gareth

Ah, Cadac desks. Blurring the line between sound equipment and furniture. Lovely!

The three 'rules of tools' : 1. Always use the right tool for the job. 2. The right tool for the job is always a hammer. 3. Any tool can be used as a hammer.

Colorsource PARs are pretty good without a diffuser/lens in front of them. However, my experience is that as soon as you drop one of the stock diffusers in front of the beam the flare and lack of any sort of definition to the beam is a real killer.

Andy Syposz is also a member here, and is one of the very few people who might be able to point you in the right direction for this. But as David says .... good luck!

I try not to think about that! It might be almost three decades ago, but even now I can watch that DVD and not fail to be impressed by what Marc Brickman and his team achieved.

There's a place for even the oldest of technology. Just watch the Pink Floyd "Pulse" concert video - some of the beautiful-looking stuff that Marc Brickman does with the Telescans simply wouldn't be possible with a moving head unit.

051 334 8991 - haven't seen that phone number for a while! Lancelyn Lighting on the Wirral. Long gone - what an Aladdin's Cave that place was. Looks like part of their old hire stock.

Luckily, there are going to be lots of Gios in good supply in rental stocks for many years to come 😀.

I'm with you both on that one. I'd take an old-skool Gio over an @5 any day of the week. I've had this conversation with quite a few people, and it does seem to be one which splits the room fairly equally.

The layout options have got a bit better with 3.2 - you can incrementally add/remove columns, rows or splits as well as selecting the predetermined layouts as you do now. But not dragging windows out MA-style. Maybe this is something which will change in the near future, though, with the advent of such large touchscreens across the majority of the console range.

The OLED keys I like. They'll do nicely to replace the labels I have to stick next to the inter-screen macro buttons (so very 20th-century!), or the thin strip of direct-selects for my important macros which always eats away annoyingly at the side of one of the built-in touchscreens. I can see myself finding some really useful things to do with the new little touchscreen just above the keypads, too. Force touch - well, yeah, sure, but who actually touches a touchscreen without wanting it to do the thing it's supposed to do when you touch it? Why would you need to touch it, then touch it harder to make it do the thing? (This is where someone tells me the reasons why they'd want it to do exactly that - but I can't think of a situation where I'd find it useful.) What I want to know is, can this be disabled? Or at least have its sensitivity varied? The way I interact with a touchscreen on a console tends to be quite gentle, and the briefest of touches (which is surprising, considering I'm sometimes told I sound a bit brutal when I'm going at a rate of knots on the hardware keypads!), so I'd be annoyed if I had to modify the way I move to make my touchscreen presses more deliberate and forceful than I do now. I'll reserve judgement until I have a go on one... I like the new mini-encoders - will be especially good for colour mixing, framing shutters, multiple indexing gobo wheels. Bigger touchscreens. Yes. What's not to like there? Shame to have lost five faders off the model touted as the Gio replacement. Yeah, I know the new Frog wheels (thanks, Matt!) are going to acquire the ability to become discrete faders - but sometimes it's nice to have a page of 10 right there under your fingers. I'm a bit more excited than I probably ought to be about the little 'book lights' in the console end cheeks! Looking forward to getting my hands on one.

Personal experience is that ETC are reluctant to deal directly with service requests - they prefer you to go through a dealer. Unless the desk needs any complex work, you might be able to find an ETC dealer with a service department which could deal with it in-house? If you're feeling particularly adventurous, it might be worth considering doing it yourself (depending on what you're classing as 'strange behaviour', of course - maybe explain a bit more?!). You've missed the boat for the hardware upgrade to allow Ion Classics to run Win7 now - that deadline was months ago. But you can still push the software right up to v2.9.2 even on an older WinXP console. In terms of firmware, the update process is the same, you'll be able to see in the shell which bits of firmware need updating. If you're thinking about opening it up to hoover the dust out, check connectors, etc. - it's do-able but be aware that Ion Classics are absolute pains in the butt to open - nowhere near as simple as just undoing a couple of screws and opening up a clamshell like on the rest of the range! ETC have published a guide to opening up an Ion Classic - if you can't find it to download on their website, let me know, I think I still have a copy of it floating about on a hard drive somewhere.

