Band Teacher nearly ruined the gels in Color Scrollers

Well this one just happened this week. It seems one of teh band helpers, not even a teacher. Came into the Auditorium and messed around with the LCD touch display and turned on all the lights in the auditorium. Including the Source Fours with the four-runner scrollers. Well he did not turn on the forerunner box. Thank God it was only for a short time before somebody on crew caught the mistake before the gels were not ruined. That would have been like $79 per colorscroller which would have been costly.

 

He he, "I'll burn your gels". See, this furthur promotes the idea the bandies are pretty low on the evolutionary chart, somewhere around 3-toed sloth i believe

 

I am not a roadie' that I would agree is a very lower form of life. Some know, most don't. Oh' for the 1930's when it actually took people that knew what they were doing to to work the stage. Given the technology was much less.

Any interest in the culprate for the misdeed learning from his mistake? Might be a budding tech helper on the horizon.

 

we used to have that same problem, so we just changed the padlock on the control box to one that only the techies had and then posted a sign saying that the box was broken.

 

Can someone explain how the Gels would be ruined?

 

In some other post in some other part of the forum there is a post on gels getting stuffed... but the gist of it is that you get "burnt centre out" and "burnt out centre" which essentially means that the colour drains out of the centre of the gel, or the outside of the gel... rendering it basically useless!

This happens during performances with high intensity fixtures (par cans 1.2kw pc's etc.) with saturated (deep) coloured gels in them like a dark (congo) blue and dark rich greens and reds.

It can also happen from having a gel too close to the lamp tray, the fixture not been focussed properly, or been left on for wayyy too long at FF. (why do we say FF? does it stand for anything...???)

 

Gotcha

 

Careful - some of us are experienced musicians 8)

 

FF is computer geek-speak for 255 - the maximum value (full-on) for a DMX-512 channel. It's hexadecimal (base-16) notation.

DMX-512 sends data as an 8-bit binary number in the range 0-255, where
decimal 0 = 00000000 and decimal 255 = 11111111. Writing out the 1's and zeros is a hassle. Converting, in your head, from binary to decimal, is a pain. Us geeks figured that we could further confuse the issue by splitting the binary number into two groups of four bits. and using a single digit to represent each group.
0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0011 = 3
0100 = 4
0101 = 5
0110 = 6
0111 = 7
1000 = 8
1001 = 9
when we ran out of regular digits, we adopted letters of the alphabet, so
1010 = A
1011 = B
1100 = C
1101 = D
1110 = E
1111 = F

So FF stands for 11111111, the biggest number you can send as an eight-bit signal - full-on for a DMX-512 channel.

John

 

Thats why on our lighting system we can lock out the control panels on the side and program the buttons to turn on only the work lights (8 parcans)

 

nice info, thats for that dmxtools... woulda replied sooner but urgh as u know lol!

 

o ill remember that bit about DMX.
im in the computing area so its up my alley.
i had always just assumed taht it was dacimal.
wab colours use that too, incase anyone wondered.

 

If your auditorium has some sort of preset system that music directors can just hit one switch on to turn on what lights they need for a rehearsal than make sure you program your scroller fans to turn on even if the scroller is not being used. This will insure that there will be no burning through the gels because of an accidental turn on of the Source fours that use the scrollers.

 

How is that annoying? He was just adding on a useful tip to a post that some people may look to for information. Just because it hasn't been touched for a while doesn't mean it's no longer valid or interesting information.

 

Yup...(guilty as charged lol)...but remember...we all could still be put under the Techie (Technical) Category. (Sorry if I offend anyone with the word "Techie" here, I know some people don't aprreciate being called a techie...although I think it is OK amongst fellow "techies" lol)

 

Right.

You guys are always telling new members to use the search feature to find answers to their questions before they ask on the forum because you guys get annoyed in answering the same questions a million times.
(I only say "you guys" there because I am one of the people who usually only asks questions.)

This forum usually has about 10 times as many people online who are not members, than who are members. These are people who only look at old posts, and are sometimes referred to here by google.

It makes perfect sense to add to the information in old posts.

 

Some people have to also realize that we as humans don't always pay attention to the date stamps on these posts, I just checked on the last few posts i have done in threads, and all of them are in threads that were near the top off the list in that forum category, but were date stamped in the year 2004.