@dvsDave and I had to take advantage of the Chauvet Tour while at USITT. Hopefully some of you also had the chance to go. The tour was great, we walked through the sales and corporate offices, had a great demo in the Chauvet Professional Showroom, by R&D and their product torture pit (they've had some of those lights running for about 10 years spining, fading, rotating... whatever needs to be done to find the potential flaws). Through the Chauvet DJ show room, the studio where they film those product videos. The amazingly huge warehouse! then over to a second building where quality control and repairs are done. Here are some pictures and comments.
That's our friend @Ford (Along with Caroline Chauvet) in a warehouse straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can see a black line down the middle of the floor behind Ford and a forklift in the distance. The line is a navigation tool. The forklifts pull into the aisle and then lock into the black line to keep them perfectly centered in the aisle.
These pictures below are from the Chauvet Quality Control Department. Did you know that EVERY Chauvet Professional light fixture is tested before being sent out? Yeah I didn't either and I bought a bunch of them! The DJ line they spot check batches but in the Professional line everything is tested. They have a series of programmed routines they run and they use lots of fog to make it easy to spot issues with the light. Here are some pretty cool pictures I took. I didn't get a picture because I was having too much fun watching, but the QC guys showed us how they assemble their Video Wall (you can sort of see it in the background to the right of the post, beyond the smoke, in the picture above). It was pretty cool. I was amazed by how fast and easy it was to put together.
And they just happened to be testing a batch of my favorite new toy at work the B-2805FC. They are SO unbelievably bright (and completely screwed up my picture) . I have them on a 22' cyc and rarely run them brighter than about 25%. Often they are down around 5%-10%. My new favorite trick is to set them to a deep dark purple and bring in my black rear traveler. It looks like it's a gorgeous purple curtain.
We had a great tutorial in the repair shop of some basic maintenance for moving head fixtures. Finally Albert Chauvet came out to greet everyone. It was a very interesting and well done tour. Chauvet has a lot of really cool stuff going on and i wish you could have all checked it out. Chauvet is definitely NOT "just a DJ company" anymore. Thanks @Ford, @Ben Dickmann, Caroline, Albert, and everyone else for the cool tour!
That's our friend @Ford (Along with Caroline Chauvet) in a warehouse straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can see a black line down the middle of the floor behind Ford and a forklift in the distance. The line is a navigation tool. The forklifts pull into the aisle and then lock into the black line to keep them perfectly centered in the aisle.
These pictures below are from the Chauvet Quality Control Department. Did you know that EVERY Chauvet Professional light fixture is tested before being sent out? Yeah I didn't either and I bought a bunch of them! The DJ line they spot check batches but in the Professional line everything is tested. They have a series of programmed routines they run and they use lots of fog to make it easy to spot issues with the light. Here are some pretty cool pictures I took.
I didn't get a picture because I was having too much fun watching, but the QC guys showed us how they assemble their Video Wall (you can sort of see it in the background to the right of the post, beyond the smoke, in the picture above). It was pretty cool. I was amazed by how fast and easy it was to put together.
And they just happened to be testing a batch of my favorite new toy at work the B-2805FC. They are SO unbelievably bright (and completely screwed up my picture) . I have them on a 22' cyc and rarely run them brighter than about 25%. Often they are down around 5%-10%. My new favorite trick is to set them to a deep dark purple and bring in my black rear traveler. It looks like it's a gorgeous purple curtain.
We had a great tutorial in the repair shop of some basic maintenance for moving head fixtures. Finally Albert Chauvet came out to greet everyone. It was a very interesting and well done tour. Chauvet has a lot of really cool stuff going on and i wish you could have all checked it out. Chauvet is definitely NOT "just a DJ company" anymore. Thanks @Ford, @Ben Dickmann, Caroline, Albert, and everyone else for the cool tour!
