Road Tests

With the introduction of the Alpha line several years ago, Clay Paky began an earnest push to reinvigorate its fixture offerings. Combined with an overhauled U.S.-based sales and support team, it has resulted in renewed brand awareness in North America and around the world. The newest addition to the Alpha line, the Alpha Profile 1200 moving yoke fixture is a direct answer to the framing shutter systems incorporated into the massively popular VL3500 Spot and MAC 2000 Performance fixtures.

Read on to see how the Alpha Profile 1200 stacks up. 

If you see fog emanating from a seemingly invisible source, chances are you’re looking at the Scotty II Fog Generator from the German-based manufacturer Smoke Factory. Scotty II is the successor to the Scotty I, and it’s a little machine that puts out big volumes of fog. The battery-operated, very compact and easy-to-operate machine delivers fog quickly and without much of a warm-up time.  

As the pace of technological development increases, finding a software tool that is easy to understand and easy to use is becoming more challeng-ing. That’s what makes The Stage Research SoftPlot 9 lighting CAD software so appealing. It provides enough power and features to effectively create a complete lighting plot without overtaxing your brain, leaving it free to concentrate on the design.

Keep your body parts, get automated

There have been many situations when I would have given my right arm to have the ability to refocus my conventional lights. I once did an outdoor festival where we had to focus the conventionals with the truss not quite to trim because it was a ground support system, and we didn’t have a tall enough ladder to reach the truss at trim. So we basically had to guess at the focus. Once we took the truss to trim, we had no recourse, so it was critical that the focus was right. It wasn’t. When the sun went down, it became painfully apparent that the talent on stage either had to grow a foot or so, or we had to come up with a way to refocus. Luckily, we got a break when there was a set change, and the dimmer tech ran out with a short ladder and a long pole, just long enough to nudge the lights.

The Sea Changer Wash is a dichroic color changer with a Fresnel lens built by Ocean Optics out of Dunedin, Fla.  The company has devised an in-strument that is designed to attach to the lamp housing of an ETC Source Four ERS series of conventional lighting fixtures. In other words, it’s a cool color changer that converts a leko to a Fresnel. Ocean Optics already had a Sea Changer dichroic color changer that uses the Source Four lens, but due to high demand, it recently released the “wash” version of the product.

Martin Professional recently added two new versions to its Magnum family of foggers: the Magnum 1200 and Magnum 1800. Each of these machines has similar features, including the way they look, an aluminum carrying handle on top, a storage compartment on the side of the unit to store accessories and a remote timer control.

Big-Boy LED at Little-Kid Pricing

There are two good reasons to get excited about Chauvet’s new Colorado 3. It adds a feature — affordability — not usually associated with an LED color wash fixture of this quality. And by “this quality,” we mean a well-built, big-boy instrument, not a child’s play thing.
 

ROSCO LITE-PAD IS READY FOR YOUR CLOSEUP

By Richard Cadena 

If you thought you’d seen every LED light source known to man, think again.

The age of LED lighting has yet to hit full stride, but already there is an abundance of LED luminaires for the entertainment lighting market. They all work pretty much the same way, with either RGB color mixing or white and amber LEDs and focusing lenses — or do they?
 

Wireless DMX has been around for more than a decade now. The idea is to use it when you cannot run a control cable from the lighting console to your lighting fixtures. For instance, you may have multiple lighting fixtures located on several rooftops and one console located in a van in a parking lot of one of the buildings.

Coemar, the Italian automated lighting manufacturer, has recently unveiled their latest product; the Infinity Wash XL. It’s a 1200-watt moving yoke color wash fixture with some interesting surprises. In some ways it is much like your typical color wash moving light with a color mixing system, zoom, effects, beam shaping, dimmer, shutter and pan/tilt. But in other ways it’s very different.

Robe Lighting has recently introduced their latest and most powerful fixture to date. The ColorSpot 2500 spot is a hard edge automated fixture that has all the bells and whistles you would expect from a premium product, but its brightness makes this fixture stand out. With the advent of all the 1200-watt wash lights that have come out, the fixture has become a necessary addition to their product line. This new fixture competes in this class, and it will be a major player on the stadium rock circuit or as a searchlight or special effect for many trade shows.