gareth

Can't help with the Vision10 software, but I have the same question as Bryson. What sort of theatre won't let a visiting production use their lighting console? That's a very strange thing. Are you working for the venue itself, or a production company which is hiring the venue?

Indeed, but a bit of a step-up price-wise from £30-worth of garden floods. Yes, it is. But the OP asked for a : so whatever they end up with is going to be quite a step up price-wise. So my answer still stands.

The GDS (now ETC) ArcSystem are the 'go-to' houselights of choice for many professional venues. Dimmable, bright, and a really nice light quality.

Red front panels were Tempus - Mini2's successor.

A panto I worked on for many years switched a few years back from pyro to non-pyro effects for the DS fairy/genie traps. It was a mistake, if you ask me. We tried CO2 effects and Geyser smoke machines in various configurations, and with various lighting/laser additions to try and make it a bit more punchy, but nothing does the job in quite the same way as 'proper' pyro.

I've never worked on the show. But my old boss (now sadly no longer with us) was the director of the original Stratford production which transferred to Broadway in 1988, and crashed and burned rather spectacularly (it closed three days after officially opening). He didn't like to talk about it....

If he still works with them, Steve Lloyd in tech support is the most helpful chap - I'm sure he'll be able to supply you with the info you need.

Here's the guy's "company" page... https://www.facebook.com/Elitesoundandvisual/

Hmm. Commented on the fact that his truss appeared to be hanging on ratchet straps, got two different replies as to why it was perfectly safe (with the details in one contradicting those in the other!), and now the post's deleted. "Elite Sound & Visual Ltd" appears to have been incorporated a year ago by one Scott Brain (who was 17 at the time)...

The official ETC forum on their site is also a good resource. I was talking about the ETC Eos group on Facebook, though, which is a different forum - not officially ETC-endorsed, but very active and you'll normally get an answer to your question, usually from Ueli, minutes after posting it!

In theory, changing the fixture type should maintain all your recorded data. If you want to be ultra-cautious about it and do it in a completely non-destructive way, use the Copy function in patch with the 'Plus Show' softkey to make copies of your already-programmed channels at higher numbers, then once you've proved it all works delete the old channels and move the new ones back down onto their numbers. That's probably unnecessarily complicated, thought! But even if it all goes to hell in a handcart (which it won't, if you're on a recent fixture library and the profiles are correct), just save your show as it currently stands before trying it out - that way, if you do end up in a mess, just roll back to your 'known good' saved showfile. (By the way, the ETC Eos Family Console Programmers group on Facebook is a waaaay better resource for this sort of query than the Blue Room. Even though you need to sift through the answers to almost every query in order to weed out the stupidly complicated - or just plain wrong - solutions posted by people who have little knowledge of the console but feel compelled to answer every question regardless!!)

It is indeed an odd one. On the face of it, while £500k isn't a whole lot of money in real terms when it comes to a project like this, it would probably go a very long way to getting the building back to a point where it could function safely as a venue again. It probably wouldn't stretch to improving anything of any significance, and I would imagine it wouldn't make much of a dent in the work which would be needed to the area around the venue either - but it would go a long way towards getting the theatre open again. A bit of internet research reveals that this character seems to live very much in a world of pure imagination (as the song goes!), and appears to be something of a serial offender when it comes to scamming people - he's been offering contracts of employment on productions which don't exist, selling tickets for shows which the supposed host venue has never heard of, and generally living his fantasy of being some sort of wunderkind theatre producer despite only recently being out of nappies. On the positive side, it sounds as though the project to reopen Theatr Ardudwy in the near future is still ongoing - but with KMD Production very much out of the picture!

