ImagineerTom

Everyone’s sharing data plus I have very low level involvement with Butlins

The palladium test is the first of 4 planned, each with different setups front & back. The idea is to try reducing spacing / cleaning gradually and produce cold hard data about not just what works virilogically but also audience comfort, technical practicality, financially. For example we now know exactly what the demand for a socially distanced concert is, we have data on what sales levels are for 100% contactless sales, we know what presales levels are. Also the old trick of invisible uv dies was used so that there’s also data produced on touch / recontamination points in the building. Similar stepped stages are planned for the Manchester comedy club & the various Butlins venues which are wizzing through a variety of formats and operational models to see what’s practical but also where public acceptance sits. Remember right now 80% of theatre patrons say they wouldn’t want to go to a show at the moment because of safety so the process is as much about finding ways to communicate the safety and win audiences back as it is about actually making real changes.

We’ve imported some kit from China over the last few months. Whilst normally it’s 28 days port to port in reality the fastest shipment we have received was 2 Months and quite a few shipments Are currently 3 months and still waiting delivery

Current H&S guidance for other leisure sectors that have re opened revolve around either ensuring social distancing & PPE / washing so that transmission is almost impossible or bubbling groups of staff so that it's much harder for infection to get in and in the unlikely event that it does you can contain it quickly and easily. ie whole orchestra bubble as one, whole company and stage crew bubble as one.

Like all generic Chinese products- it varies. Some have the receiver next to the LED, others have it on a 6” bit of wire coming out the back.

We tend to have 4 rgb floods around a kingpole so have one (Addressable) IR repeater on each kingpole making all those lights do the same thing. On some tents there’s just an ir receiver that we point the original remote at to repeat out to each kingpole. On others I’ve made up a multi channel master remote control using pure arduino code that transmits out to relay units that convert and transmit the IR. In that forum link I sent someone has worked out the ir codes and done a lot of the legwork so that in theory you could just chop the ir receiver off and replace with a wireless receiver (which could be addressable) enabling you to have wireless control over individual lights and open up the possibility of having sequences controlled by a master unit. The “secret” to arduino control is to devise an “output” that converts from arduino world into whatever control route you choose for the lights (either ir transmitter or pumping codes directly into the light) then devise another arduino gimmick that you use as your input - anything from simple IR reader / broadcaster right through to a proprietary controller interface that has programs in it. If you design the system like that then you can take advantage of the many ready made arduino sketches and modules to give you options like wireless / WiFi / 433htz communication between the modules as well as enabling you to create alternative master control units that have direct control or which can take DMX signals - again there’s ready made sketches and modules that you can just boot on once you’ve got your core architecture in place. I’ve got a busy few days but later in the week I’ll dig out a spare RGB light and see if I can bash together a sketch code that works with the hack suggestion that bypasses the existing control system. T

There’s loads of arduino sketches for IR control, extender, interface etc which basically enables you to take your cheep generic ir controlled light and control it using an arduino. Here’s a nice video of how to use ir And a whole arduino project discussion where people have reverse engineered the common floodlights and worked out the control signals https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=563067.0

DCMS have suddenly gone all-in on Butlins for some reason. The official sanctioned trial of circus is taking place there, as is outdoor concerts and indoor performances. Expect announcements of the results early august. Some would suggest there is no plan and the government are just making random announcements and lurching from scheme to scheme without any properly considered plan.......

It was a serious recommendation in early versions of the guidance...

We've looked fairly regularly at controllable RGB floods for the outside of tents - there just doesn't seem to be anything DMX controllable at a sensible price point or angle and we've always ended up going back to the d0mestic style RGB floods with IR or wireless control and bashing together little arduino units / repeaters to control and synchronize them as needed. It's not a sexy high spec solution but in 10 years of trying we still find that a £20 IR controlled unit and a £10 arduino controller interface works out more practical and cost effective.

