Few were surprised with ETC’s March 31 announcement that it would be acquiring High End Systems (HES) from Netherlands-based Barco, which had owned the Austin-based manufacturer of innovative moving lights and control systems since 2008. ETC had taken the rare step of announcing its hopes for acquiring HES with a press release on March 1, while the deal with Barco was still very much in the discussion stages.
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It’s been two years since PLSN presented a Buyers Guide on video cabinets. Since then, just about every company has updated their product line with new and unique products. Whether they are higher resolution, curved models or waterproof tiles, they are all being engineered for faster assembly, lighter weight and higher quality. Take a look at the latest products from these leaders in the business.
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Video mapping projects — beyond the LED concert video wall — have become more commonplace over recent years. They’re part of our landscape, adding images everywhere in our environment. While advances in technology have made these projects more feasible, challenges are still there. PLSN took a below-the-surface look at two recent projects to discover what confronts projecting on a creative palette beyond the screen.
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Quince Imaging Dominates Pro Sports Arena Projection Mapping
It’s moments before the first Chicago Bulls NBA home game of the 2016-17 season begins, and the United Center Arena is packed with fans. Suddenly, the entire arena goes dark except for the court, which seems to glow with an inner light. The Bulls logo appears in the center, and the court floor comes to life as Bulls mascot Benny the Bull walks out to the center of the court, waving a Bulls flag in a grand circular motion.
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French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre has very nearly done it all. Born in Lyon, France, son of film composer Maurice Jarre, Jean-Michel began studying classical music at an early age and formed his first major rock band in the late 1960s. Within a few short years Jarre had tapped cutting-edge keyboard technology and helped to revolutionize synthesized music with releases such as 1976’s global hit Oxygène, 1978’s Équinoxe, and 1981’s Les Chants Magnétiques.
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I recently had a visitor wander into my office and introduce himself. I’m not normally one to spend much time with a cold calling salesman, but this guy came with good creds. He was from a manufacturers rep organization and was introduced to us by a friendly neighbor. We had quite the interesting conversation. He asked me for my perspective (as a customer and a reseller) on how the Chinese LED manufacturers were developing their distribution model.
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The concept of Worlds on a grandMA2 is very useful when programming media servers into a show that also includes moving lights because it can be used in various ways to filter in and out attributes during programming and playback. I will admit, however, that using Worlds in this way was not intuitive at first, given that we have other means of isolating fixtures and attributes, namely Filters and Masks. But once I started exploring further, I realized Worlds could be used in several ways that I hadn’t thought about before.
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The TV Lighting Programmer Has Had an Eclectic – and Rewarding – Career
Well-respected throughout the industry, lighting programmer Steven Garner’s credits range from theatre to fashion shows; corporate events to live television. He’s now working on The President Show for Comedy Central. While busy doing last minute packing for a family trip to Vietnam, he took some time to speak with us about how he ended up as the guy behind a console lighting South African social rights activist and retired Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, among many others.
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One tool that has never found its way into my workbox is a DMX tester. Over the years, I’ve tried a few in shops and at trade shows, and I never found one that quite fit into my workflow. In general, I’ve found that some of the popular models are either too fiddly to use, have poor visibility in low-light environments like a stage, and I even used one that required the user to memorize a series of colored lights and blinking patterns to figure out what was going on.
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Elation has released the first member of its Artiste line, their new series of white LED engine sourced fixtures. The DaVinci is a medium-sized spot fixture that packs quite a punch and comes with more functions than any fixture this size should be allowed. In other words, it’s pretty much covering every function a hard-edge fixture should, from an animation wheel to color mixing to frost filters. They didn’t skimp on anything. The big question is — how did they pack all of this in such a condensed and lightweight package?
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The search for the perfect strobe light to replace the original Atomic model has been endless. Over the last three years, every lighting manufacturer has released their version of what they think the designers wanted. All LED models, it seems, as nobody wants to deal with the old tube style strobe, their power draw or the fact that they could thermal out after a few seconds. They built all white models, colored models, models with chasing quadrants.
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Automated lighting consoles are built around a basic infrastructure dependent on the DMX protocol (or map) of a fixture or device. Understanding how DMX values control specific parameters of a fixture is essential for any automated lighting programmer. However, modern consoles utilize complex pre-built libraries or profiles that alleviate the programmer from having to understand DMX functionality. One of the core concepts that should be understood is the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit DMX control.
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