Shez

I'm currently looking at a project to construct some clamshell style footlights. The mechanics are in hand but I'm in two minds about the electrics and would appreciate some advice from anyone who's been there or somewhere similar recently. Option 1 - mains. Conventional 240v LED dimmable lamps with a DMX dimmer that will do a good job of dimming smoothly to zero. Something like a SunDial Quad although that's rather more than I'd like to spend! T'internet is full of a £30 DIN rail mounted "DMX302" but I don't have high expectations of performance there! I'd like at least three channels for cheesy chases. Option 2 - ELV. DMX LED drivers from someone like LTech but I'm stuck with the "bulbs". Maybe I just don't know the right terminology to search with but I can't find much in the way of "driverless" "bulbs". The form factor isn't critical as it'll be masked within the clamshells but it would be nice to have something vaguely bulb-like. I completely understand why it wouldn't be sensible to manufacture a 24v lamp with a base normally used for 240v but that would make the assembly so much easier! I've seen a couple of items intended for use on houseboats but not dimmable. I'd prefer to go with Option 2 for the relative ease of dimming and the absence of mains from under people's feet. It's just the light sources that I'm stuck with. Any suggestions? Ideally "bulb" form factor, with a base that allows it to be unplugged for transport, 5-10W, dimmable with commonly available DMX LED dimmers, self contained so no need for external heat-sinks, colour temp below 3200K. Other approaches also welcome, along with some education on terminology as I seem to be lacking the vocabulary for this one!

I suspect the event organiser is perhaps a little misinformed about how microphones work. The signal picked up by a single microphone can easily be amplified to stadium rock gig levels. Splitting it to a second mixer input wouldn't do anything useful whatsoever. They may be used to seeing lecterns with two mics on them - this isn't to provide extra volume. It's partly redundancy - if one fails whilst the president is speaking, the other can be used instead, thereby avoiding a rather embarrassing incident! It's also to pick up a wider area - some people like to move around / stand to one side of the lectern / speak right to one side of a wide room then the other. Two mics (with either an auto-mixer or nimble fingers on faders) will get a slightly more consistent signal than one with those kinds of people speaking. To address the slightly wider question - Unless it's a very big room (more than maybe 500 people), a pair of well placed speakers can provide perfectly adequate coverage. For speech, they needn't be physically large or especially powerfull.

This crops up on a weekly basis on the FB groups. There's an expectation that CAT6+ is "better" than CAT5, which is of course true for Ethernet networking but not for AES50 which was designed around the characteristics of CAT5e. CAT6 has tighter twists and greater differences between the tightness of twists and hence the lay length. Across 75m+ of cable, that's enough to throw the signal timing characteristics perilously close to being out of spec. Hence it works for some people on some days but not for others.

As a thought experiment, consider a truss suspended on three points. Bump one motor just 1cm up or down. That significantly changes the loads on all of the points whilst being virtually indistinguishable by eye. Whatever you calculate in advance, the real world implementation can be subject to quite large variances.

I'm currently reading "Classical recording - a practical guide in the Decca tradition" which is a really comprehensive guide to all manner of recording scenarios. Their suggestions usually involve two pairs (one main and one more for ambiance) but for your situation, a single ORTF pair would be sensible. They suggest a height of 2.7m and about 1.6m in front of the players, angled vertically to favour those furthest away. If you can safely sling them, that would of course be the most visually unobtrusive otherwise a stereo bar on a single, suitably tall, stand is about your only option. The cameras won't like that though.

There's a place I often drive past (but have no affiliation with) called Power Towers who manufacture low level access equipment. Might be something useful in there?

3m above the floor is generally the minimum permissible height for any beams. PLASA has a safety guide here which is a useful starting point for your learning.

Without wishing to sound too doomy & gloomy, this might be one of those questions that if you have to ask, should you really be doing it? That said, you can always turn down the brightness of unit that is too powerful. Analogue will always be better than TTL as your range of colours is far superior. As long as you're following the usual laser guidelines about distance and clearance height above people's heads, you should be OK. However, unless your ceilings are particularly high, you might struggle to do so in a "house party" context. How high is your ceiling? How do you plan to control the laser?

You get 64 universes regardless of what hardware is or isn't connected. The Maxi Wing won't reduce that.

The fact that they're digital is irrelevant. Some radio mics do have dynamics processing akin to gating - I imagine it might be useful in very specific circumstances but it's certainly not something I'd want to use. I seem to recall Line6's digital radio mics have a similar feature but from my experience it's not useful so I've always disabled it. The fact that they're very cheap might have more of a bearing on the quality than the fact that they're digital.

vMix works very well with Zoom - you can pipe the main video output straight to it but need to use Virtual audio cable to get the sound in.

Looking through the list of venues close to me, there are a few surprises - many different types, including some I'd have thought were structurally similar to yours. And of course many that aren't charities.

Details available from the Arts Council here. Announced today, this is only round 1 - awards under £1 million.

I've pondered getting something like this for connecting mics or other sources to a phone. Via a DI I'm sure you could connect the output of a mixer with whatever processing you wanted.

I've had 10m cables work consistently with one output device but consistently not with a different one. No issue with shorter cables. You never know just how close you are to the digital cliff edge so I tend to err on the side of caution.

Beware of length limitations on HDMI cables though. I avoid more than five meters as it's pot luck whether it works consistently and reliably beyond that. Turn the volume down on the projector to avoid feedback ;)

Is it definitely the radio mic receiver itself that is picking up taxi transmissions? There are various other places in sound system installations that are more likely to be the culprit. What make / model is the radio mic system?

Perhaps not... The spec is very specifically shielded CAT5. CAT6 has a different structure - better for Ethernet but not for AES50. It'll generally work, albeit with a shorter maximum length than CAT5.

Have a look at the Z Cam E2C. Fantastic camera that will also live stream. You can use your existing lenses with an adapter. The whole range is quite modular which is both good and bad. You'll need to arrange for things like viewfinder / monitor which may break the budget.

Ideally you'd connect whatever kind of mic to the camera audio input as that'll guarantee sync. As soon as you use completely separate video and audio devices, you'll run in to sync troubles - video always has higher latency than audio.

Here's the beastie that does it. No pricing, sadly.

I've been a happy SCS user for many years now. On the few occasions I've been forced to use Qlab, I've hated every minute of it. Of course that's partly a familiarity thing. With SCS, everything is right there in front of you so it feels far more intuitive whereas in Qlab, the UI is cleaner but that means if you don't know where a function is or even if it exists, you're stuck. The developer of SCS is also amazingly responsive - he implemented a feature request I put in within a couple of days of asking! The video functionality in SCS may not be quite as refined as Qlab yet but it's improved in leaps & bounds over the last couple of years. The audio functionality is at least as good. I (slightly cynically) think that part of Qlab's success is down to it being (mostly) free and being about the only option on the platform that a lot of creatives typically already use.

Phantom to close on the West End "permanently". Link

I find vMix vastly better than OBS. It has a fully functioning 60 day free trial so you could install it well before the gig to try it out.

There's a bit more to that story than normally gets told. Pencils shed tiny fragments of graphite, which in zero gravity float around and can find their way in to electronics. Graphite is of course a conductor...