Road Tests

I just completed a road test of a new moving light from Clay Paky, called the Sharpy. Three things were immediately noticeable about this fixture. It’s fast, tiny and packs a lot of light output for a lamp that has a bulb under 200W.

German Light Products, long a world leader in innovative LED products, has built the first lighting fixture designed to actually work as a truss toner — the LED Base4 Truss Toner that’s marketed under GLP’s Scenex Lighting brand. The unique 8-inch-square-by-four-inch-deep body fits snugly into all 12-inch box truss and is designed with 12 individual tri-colored LEDs surrounding the outside of the 8-inch face plate.

Every year, lighting manufacturers reveal their latest model of a fixture to go along with other competitor's models in that range. In order to make their product stand out among the other brands, there has to be something new and unique that the fixture can do. Clay Paky has indeed taken the next step in developing the most advanced effects on any large hard edge fixture I have seen.

Last week, I found myself in need of a compact yet high output LED source. I needed to fit four individual light sources inside a 10-foot tall birthday cake that could effectively light dancers perched on top of this scenic element. The fixtures needed to be small enough to sit in a tiny space, yet powerful enough to actually light the models from underneath through a Plexiglas floor. A friend suggested I demo this new product from a company called "The Black Tank," and they were glad to come to my rescue. They shipped me eight Brickblaster Pros to use for the gig.

ELC calls this unit the Checker Handheld DMX512/RDM toolbox, but unlike your father's toolbox, this one is digital. It does fit easily in the hand and it is battery operated, making it truly handheld, and it does work with both DMX512 and RDM. But what, exactly, does it do?

Early this year I was cruising the aisles of NAMM when I came across the Elation Platinum Spot 5R. It's pretty difficult to assess a new light at a trade show, but what caught my attention was the contrast between this light and the ones right next to it. It was brighter. But the kicker was that it was smaller and it drew less power than those other lights. I had to figure out why.

Recently, I commissioned a renovation project for Northern High School in Durham, N.C. The district had chosen to accept the option to use LED fixtures for their cyc lighting. While the specification only required an RGB fixture, the system integrator provided the new Altman Spectra Cyc 100.

When the package arrived in the mail, I thought it was a mistake. Surely an entire dimmer couldn't fit in the small box that was delivered. When I picked up the box, my suspicions were confirmed; the box was way too light to have much of anything in it and certainly not a dimmer.

One of the holiest of grails for stage lighting is a color changing LED fixture that can compete with a PAR/gel scroller/dimmer package. When an LED can match the quantity and quality of light at a price that makes sense, then that's a game-changer.

It's not unusual for manufacturers to promote their products as "innovative." It is, however, unusual for the products to actually be innovative. But the new Lightlock, developed by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and manufactured by Total Structures, actually is a very innovative idea with a very practical purpose – it dampens the centrifugal force of rotation produced by moving lights as they pan on flown structures.

During the last year I have seen many manufacturers unveil various 300-watt lighting fixtures. Each of them had some impressive features that made them stand out. Unfortunately for them, Robe has just upped the bar for everyone by unveiling their evolutionary compact Robin 300 series of fixtures, and, let me tell you something, they’re not missing anything here.

For many years, ArKaos has been very successful at producing video mixing software, including its VJ line of software. It combines real time video mixing technology with intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and it is widely used in nightclubs around the world and on tours such as The Prodigy in 2009.