I don't want to stray towards politics again, but one thing is clear: This new funding is not intended to make good the losses of the past few months, it's to try to stop venues from closing in future. So it's a very strong indication that the government do not think that normal performances will be able to resume any time soon. Also buried in the announcement is that funding will be administered by the Arts Council and that part of the application will " have to prove how they contribute to wider economic growth." That means it's not going to be the automatic qualification process used for previous schemes and that applications are going to be much more along the lines of existing arts council applications with local impact and cultural quality being much more important than need or financial viability.

I have been shocked at just how bloated some venues staffing is - there's a few mid-scale receiving house only venues with 200 employees and a couple of quite well known receiving house's with 100 full employees plus their network of show related casuals. At those sorts of numbers it's no wonder they're going bust.

The "sale" here was of the entire business and staff as a going concern with one of the criteria that the bulk of the staff and financial responsibilities be taken on by the new owner - right now no-one is going to spend a million quid on some leases / rental agreements and a potential 2 year wage underwriting for a complex that won't be even close to profit for several years.

UV light only effectively cleans the surfaces it directly hits. On something like a microphone with foam inserts, switches, nooks, crannys and internal voids I can't think how you could possibly write a risk-assessment that says buying an expensive gadget that uses an un-vetted process that has multiple easily spotted problems with it is a better risk management choice than dunking a mic into a $10 jug of IPA alcohol? Also, don't forget to clean / dunk the cables too - they get a lot more touching than you'd think.

Why not an alcohol dip? IPA is relatively cheep and (almost) endlessly reusable. Keep it in a Tupperware box with a lid and just dunk items in it for a few seconds.

Theatre on the old model won’t be back on mass scale until at least next spring (and even that depends more on public confidence than realities of treatment or venue modifications), events with some level of distancing, hand sanitiser and thought about pinch points will start happening from late August. In Asia the WORST social distancing layout for internal venues is blocking out alternate rows then insisting people leave one seat between groups; there’s other venues that are using all rows and the one seat gap between groups (based on data that transmission tends to be face to face) and as well reported there are venues that don’t have any reduction / distancing because they have robust test-track-trace schemes. Circus’s across Europe are kicking off now with various levels of distance and layout, lots of open-air events planned for across the summer too - these will provide the test bed / real world data for traditional venues about what actually works physically and what audiences are prepared to do. The big panto operators are not making any public statements until September but are all working on the basis they will have panto this season and that they might have to juggle performance times (doing 3 performances of a 90min panto with reduced capacity instead of 2 performances full house) to get the numbers through the door to make it viable.

There's no point even starting down these paths - traditional venues in Asia looked at this 3 months ago and never got it off the ground, a couple of circus's in central europe kicked it about to try and find a solution 2 months ago; all of them gave up because every way they looked at it it didn't matter how much you santised physical things with magic light or magic fog it only takes one infected person to steady themselves using the banister / handrail or to cheer loudly and you've instantly put a couple of hundred people (who were told the magic technology made them safe) to be exposed and at risk. There's no mystery or investigation to be done as to what process's are the best available; the research is complete, there's literally a billion people taking part in the experiment and establishing that washing hands, a bit of distance and a $1 face mask provides safety levels hundreds of times higher than any technology has managed.

Some grandparents buy tickets for panto but overall the stats are that parents buy the majority of panto tickets - there’s strong cross venue data that they buy them just after spending time with their kids as a way to placate themselves - ie Christmas Day evening there’s a big spike in sales, after October half term there’s a spike in sales all because parents dread being stuck in the house with their kids :-p

It scares me that the recent cross-venue survey about opening theatres suggests that 75% of theatre attendees are 50+ (ie at risk group) - the venues that will thrive after this are the ones who work on unlocking the younger demographics not the ones that focus on their existing market who (by definition) will be the last people who can safely spend 3 hours in a 100 yr old building breathing in strangers air

I don't have specific data but in my experience there's a wide range of units and lenses with different angles available, also their compact size means they can be mounted in places and ways other cameras can't. There's SO MANY different units and apps out there now I couldn't give a definitive answer on how they last longterm self booting but I can confidently say there's literally thousands of people trying to do what the OP is doing and creating app's and interfaces to make it happen with micro-cameras that my instinct is that this sector is more likely to have the answer off the shelf than the relatively sedate world of CCTV?

