I can't think of any Broadway show that has opened this season that isn't on an
Eos series. Saying the
Eos doesn't do movers is quite false.
Dames at Sea, King Charles III, Fiddler on the Roof, Fun Home, GGLAM, Gin Game, School of Rock, A View From the Bridge, The King and I,
Hand to God are all on
Eos series consoles.
I know that The Crucible, Eclipsed, Waitress, and Shuffle Along.... are all going to be programed on
Eos series consoles.
It's weird, the dual
programmer thing. I have many thoughts about this and will post more later.
Hog and MA are the biggest contenders on Broadway? Um. Not so.
Interested to hear your thoughts on the dual
programmer thing. I've been doing multi-programmer shows on and off since the 90s, when we'd put white light on the Expression and movers on, well, whatever we could..
It slowed down a
bit around the time the Hog 2 started becoming viable and people started making me run movers and conventionals at the same time, stayed single-programmer through the early MA days, but then media servers started showing up and we split apart again.
These days I spend a lot of time programming theatrical projections, where my
console is an island : separate
cue calls, no shared infrastructure, nobody else in my session. (I run MAs almost exclusively). Typically the lighting guys have some kind of Eos-family
console to deal with and I'm very happy they're there for that. Occasionally I'll steal scenic
LED fixtures from their rig and tie them into my
system, but I try to avoid anything with an arc source because after 12 hours of banging on servers in that context I'm pretty likely to totally forget to douse the rig.
The rest of the time, I'm doing big nasty industrials. The vast majority have boiled back down to single-programmer shows, typically a couple dozen universes of movers and LEDs,
pixel map data coming from a server and spitting back into the
console. Occasionally if there's no time they'll
throw another
console and
programmer at the show. If it's someone I know and trust enough to share a showfile with, we live in the same session and can help each other out if necessary, but the vast majority of the time I prefer my rig broken apart from anyone else's.
In the projection world, what passes for previz for us is a
monitor per output as we sit in a stuffy room somewhere and
build cues. The ideal in this case is to get a skeleton into the board so that when we hit the
first rehearsal (don't even talk to me about
load-in schedules) I can at the very least hit GO and see something happen when the SM asks for it. In this case I typically preprogram everything as single 1080p outputs and then split them apart to converge, warp, mutilate,
etc once we get into the space.
In the industrial world, I live and die by previz. They've cut
load-in and tech time so significantly that without having time to pre-cue/write palettes/suss out positions/look for issues in in previz we would end up giving them a severely compromised show. Nobody's paying for dedicated previz suite time anymore, for the most part, but we've had great luck finding a corner and setting up the
system during
load-in. That way we're a short walk or radio away if the PE has any questions, and we can watch the progress of the actual rig as well.