Gaff's LDI 2022 Report

The two top products in my opinion were the Muxwave Holographic LED Screen as mentioned above and the
Minuit Une "IVL Photon" fixture (https://www.icd-usa.com/pages/ivl-photon) which creates the effect of using multiple fixtures to do atmospheric effects. It was unfortunately only described and not demonstrated at Friday's new product breakfast but those who saw 5 of them in action at their demo room got an eyeful. Amazing!
 
Kyocera had a booth demonstrating their new SLD laser based light source. It's a true point source of light with incredibly low beam angles. They had a flashlight that was a 2 degree spread. The future application in movers and follow spots is very exciting.

Here's the web page.
 
CB member Scott Tusing is part of a team building a new tool to help tech and maintain your shows. I had a chance to watch a demo of Vor. Vor takes a video feed of your show and records it along with the stage manager's audio, EOS cue data, data from Disguise, and more. You end up with a video file with data around the edges that let's you review when the cue was called, how long it took to be fired, how long it took to play back, and what are the results on stage. In tech rehearsal you can use the video to fine tune when things are called, how long cues should run, what went wrong. Down the road you can use it to figure out why your show runs 10 minutes longer than it did when it opened. It is a subscription based product for Apple products only. What a great idea!
 
Kyocera had a booth demonstrating their new SLD laser based light source. It's a true point source of light with incredibly low beam angles. They had a flashlight that was a 2 degree spread. The future application in movers and follow spots is very exciting.

Here's the web page.
This is a bigger deal than Kyocera's page makes it seem. :)
 
This is a bigger deal than Kyocera's page makes it seem. :)
Kyocera was at LDI clearly with the purpose of finding manufacturers to partner with. So hopefully they got the attention they were looking for.
 
I spent some time with our buddy @rsmentele checking out the latest from Elation.

Bob helped design their new LED Leko fixture the KL Profile FC. It's a really interesting new product. He said their goal was not to try to compete in the, well my fixture is brighter than yours, competition and instead create something different. So, it's an LED Leko (it looks competitively bright but that's always hard to judge on the show floor). What makes it different? it's got a 6 to 50 degree lens built in, an iris, an integrated indexing single gobo rotator, and you can swap in a Fresnel lens. Yeah... THAT is different. The optics were very good and the gobos looked really good. I was very impressed and it should be on your list of fixtures to see in person.
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To further geek out on this, what makes this fixture really different is how the light path works. The fixture homogenizes the beam by pushing it through a collimator;
this allows for ZERO fringing on the final output. It outputs more like a moving profile than an ellipsoidal. The gobo edges are sharp at any zoom range. You can also get an extremely good soft focus for the gobos as well. To expand on the gobo thing, the fixture uses glass gobos at 25mm (thanks @rsmentele for thenupdate Since this is such a significant change from your standard ellipsoidals, the fixture comes with 10 carefully chosen gobos. I confirmed with @rsmentele that Apollo could definitely make glass gobos that will fit this fixture, I have not checked with Rosco, but I would assume they can as well.
 
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CB member Scott Tusing is part of a team building a new tool to help tech and maintain your shows. I had a chance to watch a demo of Vor. Vor takes a video feed of your show and records it along with the stage manager's audio, EOS cue data, data from Disguise, and more. You end up with a video file with data around the edges that let's you review when the cue was called, how long it took to be fired, how long it took to play back, and what are the results on stage. In tech rehearsal you can use the video to fine tune when things are called, how long cues should run, what went wrong. Down the road you can use it to figure out why your show runs 10 minutes longer than it did when it opened. It is a subscription based product for Apple products only. What a great idea!
Hey, that's me! Thanks for joining for our "back room demo". Happy to chat if anyone wants to know more!
 
So final thoughts...
As always the best thing about these conventions is networking, making new friends, and seeing old friends. If you are just starting out in the industry, get involved, meet people. Sign up for a committee at USITT. Get active and be part of what is going on in the Theater world. You will not regret it. I am stunned every time we gather by how much I have in common with the collection of friends I have made here. I never expected that hanging out on a website would lead to having close friends who would share deeply personal conversations about dealing with your elderly family members failing health and death. But that happened more than once this weekend... some of us have been going through some stuff this last couple of years. So get in and make friends!

Second, go to a convention for the professional development . It's great being challenged in your thinking. It's great to think about new ways of finding solutions to problems. It's great to be exposed to things you never considered. Professional development and growth can and should happen at every age. So pick one of these shows and go take some classes that maybe you aren't comfortable with. Go listen and learn something new.

