BobJ

Our GOM Sold Out before 1st night! I ended up drawing the outlines of Armadillos onto plastic acrylic sheet used to cover fluorescent ceiling lights. Drew in some details and a friend cut them out with a lithography machine. Mounted them vertically and then used three mini spots on a cart (we could move during set up) to back light them. Worked a dream. Cost totally minimal.

Been a couple of years getting equainted with MH (Moving heads) and other none dimmer lamps. We've had a number of occasions when the lamp(s) went berserk! They were changed out and later tested. I found that every "Rogue" lamp upon testing was in fact OK! two things: Most faults were in the DMX cabling (did we always use a terminator?). And on a couple of occasions found a lamp on the floor had been mysteriously changed to 'Master' mode. Now here is the thing: Those Wireless DMX dongles can work both ways. IE if the lamp is producing 'master' signals and the "Reciever" sees no DMX input it will then TRANSMIT. Ouch! Every other wireles dongle will 'see' two signals and the whole place go nuts. Moral. Check in right mode. Dont use wireless dongles unless absolutely necessary. And 1st thing when seeing a problem, check, replace DMX cabling. Probably old hat to more more exprienced techs. But hope this heps newbies

We are putting on Grumpy Old Men and director wants 3 fuax 'Ice Sculptures' of Amardillos! Has anyone done anyhting like this or has any ideas?

I'm looking for a Music Analysis program to run under LINUX that will output OSC commands. I want to use these to control our ETC EOS, Element 2 lighting console. Something similar to the Windows "Sound2 light" om Github.

A tempt test showed it was GL caused by the two power outlets being a long way apart. We have a PYLE Mini Hum Eliminator - GL Isolator coming tomorrow. Thanks for the ideas and comments.

We are projecting animations onto the cyc. The MP4's have audio we want to pipe to the desk. When I plug the laptop output sound into the board the sound is great. But as soon as I plug the HDMI cable in we get a horrendous earth loop hum! I checked the projector and sound board power cables are grounded properly though one is FOH and the back stage. I removed the laptop charger but his made no difference. Ideas' suggestions welcome. I have to go in tomorrow early to fix this and not sure where to start.

Anyone have any real experience with BMD's StagePlayer software?

We are going to fly a table with two people on weighing about 750lbs. We have used packs of weights we put on the platform to counterbalance the ropes weights. Wondering if anyone had flown heavy objects and what the mechanics are, you have used?

Thanks all. I will certainly look up that tape. I've cobbled together a simple "Electrode" to show director tonight. I was going to put a play ball on top stuffed with LED tape and make it pulse dark red! Cant work out how to paste an image here. My Bad

I want to make some "electrodes'" to energize the monster! So far have a couple of 3" x 60" tough cardboard tubes painted black. And, (cut from kids pool "Noodles") some doughnut like sleeves painted white to look like insulators. Several of these are mounted around the black tubes. So far so good. Now, I want to put some bright lights between the insulators that I can control independently to 'chase' the light up and down. Originally was just going to wrap three LED tapes around the tube in a spiral but this doesn't give me the chase I want. Question: What could I mount between the insulators? My only thought so far is to construct some mini LED Panels by laying several short segments of LED tape side by side ad glued to a piece of 3" x 3" cardboard. I'd have a fair bit of soldering to do but that's OK. So any other (simpler) ideas would be welcome. Just imagine watching the scene where they energies the beast and seeing these poles pass 'current' up and down!

We want to illuminate a path when an actor walks on it. We can't put anything on the floor. Overheads might give us shadowing etc. So, I was thinking of painting the path with fluorescent paint and then shine a black light to illuminate it? Do you think this would work? Has anyone 'lit' a path and how did you do it please?

So, to put this to neatly to bed the version of SCS I was using was quite old. After updating the fades were easy to setup and ran very well. Animation continued during the fades. And, SCS can 'send' any cue to 4 different screens so with a uss/hdmi adaptor and my laptop's own hdmi I can send cues to the front or the back back projector. So we are good to go.

Ah! Unfortunately you have just run across the last person in the world that doesn't use that service. However, my SCS was several versions in arrears. After installing the latest version the loops and fades (whilst still animating still running) work a treat. So I'm all set to go. Thanks.

I used SCS for Music Man about 3 years back and just resurrected it for The Adams Family. But I'm having a hard time finding out how to fade between cues. I'm running a looping video clip in one cue and then, when I press Go I want it to fade over to the next cue which is a black image between scenes. Any help appreciated.