Old Light Palette? Do you mean the really old one from the 70s/80s? The Light Palette 90? Or the Light Palette from about 15 years ago? The thread title mentions 'memory stick', so I'm guessing the latter - but...?

Terminators? Well, on the whole I don't use them. That's to say, when I cable a rig, they don't get put in. But whenever I'm proddy LX on a show or a tour, there are always a few terminators in the spares box just in case. If I encounter any issues which might be DMX-related, the first thing that happens is that a terminator gets put on the end of the line to see if that solves the problem. Most times it doesn't, and the issue lies elsewhere - but it's a really quick thing to try, and it might just work. Not exactly a 100% 'by the book' approach - but it's served me well for the last three decades, so I won't be changing now!

a) Three-pin 😡 b) Someone needs to buy him a square! I don't think any of those connectors are at the same angle as any of the others 😆

Sometimes you can get away with striding out into a busy road without looking, and make it to the other side unscathed. It's an incredibly bad idea, though, because the chances of it ending badly are high. The same applies to passive DMX splitting.

Sunstrips might indeed be a good bet. They're pretty 'old hat' these days, so you might be able to find some (rental or purchase) which work for you budget-wise. There's definitely something about the look of a tungsten lamp used for eye candy which you just don't get from any LED alternative.

Howie Battens is the name you're looking for! (Or L&E battens if you want to end up with something that's far too big and far too heavy!)

2" PVC tape is, as has been mentioned, the standard for making up touring looms for, e.g., LX bar feeders and breakout looms. Take your time, make them neatly, tape them well (cut, don't stretch) and use good-quality tape, and they'll last a long time. Unless you really have the time and inclination to take all the connectors off one end of each cable, braid and heat-shrink them all, then put the connectors back on...

Anyone know of a product that produces the same effect as NeonFlex or Non-Neon, but which will do sharp (close to right-angle) corners rather than the curves which NeonFlex has to follow to get around a corner?

You're right that no production actually took place here. But it was a scam nonetheless, and if he'd had the intelligence to carry it through without being found out, who knows how far he'd have got? Anyway, the good news is that he didn't have the required intelligence, and was rumbled before he managed to take it too far.

I beg to differ. A quick Google for the activities of Kallum O'Sullivan and his 'company' KMD Productions at Theatr Ardudwy in Harlech last summer are proof that there are a very small minority who are simply out to defraud.

They only become serial non-payers if people let them get away with it. It might only be a small debt, and you might have no intention of ever working with that particular client again - but my take on it is that, aside from the debt they might owe to me personally, it's just as much about those who come after me. They might be less experienced youngsters at a much earlier stage of their career, lacking in the confidence and thickness of skin which might be required to drag a bad payer over the coals repeatedly until they see the light and do the right thing.

Have to take issue with this. No-one should ever not get paid if payment was - as it should always be - part of the deal when taking on any engagement. As long as you've got something in writing - on paper or on an e-mail - noting what the agreement was, there's no way you should ever adopt the position of shrugging your shoulders and thinking "ah well, I'll just write this one off to experience". There's very specific legislation in place (search for Late Payment Of Commercial Debts) to enable you to take all necessary steps to recover what you're owed, including adding interest to outstanding payments and adding the costs of debt recovery to your claim.

We've all done jobs like this one. If it's really getting so bad that it's affecting you mentally, then walk away. Otherwise, grit your teeth, push on through, get to the end, and run away very fast. As others have said, a reference from someone of such insignificance in the business means so little that it's no real loss if you don't get one. You can still put it on your CV - and it gives you something to talk about in future job interviews when they ask you the cliched old question about "tell us about a time when you overcame a challenging situation" 😆 Just make sure you get paid what you're owed - because it sounds as though this might be a situation where you may need to fight for it. Get your invoice in on time. Make sure it clearly states your payment terms. Brush up on the Late Payment Of Commercial Debts laws so that you're in a good position if they get difficult. If payment isn't forthcoming, push harder and harder until you get it.