Intelligent Lighting Boards - Questions

[adamcoppard]

After researching into getting in a intelligent lighting board for this year's school production to go with our colour scrollers (would chew up the channels on my generic lighting board), I have a few questions:

1) After playing with the Zero 88 offline editors, do all lights get a set time for each scene (in seconds that stays the same for every scene in that group)?

2) If I was to set up a chase to a set piece of music, how can I get lights and sound to be in perfect sync, or is it just luck when pressing the next buttons?

3) Could a whole light scene be completely set up to a sound effect (something requiring a lot of flashes), me just pressing start at the very start of the scene, and everything will appear as programmed?

 

Also, what is the most intuative desk / easiest way for me to learn how to control fixtures like the one's we are planning to hire, as well as some UI friendly editor software (hate Zero 88's), without buying licenses / USB dongles?

[barlowj331]

hi,

first of all what are you planning to hire?

if it is just scrollers I would say a fat frog is perfectly adequate but if it is movers as well then I would go for a pearl or tiger

[adamcoppard]

Hiring just colour scrollers at the mo, but that's probably going to be prone to change. It may be useful to have some Auxillary buttons aswell for a DMX Haze / Smoke machine.

[tom_the_LD]

What is the budget for hiring in a desk - this a key fact as I could suggest loads of desks which would do colour scrollers; some more expensive than others.

[adamcoppard]

We have around £1,000 to spend on desk + colour scrollers for a week or two's hire (possibly £1,500).

[LXbydesign]

How many scrollers?

 

At least just having 6 - by the time you add a PSU and the cable etc and VAT and delivery / pick up - the gonna be at least £400, so for 2 weeks your looking at maybe £600 or so - thats if you can get a discount.

 

If you just want one to drive scrollers and the odd button for smoke or whatever , then I would look for something a little lower-spec -- and cheaper than a Pearl. Thats totally OTT for what you need.

 

Jester?

 

Smartfade?

 

Actually you can drive all that quite happilly of a Fat Frog. I know those desks are like Marmite - you ether love them or hate them but you can put in scrollers as fixtures and assign smoke / haze to aux buttons quite easily.

 

My opinion of people who slate them off so much and say there're crap is actually because they probably cant use them properly and get the best out of them!!!

[adamcoppard]

Um, around 4 - 6 scrollers, but, along with the desk upgrade is the fact that, as I outlined in my questions, a set of these lights need to be programmed to sound effects, not something our Alcora can do very easily!

 

Does the Fat Frog run off of a interface like Zero 88's offline editor?

[gherriott]

It cannot be RUN off its OLE but you can preplot in it and save the file to a floppy and thenj load that show onto the desk and vice versa. I started off on the Fat Frog and had no problems with it running scrollers and moving heads and smoke machines all at once. You can make up a fixture file for the smoke machine/haze machine, just a generic 2 channel fixture and then this will allow you to control the haze/smoke on one of the attribute wheels rather than taking up a fader. If this is the first time you are going to be properly using an intelligent desk then I would go for the Fat Frog as it is cheaper than most others and there is a lot of support out there for it. If you have any specific queries about if it can do certain things or just in general if you do decide to hire it and need some help just PM me.

 

Hope all goes well.

 

Greg

[paulears]

Frankly this is all a bit daft.

 

The OP does not yet have any experience on lighting desks, but is making his first jump into show lighting by being complicated and using scrollers. For a grand, you could hire an awful lot of lights, and buy some gel!

 

His questions on states and memories means the learning curve for any modern control is going t be steep, because as yet he's not got any experience of how lighting is carried out - control wise.

 

Who on earth suggested scrollers? I bet they didn't mention all the snags with them like jams, or the price of scrolls and spares. It even occurs to me that somebody might even get the colour choice wrong when ordering them. I'm thinking of "Make the stage go pink please" - "er, we don't have any pink......"

 

The original post says he's been researching getting a desk to control their scrollers - kind of saying they already have scrollers of their own, but no control? How odd.

 

To answer some of the questions.

 

Most controls use words like 'scene' to mean different things. So in general, a scene could be a static point in a show where the lighting stays the same (if you have movers doing something, and waving around - this counts as staying the same). Pushing a button will move the show on t the next pre-programmed state. In a chase, each step is also sometimes called a state - in this case, the time before moving on is programmed in.

 

Running chases in time with music as a pre-programmed feature is rarely musically accurate. If you need accuracy - like in We Will Rock You flash flash FLASH - flash flash FLASH, then three buttons done manually will always be best. If it's pre-recorded music, then hitting the go button at the right time usually works, but if it's live - they may play at 115bpm instead of 122bpm, which wrecks it after just a few bars. Some desks are clever with a 'tap tempo' button, so you can bring the chase back to the right speed. For my money with even a clever desk, I do it on buttons every time, and 'play' the chase.

 

The last question about playing in an entire sequence is on the same lines. Of course you can programme it in - links and waits and delays, that kind of thing - most makes let you do this kind of thing to some degree - but is it any good if humans are involved in making the 'things' happen like this - accurately the same each show - I somehow doubt it.

 

 

Lighting is not about pushing buttons and sitting back and watching the machine do things, it is the human element that makes good lighting - maybe bringing something forward a tad, or lagging behind - depending on what is going on onstage.

 

 

The differences between modern desks are in the clever features, or how these clever features are integrated into something that can do the job - assist you do lighting, not take over.

 

Off-line editors can be handy for editing - they are pretty rubbish at telling you how good the hardware control is. I downloaded a Chamsys one - 100% hated it - got cross, gave up and vowed to never let one of these ever cross my path - until I sat in front of a 'real' one, where I could touch the screen, not use a mouse - and access the real buttons and faders. I rather like them now. Loads of people on here use the OLEs and then tell people how good the real thing is - and that is simply crazy. You can learn the syntax, that kind of stuff but a laptop with an OLE is just miles away from a real box with knobs!

