticed on the box it says 160W although the most I have seen it consume is 38 watts or so (blue only). The RDM is a somewhat tidier implementation than Elumen8, the identify does something (flashes red channel) and the modes are meaningfully named. Surprisingly there are two sensors, the second one being wind speed! (It stays the same regardless of fan on or off). The fan kicks in at 46 C and goes off again at 39 C.

There is no reference to power consumption in the instruction booklet (which doesn’t include photometrics), just that the power supply is auto ranging. The leaflet says the fuse is F1A but the signage says F2A and that actual fuse is F3A!

I’ve now got hold of a Pulse MFZ160Q and had a play with it on the bench (well, coffee table as I’m at home). My first hiccup was that all my DMX 3 to 5 pin adapters are at work so I can’t connect my DMXCat tester to it. I touched some wires on a gash lead to check the unit was responsive to DMX, which it is. However proper testing will have to wait. The lantern itself is visually OK and superficially similar to the MP75 with some differences. The barn door retaining clip is much cruder, being like a spring clip over a latch. The focus doesn’t move the front of the assembly as first thought, instead it moves the COB and heat sink assembly inside. It is shipped with the focus knob in the bag and it is a tad fiddly to fit (and comes out readily as there aren’t too many threads engaged, perhaps two full turns). It is a little shuddery, think of an old style Sil front lens. It looks to have a reasonable spread and spots down somewhat but not too tightly. The manual shows a local dimming knob on the rear but it is just blanked off. There is a dedicated fixing position for the safety bond, which is included. The “fresnel” lens is plastic and lightly pebbled on the front. The unit is pretty quiet in use, I ran it up to full and the fan kicked in after a few minutes but wasn’t too intrusive. The reported temperature on the display got up to 45 degrees (presumably Centigrade, not actually defined) . The three primary colours are reasonably saturated with a cold white as the 4th channel. It has seven profiles but I should think theatre users will want to use the 4 channel mode, RGBW. (There is a 5 channel mode as well with dimmer if your desk doesn’t do virtual dimming, as well as strobe and an HSV mode). Where it starts to get peculiar is when you measure Watts in and Lux out. It is brighter on single colours than mixtures. Whilst by no means scientific readings, I used the DMXCat light meter app on my Android phone and got the following Lux readings over a 2m throw spotted down. Off 13 lux ambient, Red 3469, Green 960, B 1269, W 2475, blue+ white 1699, all 4 channels full 1719 Lux. Watts in varied between 22W and 36W with channels up based on my consumer smart meter which probably doesn’t care about apparent power. Looking more closely at the spec, it describes the light source as “160W 4 in 1 COB LED (40W constant output)” and the LED colour “RGBW (40W per colour)” .So this would appear to explain why the primary colours are much brighter. I’m now suspicious that some of our cheap LEDs might work in the same way from previous power readings. It doesn’t look like it will Chuck out more light than the MP75 but the published figures from CPC didn’t make sense until hindsight is applied, explaining why the full on Lux is not cumulative. There is a bit of fringing around the barn door edges in the beam when spotted down and squared off on test but how this looks on a stage awaits a trip up the Smallescope…

A sample Pulse Fresnel has now been ordered, awaiting delivery, I will report further once I've tried it in the rig. It looks like the focus appears to involve moving the lens tube complete with colour runners. (Moving the LED assembly in the conventional tungsten style would of course be trickier if using the housing as a heat sink for conduction). The MP60 moves an internal fresnel lens for focus, the front lens you see is fixed and probably for collimation or beam smoothing. (I haven't opened any of them up yet).

We have an MP60, the CW equivalent of the MP75. The barn door shaping is fine on wider settings although softer than a 743 on edging. The fan noise is acceptable. I had come across Pulse online and assumed they were rebadged Elumen8 so am interested in if they are better or not as we were going to get a couple of MP75s. No mention of fan noise on the spec! I did pick up some bigger motorised zoom fresnels, a TZ250 RGBW and a TZ350 WW. They are a little intrusive when the fan kicks in to high but only when they have been running for a while. (The zoom is noisier but you can inch it which is quiet). The main failing for me is lack of a decent yellow, a common situation with RGBW fixtures. We have cove tape that is the same, the green swamps the mix unless checked.

