VL3000s

[David Buffham]

Does anyone here have practical experience with the VL3000 spot & wash? I played with them for the first time last week, and although I've got some ordered for a show at the end of the month I'm struggling to decide now whether to replace some or all of them with VL2000s.

 

They seem really impressive and have distinct advantages over the 2000s, e.g. range of beam effects, but then the 2000s seem better at other things, particularly colour bumping.

 

So its really a case of deciding which range is best for this production; which is mainly a design decision. But does anyone have any live experience with the 3000s in terms of reliability (during both plotting & playback), speed, accuracy, brightness with gobo & effects & saturated colour, etc?

 

Would be very interested to hear any views on the VL3000s, particulary relative to the VL2000s.

[gareth]

I've never used the 3000's on a show. But I'd be interested to hear which way you decide to go - and if you elect to use the 3000's, how you think they compare to the 2000's in operational terms.

[Rob]

Is noise an issue - I know they are rather noisy little beasts which may or may not be a problem.

[timmath]

Tech'd both both 2000 and 3000 spots and washes on Children in Need... reliability wise both were fine, no major problems.

 

The two types of wash have a similar feel only one has a significant brightness advantage.

 

The two spots are very different - the 2000 zoom is pretty big, the 3000 is massive - the twin rotating gobos and FX of the 3000 make it a great projector lamp (like stagezooms) where as the 2000 is more of a beam FX light. they're all great fitting.

 

The 3000's are noisier then the 2000's but then the 2k's are pretty quite and there is far more heat from the 1200w lamp in the 3k. I don't feel that they are any more noisy than other 1200w units (we had Mac 2k's Performances, StageZooms and Cybers in the same rig) guess it depends if your using a few of them is a silent theatre!

 

 

regards

 

tim

[Metro]

Ye ive found them a bit nosiy too.

[David Buffham]

I've never used the 3000's on a show. But I'd be interested to hear which way you decide to go - and if you elect to use the 3000's, how you think they compare to the 2000's in operational terms.

Hi Gareth,

 

In the end I did decide to use a couple of VL3000 spots along with three VL2000 spots and two VL6Cs on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar a couple of weeks ago. Here are my personal opinions on the VL3000 spots after this show...

 

Their beam zooms over a massive range (10º - 60º), compared to 19º - 43º for a VL2000 spot. Rigged upstage at a height of 6m the two VL3000 spots we had could cross to wash most of the stage (12m x 8m)

 

At their smallest zoom they are extremely bright (much brighter than a VL2000 with its iris in), though at similar beam angles to the VL2000s they are not perceptibly brighter. Which is not necessarily a problem, at least in this show, because they were able to sit alongside other units without standing out as being different. [There are some rough photos here which show this - can you tell which are the VL3000s in most of these pictures? There are also some better production photos here] On the other hand we had the option to zoom them right down to significantly brighten them up and then put in a saturated colour which would hold its own against the other lighting.

 

The edge on them is very good, and they retain sharp focus throughout their full zoom range, unlike VL1000s. Also the two units we had were very well matched on edge, which is not normally the case with the VL6Cs.

 

Colour from them is fantastic; the CMY mixes really nice blues through to orangey reds, though the standard dichroic red is superb - redder than in the VL2000s. The dichroic colours don't bump as quickly as the VL2000s but it isn't too bad, and the CMY changes can either bump very fast or crossfade nicely. The CMY colour system is definitely nicer than the one in the VL1000s.

 

With three rotating gobo / effects wheels there are many funky beam effects available, and morphing between gobo wheels works quite well. The ability to counter-rotate a prism, say, against a rotating gobo gives the kind of ethereal effect that you don't get from VL2000s.

 

The heads move quickly, but they don't accelerate or decelerate as quickly as the VL2000s - possibly because the heads are much heavier and have more inertia to overcome. For example there were a series of cues where a light would snap on and immediately start a 3 second move across the stage. With the VL2000s / 6Cs the light seemed to be moving as soon as the light came on; with the VL3000s there was a moment where the light appeared stationary as it found the energy to start moving. Also with the VL2000s & VL3000s sweeping out to the audience over the same time, the VL3000s would lag behind because they were slower to start moving. This is possibly the biggest issue I had with them.

 

The dimming on the VL3000s is very smooth, though if you're looking at the beam whilst its on a slow fade you'll notice that it gets down to about 10% really smoothly and then waits a moment before going to black - almost like an 'afterglow'. Difficult to describe properly, but if you see it you'll know what I mean.

 

Reliability-wise there were no major problems with them during the short time we were actually using them, though as 90% of the plotting was done on WYSIWYG we only loaded them in the day before the first show and didn't spend loads of hours using them. One time the dichroic colour wheel missed its o/w position by half a colour, and this happened once when I was playing with one at VLPS - so maybe there is a problem here. As usual we had the most problems with the VL6Cs...

 

Fan noise was not a problem on this show as the music doesn't stop until the crucifixion scene which has the only speech in the show, during which the most significant noise came from the USR DF50. Though I saw Wicked recently on Broadway, which has 51 VLs in the rig (13 VL3000s), and the fan noise from the rig in quiet moments was really distracting. Though I don't know how much of this was to blame on the VL3000s. There is a Quiet version of the VL3000 coming out which reduces fan noise at the cost of smaller operating temperature range.

 

In terms of cost, the VL3000s were more expensive than VL2000s, but not much more. I know that everyone tends to pay their own price for equipment rental in this industry, but we paid much less for the VL3000s than we could have got Mac 2000s for, say. And the VL3000s were only a couple of pounds more than some companies would have charged us for Mac 500s (and believe me the VL3000s are leagues ahead) - we pay significantly less for VL2000s than those same companies (not renowned for discounting) would charge us for a Mac 500, say.

 

[sOAPBOX] VL2000/3000s are a superior product to Macs, and are NOT necessarily more expensive! [/sOAPBOX] - that said, my only experience of automated products other than Vari-Lite's is limited to Mac 250 and Mac 500, but I am keen to not lose sight of the other manufacturers' products.

[gareth]

Thanks for taking the time to post that, David - all very informative and interesting. The VL3k sounds like it's the mutt's nuts!

 

I completely agree with your comment re. the comparisons between VL2k and Mac500 - for just a little more money you get a hugely superior fixture. It's just a pity that the prism is on the rotating gobo wheel rather than being separate ...

[Tomo]

Funny that.

 

We did JCS about the same time (5 nights, last week of January), and our blocking and my lighting design were really similar to yours.

Obviously a case of great minds think alike, as I purposefully didn't watch any productions of JCS before doing the design so I wouldn't be copying anyone else's ideas.

Some photos (from dress run and first couple of nights) are here.

 

And I only had one mover - it was a Tourwash 575 fixture, and I'm really impressed with them for their price.

Looking forward to playing with some Tourspot 575 fixtures in the near future.

As a low-budget near-equivalent to the VL and Martin range of washlights they are very impressive, although I can't say much about reliability yet as the hire company we got ours from hasn't had them long - JCS was the fourth outing for the particular unit we used.