Surely this is a situation for a gopro or clone - they're available with a range of lenses / focal lengths and over the past few months the software and cables to patch them in to streaming / broadcast systems have become very common.

It’s not about demanding that venues can open; it’s about the fact we cannot open and that (despite multiple government statements to the contrary) there’s NO support provided (less that half of companies in the leisure sector actually qualified for the hospitality and leisure grants & support schemes) plus there isn’t any meaningful dialogue coming from the government. They are talking to major retailers, airlines, holiday companies, broadcasters - all those guys have timelines and information and projections. The theatre / events / circus sector haven’t got any of that and it’s literally only this week that the government have announced intentions to begin dialogues to outline possible future procedures to consider producing a roadmap to begin a route to maybe thinking about possibly putting a plan together. It’s really telling that every single person in the events and theatre world who has had (very limited) interaction with the government / politicians are now going public and saying things are really really bad...

There's some people playing with it - it's largely ""theatre"" though as (like contact based cleaning) it only kills virus's on the surface so however much you fog a venue or humans one infected person walking in to the room and coughing all over their neighbor will still pass it on just as much as if you hadn't fogged.

The point of the post was to hilight the fact that with droves of theatres with their doors shut doing NOTHING, and consultations for redundancies, I know which venue I would rather be working in.... The one that's going to re-open in June... This shows the difference between venue operators who think outside the box, change the way they do things to keep the wheels turning and to stop redundancies. Standing still with your doors closed and waiting to see what happens with other venues isn't the way to get your way out of this unfortunately. Just to remind you that public gatherings of any sort are currently prohibited so even if a venue had a kick ass solution or idea ready to go right now they still can't open because the law expressly prohibits it. There are changes to the regs coming in July which provide some scope for imagination hence why there has been this sudden flurry of announcements. As others have pointed out; most theatres are restricted by their physical structure. Storyhouse has loads of secondary spaces, is light & open plan and is designed with modularity and flexibility. Oxford Playhouse (to pick the latest venue to announce redundancy consultations) despite being a relatively new build venue is more like a Matcham structure - 99% of the building is the auditorium (it's about 6ft walk from the pavement to being inside the rear stalls) and the terrace and slopes of the auditorium mean that the seating layout can't be tweaked. Roll in to this the fact that the guidance about what regs and requirements apply are changed almost weekly (and apparently on a whim to distract from bad news stories) which makes it impossible for most venues to commit to the huge financial costs of re-opening. We are in talks with a couple of producers about getting Theatre Tent tours up and running for the back half of this year because we (literally) rebuild the auditorium in every location and so they can commit to a tour now knowing that when the regs and recommendations keep changing we can modify the venue to comply; something that is impossible in a fixed venue. Also, and I can't stress this enough, the complete lack of informed guidance / understanding / support / wisdom from the government (and in particular the DCMS) is causing huge problems. There's a draft report due out next week that we had a tiny bit of input in which included recommendations that seating layouts be physically changed (impossible in 95% of venues), that non descript "technology" was going to provide solutions, orchestras would have to be socially distanced from each-other and that musicals could re-open but without any singing in them.

I don’t know the broader technical implications but I do know that the bbc time code pips on the hour are only accurate on FM broadcast because when transmitted over DAB the lag can be seconds in some case and varies because of different receiver decoding processes. Since shifting audio 1/4 of a second out sync can make something unwatchable I would expect that trying to encode, transmit and decode through DAB is a non starter for a paid drive in movie experience