Looking for assistance - Wholehog/Jands

[lonemorf]

Hi All,

Used to be in the touring industry some 20 years ago, and things have seemingly moved on quite a way!

I am looking for some help (happy to pay for someone in london for some 1-2-1 tuition), with Jands/Wholehog desks.

Not a total beginner here, I was playing with DMX a long time back, and using the likes of masterpieces, Q12/24/48s etc, and big racks of dimmers - moving mirror and moving heads were pretty "off scope" for me back then.

 

I am wanting to get back into this, as I now have children in the secondary school zone, and am wanting to get involved with their productions - I have a Jands Hog 1000, and a pile of moving mirror kit that I have inherited, and I really need to get to grips with how technology has moved on.

I *think* I will pick it up fairly quickly, once I have the fundamentals, I think I can run with it. (happy to be proven wrong ;) )

 

Any thoughts, input? Anyone in London liking the sound of beer money?

 

Cheers

[indyld]

Quite a long way since the Jands Hog 1000. I wouldn't start with an obselete and temperamental desk whose manufacturer support is long gone. Better to get into one of the current PC control solutions of your choice. At least it is learning worth developing.

[lonemorf]

Thanks Chap,

A few reasons I am looking at this, is that its free, its a "tangible" device, and PCs scare the bejesus out of me.

Am I totally barking mad? Bear in mind Im old ;)

[indyld]

So is the Jands. It's nearly a museum piece in lighting control terms. If it continues to work and you have the fixture personalities for the kit you have (the thing that tells the desk the details of the moving mirrors), then it will control lights.

 

If it falls over, you will find it hard to replace in a hurry. I can see that in a 'non-critical' show situation a free piece of hardware is attractive but having used plenty of the Jands Hogs back in the day, I'd be concerned that it just wouldn't boot at some point. It is a lot less intuitive than more modern desks. Though nothing as awful as the Masterpiece.

 

There are cheap/free PC options that are currently supported and learning them is time better spent than spending a while working out how to get an old lighting desk to do what you want, only to have it go kaput when you need it most. Having said that, I'm sure that plenty of us old timers are out there and can help you with the Hog via this board for the odd sticking point. I'm not in London and am stacked with work, otherwise I wouldn't mind helping.

[lonemorf]

Appreciated!

So if I dare look at PC options, what hardware spec would I need, and what software?

When I was exiting the industry many moons ago, Showcad was on its way into the market - and that looked like hell on earth!

[paulears]

I'm an old Jands Hog user - but I sold it a long time ago to move to MagcQ, which has similar roots. I'm not sure that I'd want to trust the Hog. There was nothing wrong with the 1000 - it's still a useful desk BUT it will become unreliable, very quickly, and spares are tricky. The thing that may just be on the horizon is a CPU battery failure. This happened to mine. The desk loses it's memory when switched off, you need to reload everything from the floppy drive and then it will work for a while, but a power out, mid show kills it. You can install a new battery, and then with a few bits of basic kit, realign the board to the new battery - just a case of setting a voltage regulator. What really began to annoy me was the poor monitor support. The small display on the desk was tricky to read, and the external monitor had a terrible b/w display which I found very difficult to read.

 

It's much easier to understand than the masterpiece - so really it's just a case of making sure you have correctly formatted head files in the library - which was a bugbear for me - in and out on floppies to the laptop, but then I no longer had a laptop or even a PC with floppy drive any longer, so had to use an external one, to get the text files into something so I could edit, then back to the desk to find it didn't work, then back to the PC, then ...... you get the idea.

 

If you haven't got the manual, I may have one somewhere.

[indyld]

PC spec fairly forgiving. Most lighting control software is relatively light on the machine.

http://www.blue-room.org.uk/wiki/Lighting_Software#Lighting_Control_Software

 

Using PC for LX control is regular point of discussion here (yawn), so have a search for old threads. :)

[soundiesam]

Pre production services are your guys Colin does 1-2-1 training he does all the current hog training and knows hog 1000 really well hit him up.

Sam

[zuul]

Hi All,

Used to be in the touring industry some 20 years ago, and things have seemingly moved on quite a way!

I am looking for some help (happy to pay for someone in london for some 1-2-1 tuition), with Jands/Wholehog desks.

Not a total beginner here, I was playing with DMX a long time back, and using the likes of masterpieces, Q12/24/48s etc, and big racks of dimmers - moving mirror and moving heads were pretty "off scope" for me back then.

 

I am wanting to get back into this, as I now have children in the secondary school zone, and am wanting to get involved with their productions - I have a Jands Hog 1000, and a pile of moving mirror kit that I have inherited, and I really need to get to grips with how technology has moved on.

I *think* I will pick it up fairly quickly, once I have the fundamentals, I think I can run with it. (happy to be proven wrong ;) )

 

Any thoughts, input? Anyone in London liking the sound of beer money?

 

Cheers

 

Read the manual and learn the terminology. If you have specific questions or need help with personalities message me. The console is very old but extremely powerful once you master it.