Third, LDI is such a treat to see the very latest stuff. Getting to see a scrim that is also a video screen is mind blowing. I may never be able to afford it, but it challenged me to think about my design ideas in new ways. I can't wait to see what happens with that new Kyocera Laser light source. How cool. Maybe, I should be looking at getting Vor into my theater so my students can have a way to better reflect on their work and learn. Where can we go in the future with things like turning moving lights into follow spots with Spotrack? Seeing it in person is such a treat to just get your hands on the gear.

I can't wait for next year. Hopefully I'll see you there. November 12th-14th (yeah weird dates, F1 racing is coming to Vegas next year and will be messing us up).
 
To further geek out on this, what makes this fixture really different is how the light path works. The fixture homogenizes the beam by pushing it through a collimator;
this allows for ZERO fringing on the final output. It outputs more like a moving profile than an ellipsoidal. The gobo edges are sharp at any zoom range. You can also get an extremely good soft focus for the gobos as well. To expand on the gobo thing, the fixture uses glass gobos at 25 or 27mm (can't remember which). Since this is such a significant change from your standard ellipsoidals, the fixture comes with 12 carefully chosen gobos. I confirmed with @rsmentele that Apollo could definitely make glass gobos that will fit this fixture, I have not checked with Rosco, but I would assume they can as well.
25mm is correct Dave! Also, to correct the qty of gobos included... we are shipping all fixtures with 10 gobos in a nice storage box.

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@dvsDave - I'm interested in what you consider to be the difference between a profile and an ellipsoidal, as we use the term profile when referring to an ellipsoidal spotlight such as a S4 or an old school Prelude or Cantata?
All ellipsoidals are profiles, not all profiles are ellipsoidals.

A profile is defined as a fixture that throws a hard edge from a single, or very tightly controlled, point source that is capable of projecting a gobo pattern.

An ellipsoidal is defined by the method of light gathering and reflection through the optic path. Literally refers to the shape of the reflector at the back of a classic S4.

LED profiles typically don't have a reflector (unless you are using an S4WRD retrofit kit).
Most use either diffusion material to homogenize the beam(S4 LED S1, S2 and S3, Ovation Series), or a collimator (like the KC Profile from Elation)
 
Kyocera was at LDI clearly with the purpose of finding manufacturers to partner with. So hopefully they got the attention they were looking for.

Pretty sure the Aryton Cobra is using that technology, not sure if it's from Kyocera though.

I have a LEP flashlight, it's fun to play with and impress people. It's come in useful a couple times to point stuff out first thing in the morning when a tour comes in. But for what they cost it's not really something for most people to have. And I think most people would find a traditional LED based thrower to be more useful. The beams aren't quite as tight. But they're generally more reasonably priced, and the spill that lights up the rest of the area is better for most use cases.
 
@dvsDave - I'm interested in what you consider to be the difference between a profile and an ellipsoidal, as we use the term profile when referring to an ellipsoidal spotlight such as a S4 or an old school Prelude or Cantata?
I'm fascinated by regional differences in terminology. I've always found the Profile vs Ellipsoidal use fascinating. My guess is back in the old days when these products first came out some marketing guy in the US said, "See Leko's new Eliosoidal spotlight" and the term just stuck. Meanwhile in the UK they called it a profile. No real reason behind it. Now as Dave described we have a problem in the US because an LED replacement for an Elipsoidal fixture doesn't have an ellipsoidal reflector. So we need a new term. Thus, we borrowed profile from the UK as it identifies the same result but in a way that makes sense with the new technology. It's interesting how words change and move around the world.
 
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I'm fascinated by regional differences in terminology. I've always found the Profile vs Ellipsoidal use fascinating. My guess is back in the old days when these products first came out some marketing guy in the US said, "See Leko's new Eliosoidal spotlight" and the term just stuck. Meanwhile in the UK they called it a profile. No real reason behind it. Now as Dave described we have a problem in the US because an LED replacement for an Elipsoidal fixture doesn't have an ellipsoidal reflector. So we need a new term. Thus, we borrowed profile from the UK as it identifies the same result but in a way that makes sense with the new technology. It's interesting how words change and move around the world.

A bit of theatre history 101
The Leko is actually the brand name for Century's elipsoidal reflector framing spotlight. ( Named for it's purported inventors Mr Leman and Mr Kook.) In truth the inventors of the unit are murky - but the name was a trademark ( like Klenex) . I do remember a number of posts about UK fixtures that were 'Pats' ( pattern ) Not sure if that was the standard name over thre or not. Century did not have a large presence there so the UK's elipsoidals would not be called 'Leko's'.
 
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"Patts" were strand lanterns, short for pattern. Pattern 23 is the iconic "baby" profile. Pattern 123 was the matching "baby" fres. Lots of well known (in the uk) patterns.

The Theatrecrafts web site has a load of info about old Strand lighting. There's asection on here just for the Patt numbered lanterns, as well as the newer named lanterns. Whether any of them will look familiar outside of the UK I really don't know.
 
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