For historic information, In the 1970s Newcastle City Hall used to get wrestling regularly promoted by the legendary Brian Crabtree and the ring lived in a FOH basement store between events. The ring light consisted of four 500W GLS industrial style circular open floods with white reflectors, joined together with conduit and chain. It was flown above the ring (erected in the front stalls) from the roof void on a spare low capacity winch and brailed using sash tied to the balcony slips into position above the ring. Being a 2kW load it happily plugged into the advance bar 15A sockets up top so it could be faded up and down as required. ISTR Brian didn't want to go to the expense of using a CSI for announcements and as most of the audience sat on the choir tiers at the back of the stage it wouldn't have worked very well anyway. I once asked Brian why they never televised from Newcastle (Saturday afternoons tended to come from Derby Assembly Rooms) and he said all the North Eastern Outside Broadcast vans were generally tied up with Gosforth Park races... The most ridiculous wrestling ring I ever saw was at Vauxhall Holiday Camp in Great Yarmouth where the ring built in the centre of the dance floor presented a hazard to the wrestlers due to truss and lanterns being at head bashing height.

...as well as battery replacement. I'd taken that into account. Pitched roof apex at 7.5m, eaves at 4m along with underside of steelwork. The roof truss construction includes a couple of horizontal sections at 6m on each frame that we have wondered what the lighting angle would be like but it is a little too impractical and whilst a mover would make sense, the exing moves already make a bit too much noise for concerts. A powered Mewp would definitely be nice but somewhat over the top even though I'm old and fat! After much deliberation, I prefer smallescope over shortescope...

I am involved with a volunteer music venue that has a flat floored hall & a dance floor. The roof steelwork is at 4m height and ladders are needed to access the lights, projector and speakers (as well as put up the Christmas decorations although unsurprisingly that didn't happen this year). They had been talking about getting a scissor lift or scaffold tower for some time and weighing up the pros and cons (safety, training, liability, cost, ease of use, storage space) but have now decided to get something called a BS8620 podium system from Alto which offers a 2.25m platform height, 4.25m working height. There are higher items available under the 2.5m threshold but they are more like stepladders with cages rather than a tower with ladder access. They also bring back unpleasant memories of being at the top of Tallescopes... Now I would have liked a category 3B MEWP (or even a push-along) but I would be the only person with a ticket to drive it and the need to put down boards on the dance floor would be a pain! Unlike MEWPs there is no obligation to be formally accredited for access platforms, just that the users and management are competent and follow properly risk assessed procedures. However I will recommend an on-site training session for as many volunteers as can be mustered post-lockdown and that the ladders get locked away. There is training & accreditation for PASMA low level work access platforms (formerly called PAS250) which is half a day although it can be combined with mobile access tower training (12m inside, 8m outside) for somewhat less than double the price. Despite being old and fat, I'm inclinded to go for the latter, if only to pass opinion on what the tradesmen get up to! I have to say that the first time I saw a Podium I thought it must have been designed by a committee as it seemed so way over the top for something I would have happily used a rostrum for when younger. However I am warming to them, especially for work that would otherwise need the Zarges and the three points of contact.

#1 was actually introduced as the early 90's Silhouette shutter pack (Sil 90 era) where all four blades were removable and reversible to get as broad a range of angles as possible. This was in answer to the Strand Cantata launch which had the fully revolving gate and made the Sil early 70's design look rather dated. (The original Sil shutter pack precluded removing the side blades as the four holes for the lens tube were laid out in a rectangle rather than a square. If you bought the retro-fit removable tube device with the new shutter pack you got a partially revolvable shutter pack as it was loose in the gate with a locking knob. The Current CCT still actually sell them and have photos on their site. CCT website photo here New Sil blades Old Sil blades Minuette blade #2 isn't a Minuette Profile blade. I don't think the Minuette blade design ever evolved, it was symmetrical other than a notch for getting it out of the pack and a cutout in the shaft to stop the handle getting too hot (and the blade going in too far).