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?

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

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 :

DMX controllable white, tunaeble white, or RGBW fixture that has a similar output to a 500w halogen flood

Post seems to have vanished.....

(looks like it's been taken down - I wonder why....)

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

Thanks Chaps

 

Really useful. I assumed as much, but never assume and all that.

I will of course save / revert if needed. Good to know the etc forum is nice and active. Just didn't have time this morning to an create account.

 

 

Thanks again! :-)

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!!)

That is a bizarre story - although when I read about the plans initially I was suprised that they seemed to think they could get the place open for only £500k so it always seemed dodgy

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

Strand went from world leader in controls (there wasn't a venue on the planet that at one time didn't beat a path to Strands door for desks & dimming) to not having an original control of it's own design (I think Genius on the 300/500 platform was the last). They let their lead slip to ETC & MA and appeared to lose the will to offer mid range but powerful hardware to control fixtures leaving a hole for Zero88 to slide in with very innovative and intuitive software (Jon Hole has done some stunning work on that).

 

The Strand/Botex link was never going to work longterm except by providing some low cost hardware for entry level users but FLX eclipsed even that - I'm not sure where Botex is in the new company (if it figures at all) but I do know that the Zero factory in Wales is now producing PCB's again as they bring production (and not just assembly) back in house so I suspect that at least by buying Strand, people can be content their desks are built in the UK.

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.

Strand & Zero88 are now "sister" companies under the same owner so it's very likely that it's a rebadged FLX.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

At school we had a Strand 2KW fresnel, our circuits were fused at 7A (No idea of characteristics in thse days) I don't recall ever blowing a fuse even when it was paired with a 500W. All of our cabling was 3/0.029" and 5A plugs/sockets.

 

More recently I've run HMI's on 4A fused dimmer packs without issue.

 

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

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!)

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.

do DSM's call cues fractionally in advance of the necessary timing, to allow for any possible ears - brain - fingers delay? Or is that period of time so microscopically short that it can be discounted?

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 rather like your use of coloured text.

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.

Never seen/heard SND used for sound effects.

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.