Every once in a while, a product hits the scene that gets a lighting designer’s blood pumping. That’s because it’s a product that nobody else has even thought of making and it’s fresh and, for lack of a better description, “really cool.” Such is the case with the Medusa, a four-headed beast of a fixture from Mega-Lite that is made to provide eye candy and dazzling effects. Picture a Lazy Susan on your dining room table. Remove the food items and put small moving head beam lights spaced evenly across the outside — four individually controlled fixtures that have an incredibly bright light source (Philips Platinum 5R bulb). Then you spin the Lazy Susan. You get the idea.
The Wheel
The wheel itself can spin in either direction continuously. It is just under two feet wide and takes 1.5 seconds to revolve 360° at its fastest speed. It slows down to just a crawl. The wheel is attached to a base that houses the power supplies for the fixtures. The cylinder connecting the wheel to the fixture’s base is about six inches thick. This is to keep the fixture strong when hung at any angle.
There are a few options on how to hang this fixture. A nightclub would probably prefer to have a few of these flown flat from an overhead grid in the middle of a dance floor. A DJ may prefer to use these fixtures lying flat on the ground. A concert designer using this fixture for an EDM act or any live band would probably prefer to hang these on their side from a pipe or vertical truss, with the fixtures facing the audience.
I watched closely as the fixture spun in circles to look for any physical evidence that the fixture’s axis would bend or the light would wobble at all. I see no evidence of this, even when I watch from the side as the wheel spins indefinitely. The axle is strong.
The base of the fixture has three clamps to mount it to a truss. The user only needs to use any two of the clamps, but three are there to facilitate the user so they can avoid truss diagonals and cross braces that prevent the tech from hanging the fixture precisely where the LD requested. Smart move.
With most continuous panning fixtures, it takes a second for them to snap out of that mode and find their correct pan and tilt focus. With the Medusa, one must think about all the inertia that a round spinning plate with four heads will have. When I try and pause the continuous pan it takes about 2-3 seconds for the fixture to stop and swing back the other way to find its focal point. In reality, this is not much different from other fixtures. The LD needs to black it out before resetting it to a parked position.
The Fixtures
All four fixtures are identical. It’s important to point out that the fixtures do not pan themselves, they only tilt. The wheel itself is considered the pan. So the fixture is definitely to be considered an effects light fixture as opposed to one being used to key light a person or aim at a particular object. But the effects are rather stellar.
The Medusa can run in a basic 11-channel mode or 37-channel mode. In 11-channel mode, all fixtures tilt as one unit, as do the color and shutter mechanisms. In 37-channel mode (the optimum one), the user has individual control of all of the fixture’s attributes.
The color system is a typical color wheel with the similar colors you expect from any of the beam fixtures on the market these days. There are 14 different dichroic filters on the wheel. It can spin continuously or snap between colors faster than your eye can blink. It’s quite simple to have a machine gun effect of white strobe bursts or color chases. I was able to do a two-color chase with alternating heads in red and amber at a fast rate. It resembled a color strobe effect usually utilized on LED heads. Running the color wheels at different speeds gives me a multi-colored rainbow effect.
There is a stamped gobo wheel as well as an 8-way circular prism wheel that can spin to give you the rotating gobo effect at variable speeds in either direction. The gobos have the ability to shake. A frost filter can be used to change the 5° beam into a floodlight with no hard edge. It actually turns the beam into a wash fixture, unlike all other beam fixtures I have played with.
The fixture comes with standard sync and random strobes as well as various pulsing effects. Even in 11-channel mode, the four heads spit out strobe flashes that are randomly different from each other. I put the dimmer in a four-part chase and started spinning the wheel. It looked like a Gatling gun going off. Just four of these fixtures would make a huge statement. Imagine a wall of them. The dimmers themselves are the same as other beam lights in that the curve is really not linear. But on the plus side, I did notice that the hot spot in the middle of the beam did not seem nearly as noticeable as most 5R discharge bulbs.
I am able to take all four heads and tilt them so they reach a vortex and all four beams collide to light an object. I did this with a person, and they were so bright I’m surprised the girl did not spontaneously combust into flames. I put the spinning prism/gobo to use and step away from the fixture. It resembles the output of a Nova Light split into four beams. I put the tilt in a sine wave effect, and it becomes dazzling, like flower petals opening up, then retrieving. The beams tilt inward and cross each other in an inverted fan look that’s dynamic as well. When I combine all the elements at once moving fast, I have the ultimate disco light. When I slow it way down, I have the ultimate light for a ballad.
The fixture has an auto-sensing PSU that can run from 100-240 volts. Because of its punch, the fixture looks big, but once you see it placed in its custom road case, you realize it really isn’t. It actually weighs 126 pounds and has a pan lock mechanism so the wheel doesn’t spin when technicians hang it. I see this fixture as a very sought-after device for television, concerts, nightclubs and DJ use.
At a Glance
Putting That Lazy Susan to Work
You might have to shield your eyes from Mega-Lite’s Medusa, not because one glance at this four-headed beast of a fixture will turn you to stone, but because the Philips Platinum 5R bulb light source in each of the moving fixtures mounted on a rotating disk are so bright. The wheel spins clockwise and counter-clockwise at rates ranging from a slow crawl to 1.5 seconds per turn.
Medusa 4X5R
PROS: Exceptional eye candy, unique fixture, bright beams, good wash, shaking gobos.
CONS: I wish the four beams could pan as well.
SPECS
- MSRP: $6,600
- Wattage: 1129W
- Weight: 126 lbs.
- Size: 21.25 x 21.25 x 22 inches
- Manufacturer: Mega-Lite/Mega Systems Inc.
- More Info: www.megasystemsinc.com
For a video, go to www.plsn.me/Medusa-Demo.
