Hi all my first post on Blue Room despite being a lighting technician for nearly a decade. I have only in the last 6 years touched lighting desks, but have been working for a fairly old school gaffer that mostly used fairly basic 24/48 channel desk. However one of our jobs a tv show that has been running for 15+ years has for a long time run on a strand GSX
The functionality of the gsx is perfect for the job as we use around 75 channels and have various scenes programmed into sub masters. One scene is the practicals around 17-20 fixtures that are on all of the time at set levels, but we sometimes dim them as a batch or quickly adjust manually using the key pad, then with out having to leave a live mode or do anything too complicated and can amend these levels on the sub-masters page.
For other scenes on submaster we have groups of 2-5 lamps,(key lights and back lights) we can bring these up in groups as required and agin quickly adjust lamps by manually on the Key pad and if happy then save these levels in the sub masters page for the group without having view all the active lamps on the other subs at the same time. Finally the ability to edit non live sub masters while still having instant control of the other subs is very useful, if we audit have to bring down a back light on position for example.
And of course viewing all this on an external monitor makes life easy.
this set up is as also fairly simple to get your head around and in an emergency if the technician is held up in traffic or something then you can easily on the phone tell someone non technical which sub masters to bring up for a scene.
Many other consoles I have looked at require all the lamps for a scene to be dialled in either live or in blind and then hit save, which is too cumbersome to quickly tweak levels on the fly.
I desperately want to upgrade to a more modern desk for purposes of reliability/ spares and repairs but we work on very very tight budgets and very tight timescales, if we where to change to a new desk would need to be swapped over in a short window, an hour or so max to re program the 24 sub masters and be good to go.
I wonder if anyone knows at a desk with similar characteristics that also won’t break the bank?
many thanks in advance if any one can help out on this.
Pete.
