Butch!
Active Member
I totally agree with @NickVon's rant. You would think teachers would want to stay up to date on what they teach. But that might be the rub --- many of the teachers that do plays in schools aren't teaching theater technology and don't feel they should have to learn how to use a console for the one show a year they do. I'm in a school somewhere once a week and sometimes for a week at a time and the teachers gripe about a lot of 'extra' things that the Administration is burdening them with. They have new grading software, new lockdown drills, new protocols for discipline, new policies and more thrown at them every month as they spend all of their time 'teaching to the test' so that their students score well and allow the school to keep getting funding from the government. With limited time and so many demands on them they can't do it all. There's no easy answer but in the end it's the kids that suffer.
We suggested an Element to one of our schools and the results were disappointing. The end users couldn't handle the use of a knob to switch between banks of faders. One of the school's big complaints was that people would use the console to turn the lights on after school and then leave without turning them off and they would stay on all night. We had hoped that the time functions on the Element would be universal so that it could be set to automatically power down every night, but they are tied to the show so if someone tries to create a new show they wipe out the automatic shutdown and the other macros we put in place to make it easier on everyone. All the laminated cards and cheat sheets haven't been able to solve it.
Give them 96 channel sliders and 24 subs they do great, anything less and they just don't get it. I just wish ETC still made something like that in a affordable range.
Oh and @RonHebbard I thought the Y2k glitch wiped out sundials!
We suggested an Element to one of our schools and the results were disappointing. The end users couldn't handle the use of a knob to switch between banks of faders. One of the school's big complaints was that people would use the console to turn the lights on after school and then leave without turning them off and they would stay on all night. We had hoped that the time functions on the Element would be universal so that it could be set to automatically power down every night, but they are tied to the show so if someone tries to create a new show they wipe out the automatic shutdown and the other macros we put in place to make it easier on everyone. All the laminated cards and cheat sheets haven't been able to solve it.
Give them 96 channel sliders and 24 subs they do great, anything less and they just don't get it. I just wish ETC still made something like that in a affordable range.
Oh and @RonHebbard I thought the Y2k glitch wiped out sundials!