TORONTO — A Compulite Vector RED serves as the main console for Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) show hosted by Canadian-born Alex Trebek. The show is designed to motivate young adults to take a greater interest in entering the political arena. Four finalists go through a series of political challenges overseen by a panel of four former Canadian Prime Ministers (Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, Kim Campbell and Paul Martin).
The audience votes on who is to be crowned “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.” Along with possible future political capital, the winner walks away with a prize of $50,000.
The show was recorded in HD at Studio 40 in the CBC’s Broadcast Centre. Brad Dickson, CBC’s senior LD, chose a rig with a mix of conventional and automated fixtures.
The lighting rig included 200 channels of conventional television fixtures controlled by the Vector and patched to the permanent CD90 studio dimming system. The rig included: 24 large format Rainbow scrollers, 60 Color Kinetic Color Blast LED fixtures, four Color Kinetics IW fixtures, 24 Vari*Lite VL5 wash fixtures, four Vari*Lite VL3000 Spot fixtures, 16 Coemar CF 1200 HE fixtures, four High End Showgun fixtures and 100 Versa Tube V2i fixtures controlled by a PRG Virtuoso DX and PRG Mbox Media Server.
The main Vector RED console was backed up by a Vector PC with Playback Wing, Editor Wing, and three ePort, Ethernet to DMX nodes.
The console used 8 outputs of physical DMX and one of ArtNet on the main console, 8 outputs of VCs and one of ArtNet on the PC backup
The consoles were loaded with the new 3.16 CRV1 release candidate for Vector systems, which proved to be very stable, according to Compulite. It used the following new features:
Multiple workspaces: multiple workspaces (tabs) on each of the available monitors, which lets users quickly view changes without re-loading different layouts.
New DMX protocol manager: said to maximize the performance of ArtNet and Compulite's VC network protocols by reducing network traffic. Compulite reports that this new protocol manager allows individual ports to be specifically configured for ArtNet, VCs, or both.
Desktop feature: This enables the creation of a Desktop similar to the Windows desktop found on most PCs, according to Compulite. Commonly used objects such as fixtures, groups, libraries, macros, and icons from the gobo and color pickers, may be dragged from most soft-key or picker locations and dropped in icon form on the desktop.
For more information, please visit www.compulite.com.
