soundlight
Well-Known Member
So I'm doing another light show. You may remember my first light show back at the beginning of this year. That was kind of a standalone deal, done for the department open house. This show that I just finished programming will be included in the Dance Company Fall Concert, the first time that this had happened in a very, very long time, apparently. With this in mind, I used almost intelligents, as I couldn't put anything in audience view like I did for the previous show, and we actually ran out of instruments doing our dance concert rig, and had to bring some of them over from the studio theatre to complete the rig. We also used up all of our socapex cable, so I wasn't able to set up a lineset that could be flown in that had more units on. (This dance show already has 9 onstage electrics in a house that usually only has 5).
That being said, I had a very nice set of tools for this light show. 6 Intellabeams, 4 VL3000 spots (rented), and 2 I-Cues, and one special - a 10 degree source four from the balc rail with a heart gobo in it and R26. Sadly, I'm still programming on an original obsession 600 (upgraded to 750 channels) with the ML DRC, so things go really slowly.
I'm using the internal SMPTE clock, and this is where the latency of the 486 processor starts to show. We've put the newer OS on it, so it's running as much information as a Pentium II handles through a 486...so every now and then, the cues are horribly latent, and I have to start over again. However, this didn't happen tonite on the actual dress rehearsal of the show, which was good.
I'm also having problems with one of the VL3000 spots. About 50% of the time that I run the show, it resets itself. Always on the same cue. The fixture is recieving the exact same data for all channels except pan and tilt as one of the other units, and the control channel on all fixtures is parked at 35% (a dead value in control channel commands). I switched the patching for fixtures one and two, and when fixture two was recieving fixture one's patching, it STLL died - so it's definitely a fixture problem, or a really whack board issue (I also checked all of the individual channel patching, not just ML patching, to see if the channels were all patched properly). But luckily, this is the only major issue that has come up besides the latency of the board on the internal SMPTE clock.
I am also designing two pieces in the dance concert, rare for someone who is only a sophomore, so I'm really happy about that. The light show is to a shortened (about 1:53) version of OAR's Love and Memories, and I got the timecode by putting the time display of Cool Edit Pro in to SMPTE 30fps and recorded all of the timecode values in to the console manually. If anyone's in the central PA area, the show is this Friday (tomorrow) and Saturday at 8pm on both days.
There will, of course, be a video of the show up as soon as I have some time to go in, haze the place up really well, and record it without the timecode flipping out on me.
That being said, I had a very nice set of tools for this light show. 6 Intellabeams, 4 VL3000 spots (rented), and 2 I-Cues, and one special - a 10 degree source four from the balc rail with a heart gobo in it and R26. Sadly, I'm still programming on an original obsession 600 (upgraded to 750 channels) with the ML DRC, so things go really slowly.
I'm using the internal SMPTE clock, and this is where the latency of the 486 processor starts to show. We've put the newer OS on it, so it's running as much information as a Pentium II handles through a 486...so every now and then, the cues are horribly latent, and I have to start over again. However, this didn't happen tonite on the actual dress rehearsal of the show, which was good.
I'm also having problems with one of the VL3000 spots. About 50% of the time that I run the show, it resets itself. Always on the same cue. The fixture is recieving the exact same data for all channels except pan and tilt as one of the other units, and the control channel on all fixtures is parked at 35% (a dead value in control channel commands). I switched the patching for fixtures one and two, and when fixture two was recieving fixture one's patching, it STLL died - so it's definitely a fixture problem, or a really whack board issue (I also checked all of the individual channel patching, not just ML patching, to see if the channels were all patched properly). But luckily, this is the only major issue that has come up besides the latency of the board on the internal SMPTE clock.
I am also designing two pieces in the dance concert, rare for someone who is only a sophomore, so I'm really happy about that. The light show is to a shortened (about 1:53) version of OAR's Love and Memories, and I got the timecode by putting the time display of Cool Edit Pro in to SMPTE 30fps and recorded all of the timecode values in to the console manually. If anyone's in the central PA area, the show is this Friday (tomorrow) and Saturday at 8pm on both days.
There will, of course, be a video of the show up as soon as I have some time to go in, haze the place up really well, and record it without the timecode flipping out on me.
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