Recent content by Butch!

I think the industry has missed the boat when it comes to what many high and middle schools need. Hey if you're in a big city with huge schools and a huge tax base then you can have a staff TD who knows all the latest technology or a theater arts teacher who has a really good idea of how to do...

You can take 4 by 8 stryofoam sheets (not beadfoam), preferably 2" thick, (thicker if you can find it), ideally without the prescored snap lines and cut them into rings of diminishing diameters from 48" and down to rough out the shape of the piece. Then hang a router from a cable anchored to a...

Even though they're luan covered I wouldn't top hang them. 1) it's just not as safe, 2) the flat will tend to lean while if bottom hung it will be closer to straight up and down.

+1 On that. I've seen figure 8'd cables in free air get hot.

On all of our Lehigh consoles the houselight control is powered by the rack. The tech who worked on ours said it is as simple as pulling the slider (and button) module out of the console and mounting it in a box and then reconnecting the wires.

I work in a couple schools with Lehigh systems, though mainly from 1995 and up where they used a different connector for the houselights - it's very similar to a VGA monitor plug on all of ours. In these systems the houselight dimmers are in the rack but are controlled by a separate analog...

That's what we're doing for a production about a month from now.

We counted our full sheet inventory once and put the results in an excel spreadsheet. Then next to the gel rack we have little forms which are to be filled out every time gel is pulled - color, quantity, date, show, name of puller. Then there is a little box next to the rack to put the forms...

@MNicolai and @RonHebbard - Thanks for the great product suggestions. I usually use Radio Design Labs and hadn't seen anything appropriate in their line.

I was at the school today and met the Athletic Director and finally got the whole story on the Bluetooth request. The girl's basketball coach wanted to play music from his phone during warm up before the games so he strung together a bunch of adapters from Amazon until he got something that fit...

Either I'm not getting it, or is there an oops in your drawing? On the green wall it looks like there are two hinge points, but on the pink ones it looks like there are three pivot points. I think the two pivot points would work, but the three wouldn't as there isn't anything to keep the middle...

I imagine you have the pack in one location and then are running cables out to the fixtures and practicals. You haven't done anything crazy like coiling all the cables together or around a pipe or something like that have you? You can get inductive currents in those situations which will...

I keep telling them I'm allergic to theater and now I have proof!

Years ago my wife toured with Martha Graham in Europe as the Lighting Designer. At a stop in France the locally hired translator didn't show up. Luckily my wife had some High School French and had found and bought a 'theater phrases' translation book before leaving the U.S. She figured out...

@Chris15 That's a good find and a nice product to know about! But at $400 plus the cost of running the Catx cable back to the rack it would be less costly to go with a beltpack wireless transmitter and plug the phone into it.I think I've managed to talk them out of Bluetooth due to the...