Hi all,
I'm a newer head electrician at a PAC that does a good amount of in house productions, but also hosts for touring companies at least once a month. Typically we get things like comedians or podcasts that don't have many technical needs but a few times a year we get bands or tours that have their own lighting packages. Historically, we've set up a 4 port dmx input node to allow them to have control of the venue lights they need, and we do AIP on our side (we're an ETC house with sACN). Recently we've upgraded a lot of equipment to LED and intelligent lights and are hitting limitations with fitting everything into 4 DMX ports. Last week I had a tour directly connect to our sACN network and things went well, but in speaking with the tour LD he seemed skeptical of that approach.
With that said, how do you typically handle this type of situation? are other venues keeping strictly to DMX input? If not, what protocols do you have about hooking other networks in to your system? Do you typically have their network priority match yours? higher? lower? Do tours have certain expectations from the house when this happens? What do you do when your universe footprint overlaps with yours? Would you expect the tour to adjust their network to fit or would the house? is there a range of universes you would expect a tour to use?
I'm mostly just looking to see what other venues do in order to make life as easy as possible for me and the touring LDs, and try to avoid learning some lessons the hard way about dealing with these situations.
Thanks in advance!
I'm a newer head electrician at a PAC that does a good amount of in house productions, but also hosts for touring companies at least once a month. Typically we get things like comedians or podcasts that don't have many technical needs but a few times a year we get bands or tours that have their own lighting packages. Historically, we've set up a 4 port dmx input node to allow them to have control of the venue lights they need, and we do AIP on our side (we're an ETC house with sACN). Recently we've upgraded a lot of equipment to LED and intelligent lights and are hitting limitations with fitting everything into 4 DMX ports. Last week I had a tour directly connect to our sACN network and things went well, but in speaking with the tour LD he seemed skeptical of that approach.
With that said, how do you typically handle this type of situation? are other venues keeping strictly to DMX input? If not, what protocols do you have about hooking other networks in to your system? Do you typically have their network priority match yours? higher? lower? Do tours have certain expectations from the house when this happens? What do you do when your universe footprint overlaps with yours? Would you expect the tour to adjust their network to fit or would the house? is there a range of universes you would expect a tour to use?
I'm mostly just looking to see what other venues do in order to make life as easy as possible for me and the touring LDs, and try to avoid learning some lessons the hard way about dealing with these situations.
Thanks in advance!