Lots of good stuff here. Thanks. And that bit about not being able to dim the panel LED reminded me of a large hall I did a gig in that had one of these architectural control setups and LED house lights. And, when we wanted to dim the house lights we got to about 20% and kaput! I'm going to go back to a 2" deep wood frame backed by some of that AC ducting fiber board with the silvered surface. I'll run LED tape around the inner periphery, cover the top with semi translucent show curtain and finish off with my 'window frame' mask on top. This can have some uneven areas but as we're emulating low intensity candle or lamp light it should be OK. Just have a couple of weeks to open so will continue to look at the panels for use later. Thanks all.

We want to use some LED ceiling panels as backlights for some faux windows. Wondering if anyone has used (rewired) these panels to work with a DMX PWM 0-12v controller (typically used for LED tape)?

Right. Not too hard to see that. But it isn't allowing new members. Try it.

Just go a QuickQ 20 for our bijou theater and think its a great bang for the buck. The Chauvet, ChamSys and Luna guys here in the US have been helpful but I would like to be able to converse with some regular users to swap experiences. Unfortunately ChamSys have closed down their user forum and moved all traffic to Facebook. I do not use (or ever will use) Facebook so feeling kind of left out. Any QuickQ users out there I would be glad to hear from.

Totally awesome. Thank you. I'm off hunting

We want to be able to move a heavy platform quickly and easily. Sometime back I was given some details of suppliers of pneumatic equipment we could use to "force down some wheels for the move. I lost all those notes! Ideas welcome.

Thank you for the reply. And in passing noted the moderators views on advertising though I also think the contributor was trying to be helpful and he did ID himself as a rep. I've had "advise" from folks who don't admit to any commercial interest. But back to this post: No theatre tracking: Agree. Acualy we use "Cue Only" on the big boards. Tend to keep stage 'look' up and modify for next cue etc. So this didn't occur to me. But it would be a concern for real 'Trackers" Easy to patch and get things going: Yep - apart from the one channel one fixture limitation I agree. If I wanted to control say 3 fixtures from one control channel I'd have to address them the same or perhaps kludge it with a group. Updating things "live" in the middle of a show can be a bit fiddly: Hmm! My experience is only with the software run at home (Designer) as theater is closed so I can't get the board. I find the suite pretty responsive but this may be after several software upgrades. Don't get me wrong it still has problems. I can't rename fixtures right now but hopefully this is limited to the PC Designer suite and not the real console. Layout view is really nice for arranging small rigs: On the money. I wouldn't want to run our large stage with it but having said that, recent experience with another local theater's Strand NEO costing a whole more would steer me to the QuickQ if I had no choice. From the little I know of MagicQ I would have to say comparing to the QuickQ would be like us using the ETC Element 2 as a comparison. No competition! But in closing the little QuickQ stands up for itself admirably in my books. But, the big question now is when will the theater re-open? I'm going stir crazy.

Wow, seeing these I thought they looked like the plugs used on the big patch board for the BerkeyColortran “CRD” line of Dimmers and Controllers (Circa 1975). Looking very closely it looks like there may be a small cap inside each plug to prevent arcing when plugged into the high voltage socket.

Been looking for a reasonably low priced console for our smaller theater as the aged ETC Expression 3 is showing signs of senility! I've used a few of the big boy's consoles and become somewhat spoiled to touch screen, Color wheels, Encoders yada yada i.e. expensive tastes. Then I came across the Chamsys QuickQ. This little sucker packs a punch. Not up to lighting the Rolling Stones on tour for sure but it will do everything we need for a 100% LED 100 seater theater +++ It does have a few quirks and limitations like the 20 faders (Q20) are restricted to the 1st 20 patched fixtures. Bummer? Not really: you can patch more than 20 and then access them both on the layout screen and within the intensity screen which can be paged. It works well in 'busking' mode for those bands on stage and in 'Theater' mode for a regular linear cue play. One thing that does separate it from the more expensive jobbies is you can only patch a fixture (control channel) to a single DMX address. And yet the darn thing has built in networking, RDM etc. Go figure. We would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experienced console. Ya'll keep safe out there!

The EOS software I run at home does output Artnet/sACN so this looks very good for monitoring that. Unfortunately the board I'm testing is just DMX which limits the tools I can use. But thanks for the input here.