marshmolly123
Member
So last night was our second to last performance of The Crucible, in the round, at my school. We'd had three shows already, all of which had gone off without a hitch. The light plot is pretty simple, with a total of 34 instruments. Most of the show is pretty dim, and usually my levels are at less than half. This definitely made our problem more noticeable.
I walked into the theater and someone immediately ran up to me and told me "Molly! All the lights are on but the board's off and we can't fix it!" I wasn't immediately too worried, because sometimes shutting the board off with channels up causes it to do weird things, and turning it on usually fixes that problem. I walked into the stage area and saw that literally every instrument was at full. I turned on the board, and nothing happened. This was the beginning of a very frenzied hour in which we tried many things: setting the dimmers to zero, switching out the DMX cable, turning the dimmers off and on, trading out the 24/48 for the main board (a 48/96). Finally, our technical director went up to the dimmer room to try to see what he could do. It was interesting, because only one of our dimmer racks was affected. I'm not really clear on what he did, and I'm not sure he is either, but I think he cleared the backup looks and reset the dimmer rack. I returned to the board and saw, to my relief, that everything seemed to be working. We started the show ten minutes late, and everything seemed fine.
Then, 10 minutes later, all of the instruments suddenly flashed back up to full, where they stayed no matter what I did. We were in the middle of the first act, so we couldn't exactly reset the dimmers again. I wrote down some dimmer numbers and we went up to the dimmer room to shut off some of the dimmers, so at least the lights weren't blindingly bright. Meanwhile, the technical director called ETC's technical support to try to figure out the problem. At a lighting change, we physically switched off other dimmers to change to a forest gobo scene.
Finally, at intermission, we were able to figure out what happened. A brownout earlier that day had somehow messed up with the Unison system in the auditorium and locked the dimmers to full. We're not really sure why that happened, as it has never happened in the ten years we've had the space, but fortunately resetting them fixed the problem. The rest of the show went off without a hitch.
We were very impressed with ETC's technical support. The man on the phone figured out the problem and told us what to do in about five minutes.
I walked into the theater and someone immediately ran up to me and told me "Molly! All the lights are on but the board's off and we can't fix it!" I wasn't immediately too worried, because sometimes shutting the board off with channels up causes it to do weird things, and turning it on usually fixes that problem. I walked into the stage area and saw that literally every instrument was at full. I turned on the board, and nothing happened. This was the beginning of a very frenzied hour in which we tried many things: setting the dimmers to zero, switching out the DMX cable, turning the dimmers off and on, trading out the 24/48 for the main board (a 48/96). Finally, our technical director went up to the dimmer room to try to see what he could do. It was interesting, because only one of our dimmer racks was affected. I'm not really clear on what he did, and I'm not sure he is either, but I think he cleared the backup looks and reset the dimmer rack. I returned to the board and saw, to my relief, that everything seemed to be working. We started the show ten minutes late, and everything seemed fine.
Then, 10 minutes later, all of the instruments suddenly flashed back up to full, where they stayed no matter what I did. We were in the middle of the first act, so we couldn't exactly reset the dimmers again. I wrote down some dimmer numbers and we went up to the dimmer room to shut off some of the dimmers, so at least the lights weren't blindingly bright. Meanwhile, the technical director called ETC's technical support to try to figure out the problem. At a lighting change, we physically switched off other dimmers to change to a forest gobo scene.
Finally, at intermission, we were able to figure out what happened. A brownout earlier that day had somehow messed up with the Unison system in the auditorium and locked the dimmers to full. We're not really sure why that happened, as it has never happened in the ten years we've had the space, but fortunately resetting them fixed the problem. The rest of the show went off without a hitch.
We were very impressed with ETC's technical support. The man on the phone figured out the problem and told us what to do in about five minutes.