Best practices as house when hosting touring production's lighting network

[Malabaristo]

You have a lot of really good points here.

I'm going to address one aspect of it, with a potentially incendiary statement.

If you're a house tech in a venue relying heavily on networked distribution, and you're not able to troubleshoot/change/manage/understand the way the infrastructure works, you're not qualified for your job.

None of these things are novelties anymore. It would be like walking into a counterweight house with a flyman who only used hemp,.

I don't necessarily disagree with this, but there's a very big difference between "Can I troubleshoot this?" and "Do I have time to troubleshoot this?" There's also the closely-related question of "How much do I trust this person to do what I tell them (and tell me what they're doing accurately and completely)?" Those questions would be the big driver for me to try to lock down/limit/control whatever someone else's gear can do to my network. I don't currently work in the type of venues where that's an issue, so reading through this has mostly been an interesting thought experiment so far...

I guess my one counter-argument to your point is that with as complex as everything has gotten across sound, lighting, video, etc, it's pretty difficult for one person to know everything about everything anymore. If it's a venue that only has one full-time (if that) tech person, it's not unreasonable that they would fill in gaps in their systems knowledge with part time or contract people who aren't going to be on call 24/7.

 

[Bill Werst]

We have a full-size MA3 which we've been running in 3 mode for over a year. Still looking for a few features in 3, but usability improvements are great. No going back, people staying on 2 have a unique requirement, haven't had the training time, lazy, or chicken.

Anyway, a solution we've found for incoming tours is to use the second nic on the console. We set the second IP to match the tours addressing. In our console we can create a temporary universe mapping. The console will bridge protocols and only expose what we map. Additionally, our console and architectural system are online and we they aren't actually on our network. If your house has unique patches you can also use DMX inputs (including protocols) to map to our executors. For instance our executors might limit house lights to certain percentages.