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Mantracourt’s BroadWeigh system components are pictured here.

Load Cells in the Workplace

The amount of weight any production can hang in a venue has long dictated the size of many productions. As touring productions get larger and use more rigging points, it’s become imperative that the weights on each point become precise to avoid overloading a hoist or the beam from which it is suspended. Over times, rigging weights have been measured from produce style looking scales to electronic devices with miles of thin wires. Today’s load cells are a strain gauge transducer that works like a digital scale. The business of figuring out rigging weights has gone wireless with the addition of BroadWeigh to the market. But let’s look at what led our industry to this achievement.

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Nook chats with the acclaimed show director about what the job of “Show Director” entails, and how he got there.

Show Director Barry Lather

A show director in the live events business is the person who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatrical production. This person unifies all the different production elements and departments through their own vision to achieve the end result. This individual commands an army of specialists in their fields, working with the lighting and set designers, costumes, video directors, content creators, audio engineers, musicians and choreographers. To name just a few.

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String Cheese Incident, lit by Andrew Cass. Photo by Doug Fondriest

Morpheus Lights

A Unique Company Supports Top Tours and Events with an Expanding Array of New Lighting Products

Morpheus Lights is one of the pioneer companies of the modern entertainment lighting industry. The Morpheus brand is recognized as a hallmark in intelligent lighting fixture development, with numerous innovations, including CYM color mixing and rotating gobos that have now become industry standards.

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PLSN Buyers Guide, March 2017 - Moving Lights with Framing Shutters

Moving Lights with Framing Shutters

Framing shutters have been a part of ellipsoidal fixtures for as long as anyone can remember. They consist of four separate blades that can cut into the focal path and shape the beam of light. The shutters (blades) are spaced 90 degrees apart around the fixture and can be moved inwards and angled, allowing the light source to concentrate its beam on a particular area. With the advent of the Vari-Lite VL1000, we saw a moving light with electronic shutters for the first time. Now, framing shutters on moving hard edge and wash fixtures have become immensely popular. PLSN displays what’s on the market today.

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Daric Bassan

Daric Bassan on Teaching the Right Way

Evert once in a while, a story pops up about the value of being educated properly in the technical aspects of the entertainment biz. This education could come from your college, your own school of hard knocks (meaning other folks taking time to school you) or perhaps your high school theater teacher. This education likely took years and molded you into the person you are today.

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Lasers for DJ Steve Aoki’s MTV Wonderland performance. All photos courtesy MTV

From Warehouse to Wonderland

Remember when MTV played music? Back when MTV launched in 1981, I was in college and procrastinated away many an hour watching music videos on the channel. Over time, MTV tried a lot of different things and reality TV was the one thing that stuck. Airing music became mostly a thing of the past, until now. In 2016, MTV brought music back in a big way when, for the first time in 20 years, they began producing a live music show called Wonderland.

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Video Dreams

Video Dreams

I started out as a lighting guy. But I saw the writing on the wall early on, and with the aid of my mind’s eye, I drifted into a video guy. I guess in some sense I’ll always be a lighting guy — can’t have video without lighting, right?

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Datapath Fx4

Datapath x4, Fx4 and dL8

Although Datapath has been around for a while, I only recently became aware of their product line. Having spec’d a rather large video wall a scant six months ago, Datapath frequently rose to the top of my Internet search as an external graphics box manufacturer, and they make some killer boxes. The company is mainly known for large, scalable wall controller servers and graphics capture cards, but they also offer a series of small-but-powerful multi-display units that are worth checking out.

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Paul Guthrie and the VL-6000

1000 Words With Paul “Arlo” Guthrie

We’re chatting while peering into a spanking new Vari-Lite VL6000 at the Heroic Productions facility in Minneapolis, where production designer Paul Guthrie, (nicknamed Arlo) resides. He’s an Aussie who fell in love with an American girl and settled here back in the 1990’s. He’s pretty much covered every aspect of lighting in his career, including a huge sold out show at First Avenue’s main room last week with Poliça, a local band. His light rig consisted of six Chroma-Q Color Force 48 strip lights and six Martin MAC Auras.

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Vari-Lite VL6000 Beam

Vari-Lite VL6000 Beam

Beam fixtures have certainly become commonplace in the world, but when one thinks of these we normally think of the small fixtures with a tiny aperture that project pencil-thin beams. That was then and quite frankly, this is now. The VL6000 Beam takes everyone’s preconceived notion of what a beam fixture should be able to do and has doubled down on it. This unique fixture is like no other, changes color like no other, emits lumens equivalent to a long throw spotlight and is the fastest large-yoke fixture I have ever seen. And it’s virtually silent.

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D.T.S. Katana

D.T.S. Katana

The image of a katana is one of refined elegance, a gracefully curved blade so sharp as to cut the very air before it. Like its namesake, the Katana from DTS Lighting aims to provide a sharp and dramatic blade of light cutting through the darkness, but it’s more than just a linear batten — the Katana comes with a few tricks to keep things interesting. DTS is an Italian company that has been in the lighting business since the 1980s, and this is their first motorized linear batten light. The form factor here is typical of some other motorized battens — a linear “head” with the LED dies and optics, and a base with the power supply, menu system and electronics.

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The Hippie Hippie Shakes

Automated lighting programmers have a multitude of functions available to them to modify lighting looks. From gobos to color, to movements, the options are nearly limitless. One of the underused concepts is shaking of various elements. This can add drama, frenetic energy, or even psychedelic displacement to an already existing lighting look or effect. There are several different types of shakes that programmers can encounter, and each provides a unique effect. Some are built into the fixtures while others must be created from the console. It is important for automated lighting programmers to understand the abilities and shake things up a bit when appropriate.

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