[LXbydesign]

I agree totally.

 

Good lighting design is not just fantastic it looks, but how the designer FEELS the play or musical - and pressing the GO button.

 

As a designer, for me , putting in all the states is the easy part. Its actually sitting down during the dress rehearsals and adjusting timings which is the most sensitive part. A fade or rise too fast or too slow could easily detract or kill the mood of whats going on, on-stage.

 

Sure for some cruise ships and theme parks where everythings on HD etc then is fine for the lighting to be totally automated and just requires an initial GO to run it - and also I like to run a strobe (usually Martin Atomic) through MIDI to link with Thunder/lightening sound effects - but other than that its always best to "be manual".

 

As said , if the band start to lag a bit but the lighting desk is still bumping out a chase at 130bpm it might look a bit strange!!

 

 

** Best "finger on the blinders flash button moment" - during Take That on the "Never Forget" chorus!!!! :)

[adamcoppard]

Just for clarification: we own a grand total of 0 scrollers.

All that we do actually have are 8 Par Can's, one of which bulb is blown, and we are trying to persuade whatever school budget they do fall under (no one knows) to get them fixed, but that's another story for another day.

So, because of that, we hire in all light and sound each year for our production, and generally, we hire for fashion shows etc aswell.

I do know how to use our current desk (it's a simple Alcora, nothing fancy), and can do all that is required for that.

However, we don't own a desk that can control intelligent lights, and we as a school have never used one, and I have only breifly been told about what these desks are capable of by someone else. Therefore, the only experience I have had with them is the very badly designed Zero 88 offline editor (and I'm talking from a UI point of view, not a lighting P.O.V), and have never actually laid my hands on a desk with this kind of capability, as I am sure plenty of people in my situation are in the same boat. Therefore, I was asking questions over what impressions I have got from a) what people have told me and b) what the offline editor feels like (which was bad).

 

And, the scene question comes from designs I have seen, I have always used faders / flash buttons on our console at school, apart from colour washes that we choose.

 

Finally, I agree with everyone about the 'GO' button, I just wanted to use it at the very beginning for a stage effect, that our director shall be incredibly picky over, and want exactly the same right from day 1 through to pack down, so I was trying to see if that could be achieved.

 

Thanks for all the comments, after all, that's how we all learn, isn't it?

[paulears]

So Adam

After researching into getting in a intelligent lighting board for this year's school production to go with our colour scrollers[

 

You said you have colour scrollers, now you haven't. That's a pretty tall story isn't it?

 

You said

We have around £1,000 to spend on desk + colour scrollers for a week or two's hire (possibly £1,500).

You now say

we are trying to persuade whatever school budget they do fall under (no one knows) to get them fixed

 

It sounds like your school is a total disaster. You cannot afford to buy new lamps, but you hire in kit? You are the technician (it says in your profile) but you don't appear to have any kit to techniche!

 

 

You have a grand to spend on hire for a week or two for a show. That's good. trouble is, you're not apparently in the position to be able to select what you want. Forgive me for saying this - but surely your teachers will be the ones deciding what you hire? They have to sign the order, and unless you've been briefed on what the aims of the director actually are - you have no way to even think about equipment. Remember that the designer selects the most appropriate equipment for the job, not just nice things to play with. A grand would get you a lot of PAR cans, or just a few waggly buckets. What is the show? How big the stage, all these kind of things.

 

I'm still unclear about where scrollers came from?

 

If you are doing the show with very little help - then stay away from anything that moves, and have lots of generics - the results might well be better.

 

Please - do think about what you post - people are trying to help, but you keep shooting yourself in the foot. Can you imagine going onto a doctors forum and saying, I'm good at biology - next week I need to take out an appendix, any ideas - I've read up on scalpels, but thought I'd get a defibrillator!

[gareth]

Or, to put Paul's advice in another way, don't run before you can walk, and make sure you design the rig around equipment that's appropriate for the space and the production rather than stuff that you put in there purely because you fancy playing with it.

[adamcoppard]

I'll edit the other two posts so that it's easier to understand the entire situation:

When I said to go with our colour scrollers, I meant (and I used it as if I were talking to someone) the colour scrollers we are hiring in.

The budget stands. We get around £2,000 - £3,000 through tickets. Around £750 goes towards props and costumes. Everything else comes our way, and the school will also right off any excess (which they always do, and accept that they have to) which means for combined sound and lighting we have around £3,000 to spend on hiring in equipment.

The school will pay for the hire as it makes the whole school look good, to the parents etc. Our own kit get's used for events with just students in it, as they really don't care as long as they can see the band, and it contains an exciting flash here or there.

 

We do muddle through with what kit we do have, and I'm spending time over the half term getting all our kit out, rigged up, checked and then persuading whatever budget it's decided it goes under to pay for new lamps etc for everything that is broken.

 

And, yes, we are looking into plenty of different way's of lighting the show, one option is just top have a shed load of par can's with all the colours the director would have liked the colour scrollers be able to create. We also need to hire in some Atomic strobes, and quite possibly something that could recreate an audience blinder effect.

 

Oh and the scrollers WOULD BE HIRED.

[gareth]

As a bit of 'food for thought', picture this scenario ...

 

The director decides, on the first day of the tech, that one of the colours that you (or they) have picked isn't right - perhaps too light or too dark, or perhaps even the wrong colour altogether. If you've lit the show with a number of colour washes, whether from parcans, fresnels or whatever, then changing the colour is simply a matter of a few quid on a couple of sheets of new gel and quarter of an hour up a ladder swapping the colour out. If you've commited yourself to scrollers, it's going to be pretty much an impossibility to change your mind.