90,000 amps !

JD

Well-Known Member
You read that right. At 120v, that works out to a 10.8 Megawatt light plot! Sometimes in theater and rock lighting we forget what the big boys are doing! The plot I speak of was used in a large aircraft hanger for the filming to the Maelstrom in Pirates of the Caribbean III. Ten 9,000 amp generators provided the juice along with seven miles of feeder cable. All these details are on the "behind the scenes" section of the 2 disk DVD that came out this week. If you can borrow it from someone, do it! The staging was apparently the largest attempted indoor scene ever done. There is about 30 minutes spent explaining it on the DVD. A real treat for anyone in theater!
 
Sweetness! I've definitely got to find someone to borrow this from! Or maybe I'll ask for it for xmas or something!
 
you can always bring ihn your own nuclear reactor
I wonder if they made a slight mistake in what they said

Sharyn
 
Ya, thats my feeling too. I know they have 900 amp genys out there, but 9000 amp... 7 Miles of feeder, possible, but no way is there a 9000 amp generator that you could actually move.
http://lightson.com/rental/kansascity/generators/900.html

I don't know, the pic they showed looked a lot heavier then the little 8000 pound 900 amp guy. Each of the 10 gens would have to be 1.08mg output. That works out to 1440 Hp which looked about right. Basically, your standard diesel locomotive generator. Just did a little googeling and found a bunch of them used at a site called myrak.com in the 1.0meg to to 1.275meg range if you have a spare $160,000. They are all skid and/or container mount.

http://www.myrak.com/?gclid=CNShkeucn5ACFQhlHgodI0lSPQ
(Page is slow, scroll to bottom.)
 
I got a private tour of the disney lot this summer and I was pretty impressed by the way things are run, it felt a lot more like a machine and a part of the disney empire than the paramount lot did.
 
Just did a little googeling and found a bunch of them used at a site called myrak.com in the 1.0meg to to 1.275meg range if you have a spare $160,000.

Sweet. I need one of those at my house for winter storm power outages. I could rent power to the whole neighborhood!
 
My guess is someone is looking at adding the amps per each leg three phase. Considering the lack of efficiency on lighting, that much power certainly would make for a real oven to work in.

Sharyn
 
"8.8 Gigawatts?!?!? Of course! 8.8 Gigawatts! Marty!"-Dr. Emmett Brown/Back to the Future.
 
"8.8 Gigawatts?!?!? Of course! 8.8 Gigawatts! Marty!"-Dr. Emmett Brown/Back to the Future.

Actually, I do believe that it's "Jiggawatts"...but yes! Excellent movie reference!
 
Actually, I do believe that it's "Jiggawatts"...but yes! Excellent movie reference!

So Jay-Z generates electrical energy? Wow, and here I just thought he was a hip-hop mogul.



(Jay-Z has referred to himself as the 'Jigga-Man')
 
"Jigga whaaaat?"

Gawd, greenia, I'm SO glad you caught that too...'cause I was dyyyyying to go there, but didn't want to push my pop culture quota too high in one night.

But at the end of the day, I still need N.W.A.
"...built like a tank/ yet hard to hit/ Ice Cube and Eazy-E cold runnin' _ _ _ _"
 
Glad I'm not the only one.
 
By the way, it really was in the movie "gigawatts," according to the almight imdb.com they just pronounced it jiga.
 
The size and scale of the set was jaw-dropping! They built the full decks of both ships and had them on hydraulics. The oil pump alone was rated at 1000GPM (that's M as in minute!) at standard hydraulic pressure. I am sure it was a very hot set indeed, although the entire shoot was done in a drenching indoor rainstorm. I watched the DVD again, and still could not believe the size and scale of things. That row of generators is downright sick! Makes the old 125kw's we use look like toys! The footage is only on the two-disk set, so borrow/rent/whatever, sit back and prepare to have your mind blown!
 
I hate to say it, but I can see that figure being accurate. When you take into account the larger size fixtures on film sets (20K+ Xenon fixtures), the amount of strobes and Lightening Strike machines that were more than likely used, you start eating up amps mighty fast. Some of the Xenon fixtures take straight feeder, the others will take a 100A bates connector. Also, take into account needing to strike multiple HIGH amperage arc fixtures. You can only power up so many fixtures before you run out of head room on the generator to have enough amperage/voltage to strike the next.

Also, please note they probably didn't use that many amps, but were capable of generating that. On generators, as you all know, its very important to balance the load across the phases. On film sets, they do a LOT of partitioning to make sure the genies aren't over working themselves, are completely balanced, etc. I'm sure they had a bunch of dummy loads out back to keep the genies all balanced and such. Also, given this is such a high profile movie and they had a huge budget, I can imagine them over ordering on generators to make SURE they never overloaded them, and never had one go down during shooting. If you've ever had a generator go down during the middle of a take, you know what I'm talking about.

Still, that's just a silly amount of power. Would love to watch the behind the scenes footage.
 

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