Portable auditorium lighting for small venue

[Krais]

Hi All,

 

 

I am LD for an amateur theatre group which is regularly putting on events in village halls, between larger productions which make the most of professional venues or well equipped school halls.

 

Auditorium lighting in the smaller venues always proves a problem, since turning off fluorescents never looks great and doesn't give us the easy control we would like.

Inevitably we mount a couple of floodlights wherever possible, and run them through the lighting desk. The 2 main problems with this is that some areas are overlit to provide enough to fill a hall, and the 500W floods create far too much heat in the hall, especially during an extended interval with a buffet.

 

I would appreciate any ideas to increase our travelling kit, with a budget in the region of £1k. Control isn't an issue as we have a mambo frog, but making this level of purchase we would want something which would also be suitable to a larger venue (...so if some LED floods are suggested, can our budget purchase something which can equally be used to light an 18' cloth?)

 

 

I'm perhaps asking too much with a small budget, but that's amateur dramatics for you!

 

 

Thanks.

[gordontech]

If you don't mind cheap and cheerful Chinese stuff then you can pick up LED floods either in a set colour or with RGB control (DMX controlled) from places like Alibaba. They will of course have a bad reputation but for function they do come in handy. I would say a 60w LED flood would have about the same power as a 200w Halogen flood. You can buy them for £20-50 depending on how hard you haggle so you could buy 10 or so and have them as up/downlights for the house.

 

 

 

Just a 2 second budget idea for you.

[timsabre]

If you don't mind cheap and cheerful Chinese stuff then you can pick up LED floods either in a set colour or with RGB control (DMX controlled) from places like Alibaba.

 

A lot of them are not dimmable or controllable in any way though. £1000 will buy you quite a lot of LED pars from thomann.de which could be used for house lighting by uplighting the ceiling or for stage use. The ones using a small number of high power LEDs (3W or above) are much better than the cheaper ones using a lot of 5mm or 10mm LEDs.

[Krais]

Thanks for the comments, and especially the note regarding the high power ones being better than the 10mm version.

 

 

I am currently thinking that 4 floods would be enough for most 'village hall' type venues (if not too much for some!),

 

Keeping in mind that it would be useful if our purchase also suited our larger venue, where I'm usually scrounging around to get a second set of 4 x 500W coda's for backcloth lighting, Thomann have a Starville 9 x 8W flood (http://www.thomann.de/gb/stairville_hl_x9_quad_color_flood_9x8w.htm) and a 18 x 8W flood (http://www.thomann.de/gb/stairville_hlx18_qcl_rgbw_flood_18x8w.htm) which would both fall within my budget.

 

Looking around the internet I'm not really much wiser as to the comparable output from each of these and I don't want it to be a flip of a coin purchase. Any comment on the units, and the output would be much appreciated.

 

 

Thanks :)

[timsabre]

I have not used those units but the spec says they are 35 degree beam angle which will be too narrow for backcloth lighting. A coda 500 is probably 120 degrees or more.

[alistermorton]

I have not used those units but the spec says they are 35 degree beam angle which will be too narrow for backcloth lighting. A coda 500 is probably 120 degrees or more.

 

It's also an asymmetric beam so it looks more even all the way down/up, even though the lantern is much closer at the top/bottom than at the other extremity of the beam.