Posting this here for the benefit of anyone who might be approached by this individual or his company. https://www.bbc.co.u...-wales-58023864

I don't think the Strand name will ever return to the all-dominating position it once held. They used to be the only option 'back in the day', and when the company was at its peak no-one could come close to unseating their grip on the market locally. Rightly so, too - just think of all the innovative stuff that's come out of the Strand stable over the years, from Light Console onwards. I used to be able to take a show out on tour and turn up at pretty much any theatre in the UK, wave a GeniusPro show disc at them, and that was that. The Genlyte acquisition in 2006, and a subsequent catalogue of terrible decisions, soon put paid to that. And then ETC's timing with the release of the brand-new Eos at the end of 2006 couldn't have been better - just at the point when the earliest Strand 430s were coming to the end of their useful life in 2006/7, everyone looked at Eos and said "Well, this new ETC console is so much better than that awful new Strand Palette thing, isn't it?". The rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

Not sure where to start with that one....

Maybe RDM as stated above. Or might be worth trying a slower DMX speed. What are you using to output DMX?

Repeating what's already been said - but another vote for 'getting a professional in' to have a look at what's going on, and advise on a way forward. While there's nothing which immediately leaps out as a concern with the rig itself, I'd definitely want to have a closer look at what's holding it all in the air. As stated, the installation (and I use that word hesitantly) of the dimmer packs is absolutely shocking. The other thing which I don't think anyone has mentioned so far is your statement that you've got the PAR64s working on one of the dimmer packs. PAR64s are generally 1000w lamps (there's a 500w variant but it's pretty rare to come across one in the wild). If you've put all six onto one dimmer pack, that's a 13amp socket overloaded by a factor of almost 100%. (The addressing scheme on the dimmers also looks a bit funky - as four-channel dimmers they should start at addresses 1, 5, 9 and 13, but yours seem to start at 1, 2, 3 and 4!)

Good luck. Post some links to the finished project when it reaches fruition!

James Eade is very good. Lamp & Pencil (Robin Barton) also offer some useful and relevant training courses.

Another vote for colour-coded cables in cabinets and patch bays. At my old venue we re-engineered our departmental network infrastructure about ten years ago (coinciding with the purchase of the new Eos lighting desks which, along with the ongoing shift to networked audio and video systems, meant a much-increased need). We were lucky in that, other than a link to the building's fibre internet connection, our infrastructure was completely separate from the building's telecoms and IT networking, so I could set it up in a way which worked for us without having to take anything else into consideration. In order to distinguish between lighting control, audio networking and general departmental IT, we bought a whole load of coloured patch cables and a few cassettes of corresponding coloured tape for the P-Touch labeller, and at every location where two or more of those things co-existed everything (patch cables, switches, semi-permanently-allocated tie lines, etc.) was colour-coded to keep it separate. It worked out pretty well.

A good DSM will very slightly anticipate any cue which has to hit a very specific timing point within a piece of music, line of dialogue, etc. They will also, probably subconsciously, get to know the difference in reaction times between one operator and another, and compensate for that. Listening to a really good DSM call a fast sequence of cues during a musical number or other busy sequence can be a very impressive thing to hear if you're not used to that sort of thing!

I only used coloured text because there's no way to do text on a coloured background in this forum software! Black text with a coloured highlight is definitely the way forward.

What a sheltered life (in tech theatre terms) you must have led... I think it's already been mentioned, but I'll mention it again - if you want an LX cue and a sound cue to happen simultaneously, best to combine them into one line with a single 'go'. E.g. - "LX 2 & SND 2 GO - Houselights & preset out, house music fade". (The colour-coding is a good touch, by the way - a big aid to clarity. If I'm ever single-person-op'ing LX and sound on a show from a script printed in black and white, I'll mark every cue with an appropriate highlighter pen to distinguish one from the other.)

I absolutely agree with the suggestion to use SND as abbreviation for sound. Look at any prompt copy marked up by an experienced professional DSM and that's what you'll see used (either that, or SQ as Jon says above). The apparent trend these days to use SFX, or even SX (yuck!) as an abbreviation for sound really makes my teeth itch. It's bad enough when I see it written - but I've sometimes heard young, inexperienced people calling a show using SX as a spoken 'abbreviation' for sound - why?!?! It's two syllables, and therefore takes longer to say than just saying the word 'sound'; and on a busy comms channel during a noisy show, the potential for SX being mis-heard as LX, or vice-versa, is huge.