Moving Heads

[scottbramall]

Hi all,

 

I'm trying to persuade my college to a few moving heads.

As you can probable guess budget is tight (unknown how tight)

 

at the moment Ive just got to get some ideas of prices and tell college why we need them.

 

Were wanting (or I am) some sort of profile, with rotating gobos, and if possible at least one inter-changable gobo

 

So,

Does anyone have any recommendations, we not talking cheap I-moves or anything like that.

 

Thanks

Scott Bramall

 

s050569@longleypark.ac.uk

[TommyToad]

River (pilot or whatever they are called), Robe stuff, Highend. Just browse around, I never heard of any moving head with anything under 5-6 gobos anyway :)

well, moving head in the senctence it's a spot.

[scottbramall]

River (pilot or whatever they are called), Robe stuff, Highend. Just browse around, I never heard of any moving head with anything under 5-6 gobos anyway :)

well, moving head in the senctence it's a spot.

 

Do you have any details or a link?

Cant find anything on it

 

Do robe have a website?

 

Thanks for your help by the way

[david.elsbury]

The first one in that list is Pearl River. Their product line is the Pilot range of heads.

 

 

Do robe have a website?

Have you tried Google? :)

 

BTW, I have to ask, why do you want/need to get MH's for a college?

Have you got a suitable desk in place to control them?

Have you got a great generics rig as a base?

What's your maintenance budget like? When the lamps blow in the MH's, are they going to sit there for a year because no one wants to allocate funding to purchase a new lamp?

 

At the moment we need to get prices and tell college why we need them

And why do you need them?

 

David

[scottbramall]

We do a lot of events such as battle of the bands, singing and dancing. The main lights we have at the moment are par cans and Fresnel's (sp?) and there's only so much you can do with them.

 

Board - Zero, Frog 88, so controlling thems no problem

 

There's no budget for maintenance because its a new course and college. We can afford to replace the lamps as we have a teacher who's great at getting us things.

[J Pearce]

Spend some money on profiles if you have none.

 

Then if you want movement get some gobo rotators.

Movers are big beasts, that require a lot of infrastructure and maintenance, you would be better off hiring them when you need them.

That way if something goes wrong its the hire company's problem, not yours.

[scottbramall]

We'd prefer to buy them (don't no why) college doesn't hire . (I currently own (I'm 16 so moneys tight) two funky daddy-0s great cheap and ideal for beginners (which, to be honest, we are). They do us fine but for some reason college would prefer to spend more. Just trying to get some ideas of what people use and recommend.

[dosxuk]

If you don't have a maintainence infrastructure in place you have two options -

 

1: spend the money on something proven and reliable e.g. another 24 pars or a few decent profiles, or

2: buy the movers, and in a year and a half have them sat on the floor broken because nobody budgeted for them to be repaired

 

We have over 30 moving lights in our venue. Almost once a day one of them needs attention of some sort. In a college who is going to do this? Moving lights require a lot more than new bulbs. If you need moving lights for something, hire them in.

[scottbramall]

What other maintenance do they require? Were only looking at buying 2 (four if we can) Most likely from Stage LX, would they maintain them if they do break (at a price obviously) . They will be well maintained. (They'll be a lot of sulking students if they don't work :) )

[paulears]

unless your college are very unusual, the money you are talking about will be a capital items budget item, not BSME or whatever your college call it - hence why hiring will be out. It is usual nowadays for the finance beanies to ask everyone to put in a bid for next years kit. So your teacher gets a quote, maybe, let's say £2500. S/he puts the bid in, and the total for the college comes to about twice what they have to spend. They then prioritise. Everything not 'essential' gets thrown out, leaving everybodies vital bits. Your lights may be up against the engineering dept who want a new computer controlled widget. Your HOD argues it out against their HOD and somebody wins.

 

The idea that you have a budget with this sort of dosh just sitting in it is very unlikely nowadays. So you might get this is September, IF your department make a good case - and believe me, unless your teacher really understands what you want it for, the engineers get their widget!

[scottbramall]

somehow, and I don't no how our colleges budget works, we should get the money as long as we have a reson why we need them - and we have but im not going into all that. Put it this way, they've just forked out for a massive screen (motorised) for the drama room. :)

 

 

 

ANYWAY, getting back, what lights are recomended (cheap, decent, and well built)

[dwh]

Board - Zero, Frog 88, so controlling thems no problem

Zero88 Frog? This does not have moving head controls. If you have a Fat Frog or better, however, you're set.

[scottbramall]

Board - Zero, Frog 88, so controlling thems no problem

Zero88 Frog? This does not have moving head controls. If you have a Fat Frog or better, however, you're set.

 

Sorry, It is the Fat frog.

 

Looks like this one (sorry cant get exact model untill monday,

[gareth]

So many comments spring to mind here. There's been a lot of discussion on this subject on the BR before (i.e. small or educational venues spending money on moving light 'toys' that could/should have been far more effectively spent on buying new dimmers and lanterns or maintaining/repairing the existing stock of them). I suggest you have a search through the archives and see what you find.

 

So, those comments I mentioned ... well, first up ...

There's no budget for maintenance

Rather than buying moving lights you should be looking at spending at least some of the money to rectify the problem of your currently non-existant maintenance budget for your existing lamp stock. You can't buy a car and then not put petrol in it and have it serviced every year, otherwise very soon it'll just not go any more - and the same applies to lighting equipment.

 

Secondly, control - you already mention you have a Zero88 Frog desk, which is what I assume you mean by

Zero, Frog 88

:) - if it really is just the Frog, it doesn't do moving lights - that's the domain of the Fat/Mambo/Leap/Bull Frogs. So you'd need to factor a controller into the price of the system.

 

Most likely from Stage LX, would they maintain them if they do break (at a price obviously)

At a price? But you've already said there's no maintenance budget - who's going to pay that price?

 

The main lights we have at the moment are par cans and Fresnel's (sp?) and there's only so much you can do with them.

With respect, if no-one on the lighting team has the imagination to think of interesting things to do with parcans and fresnels, you're just going to come up against the same issues with moving lights.

 

There's quite a bit more that could be said, but it would be pointless to go on about it at length here because it's been said before elsewhere on the forum. If I find any of the older topics, I'll edit a link to them into this post ...

[MrDan]

I don't know, but every time a college kid in this forum asks about adding a few moving lights, everybody jumps at them, how useless and expensive moving lights are and nobody actually answers his quesion :)

 

I don't know much about college drama groups, especially in the UK, but I don't think it would be the end of the world to add two movers to their lighting setup. Especially since nowadays movers are getting cheaper and cheaper. And if the budget doesn't get approved then that's another story. But that was not really the question, or was it?

 

So to go back to the question. In my (limited) experience, I would say:

Robe (Czech manufacturer), Martin (Danish) and SGM (Italian) are very good, although relatively expensive.

 

As always, you get what you pay for. So if you go with Chinese manufacturer like Pearl River or Chauvet (I think they are Chinese build?), the quality is not as good and you might need to pay more maintance in the future.

 

One other comon manufacturer is Coemar

 

One other thing to consider when buying moving lights, is that the cheaper ranges of lights have (of course) missing features that more expensive lights (from the same manufacturer) have. E.g. the cheaper lights miss e.g. iris adjustments.

 

I hope this helps a bit.

 

Dan