Learning Network for Entertainment

McCready00

Active Member
Hello all,

I never really had a problem connecting a network for the gigs I've done. I got to say that in most occasion, they were simple networks..

Festivals and Tours are now getting bigger and bigger in terms in networking. I would like to have a more serious training on the type of networking we are facing.

Is there a website, or videos that could show me more.

( no books please.... )

Most of the websites I find won't really show what is needed in our field of work.

Anyway, if you had anything that could help me out, don't be shy to show it.

Thanks
 
The reality is, while we have been using networking in the industry for a while, it is still a bit of black magic to many. I know you don’t want a list of books, but even in print there are not too many options that relate directly to our field. Entertainment networking is really pushing the edge cases of network technology. We do a lot of things on networks that make IT people cringe.

Generally, networking for a lighting system is pretty straight forward. When you get into sound and projections/video it gets a little more complex and a lot more data. If you look at show control and automation things start to get really interesting.

The thing is, even industry leaders are still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. There is a good history of folks doing silly things (like the art-net spec stipulating a default IP range that uses public IP addresses). Many people and manufacturers are still learning by experimenting.

I am sure we have some folks around here with IT backgrounds who are probably facepalming right about now, but it is pretty true.
 
The network is proportional to the size of the equipment used on it. If you can set up a small network then you can do it on a bigger scale by just putting the smaller pieces together.

No one network should rule them all it will get to busy and expensive.

One for Lighting
One for Audio
One for Video

Easy enough.
 
The network is proportional to the size of the equipment used on it. If you can set up a small network then you can do it on a bigger scale by just putting the smaller pieces together.

No one network should rule them all it will get to busy and expensive.

One for Lighting
One for Audio
One for Video

Easy enough.

This is not quite true. A small network can survive on unmanaged switches and "plug and play". A large network will greatly benefit from configuration, monitoring, intelligent traffic routing, vlans, spanning tree/loop protection, redundancy, dns serving, dhcp, and all sorts of other utilities. It's also more and more likely that you'll want lighting to talk to audio and video for some amount of control in your show, which makes one network with routed vlans incredibly useful. You'll need to be intelligent about how you route traffic, but it's certainly within the realm of networking for everything to live on the same hardware.
 
This is not quite true. A small network can survive on unmanaged switches and "plug and play". A large network will greatly benefit from configuration, monitoring, intelligent traffic routing, vlans, spanning tree/loop protection, redundancy, dns serving, dhcp, and all sorts of other utilities. It's also more and more likely that you'll want lighting to talk to audio and video for some amount of control in your show, which makes one network with routed vlans incredibly useful. You'll need to be intelligent about how you route traffic, but it's certainly within the realm of networking for everything to live on the same hardware.

Sounds busy and expensive for Festivals and Tours to travel with a full network package.

Now Cirque, Broadway, and Theme Park stuff sure but the budget reflects that kind of equipment.
 
ETC had a few talks on networking at their last CUE conference, IIRC they're mainly lighting/ETC focused (as should be expected), but should give you a good coverage of basic network terminology and structure:

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The Dante Certification Level 1 and 2, Both free and easy and worth your time delve slightly in the the black magic that is network traffic but mostly it's in how Dante (and other similiar sound traffic works on it.) The Level 3 + course delve much deeper into the deeper levels of network management from a sound/dante level.
 
I'm a network admin literally building a show control network for a client as a write this (waiting for some devices to reboot)

I usually point people in the direction of CBT Nuggets. Jeremy Cioara teaches the 2 "networking for beginners" classes that most people in the IT field start out with, Cisco ICND-1 and CompTIA NET+. Both classes are pretty similar, but the Cisco class is obviously more Cisco-specific while NET+ is more vendor-neutral. Jeremy is infectiously passionate about teaching IT, so it's not nearly as dry as most IT training. CBT Nuggets isn't free but their prices keep coming down.
No I'm not sponsored by them but I do have an annual subscription.
 
LDI has a network course before the show that I found invaluable. Actually they have two, the one for physically building network cabling I hear is a complete waste of time. The one on networking, the one I took, is very helpful.

Which is which? This year I took one that seemed like it would be useful, but about half of it was just building cable...
 
Which is which? This year I took one that seemed like it would be useful, but about half of it was just building cable...

The one I took was taught by Milton Davis from Fleenor and called “Designing, Building, Testing, and Troubleshooting Control Networks”
 

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