Road Tests

If you aren’t aware of the seismic shift towards LED sources in the entertainment lighting industry, welcome back to Planet Earth. Even if you have been hanging out in the International Space Station since the first crew occupied it in 2000, you’ve probably heard or read about the advantages of LEDs — low power consumption, high efficacy in lumens per watt, low heat, long life and more.

Elation has stepped up their product line considerably in the last year, and the introduction of their latest hard edge light is no exception. They have become the first company to build a 1,200-watt fixture with a body the size of everybody else’s 700-watt models. And the light produced from the double-ended MSR 1,200-watt lamp is pure white with a perfectly flat field.

Software is the new frontier of lighting control. Advances in technology have made computers ridiculously affordable, powerful and readily available. The people who write code for them have harnessed that horsepower and put it to good use in our industry. Lighting control, for example, is making leaps and bounds, and DMXCreator software for the PC is a prime example.

I don’t think there has ever been a more interesting time to be in the lighting industry. The rapid pace of technological advancement is a rich fertilizer for the entertainment production industry and it produces a bountiful harvest of new products. One such product is the Chauvet Colorado 2.

A few years ago, I toured with a lighting system that had several Chroma-Q™ Color Block™ LED color mixing fixtures lighting a white backdrop. They worked well for washing the 40-by-20-foot surface with color and, because they are small and draw little power, they set up quickly and trouped easily.

In the days of analog control it was easy to figure out if a control cable was good or bad. A simple continuity checker was all you needed to know whether or not it would pass signal. In the days of digital control it’s not that simple.

One of the most important lighting design tools to emerge in the post-automated lighting era is lighting design software. The first to market was the WYSIWYG suite of CAD, paperwork, rendering, and visualization software for lighting designers and programmers. Eighteen years after version 1.0 comes the latest release from Cast Software, Release 23, and it represents a major step forward in terms of real-time visualization, detail, and quality of rendering.

On the surface, the latest version of Vectorworks computer-aided design, visualization and rendering software may not look as if it has had a radical upgrade, but when you replace the 3D modeling engine with a new kernel, there’s a good argument for saying so.

I was recently asked to take a look at a new Elation lighting fixture, the LED 36 Tri-Brick. I thought to myself, “Great, yet another LED fixture in the shape of a brick.” But then I turned it on and all I could say was, “Wow.” Elation has once again stepped up and taken the LED fixture to a new level.

As lighting designers, we need to provide lots of information in the form of lighting plots and paperwork. That hasn’t changed since the days when I was in college. But these days, two-dimensional drawings are not enough. We have to be able to draw in three dimensions, turn on the lights, capture cues as photo-realistic pictures, and we have to do this in the same amount of time it used to take to produce the light plot alone.

Look Solutions recently introduced another addition to its family of haze machines with the Unique2. It has a bunch of new features that will make anyone in this business happy. For starters, it is so compact that you could fit it in your suitcase with room to spare for your clothes. But hey, who needs a lot of clothes on the road doing this job, right?  So let’s get down to the business of talking about what this product can do for your show.

The advent of the blue LED in 1993 unlocked the potential for LED technology to be used in the entertainment lighting industry for a variety of applications, one of the most important of which is the RGB LED luminaire. Creative designers quickly discovered that these luminaires could be assembled in a matrix configuration and used for low-resolution graphics. But in the beginning, there were few options for the programmer to ease the tedious task of assigning color and timing to a matrix of RGB LEDs. Today, there are many more software and hardware solutions to make it quick and easy to convert a video file to a beautiful graphic LED display.