I've got a Status Cue I used for six years (~2001-2007) for 90% of an Equity Small Professional Theatre's production. The house we performed in also owned a fairly good sized ETC. Lighting was run by stage management who absolutely adored the Status Cue's user interface and hated the ETC. I'd set up acts as "songs" so they had a pallet of all the cues right in front of them. If there was a train wreck on stage they could quickly repeat a cue, jump to a different cue, etc. I used the console for programming a show and they ran it with a mouse.
An SC would be just fine with the equipment listed and it doesn't sound like your going to have a budget to rush and buy current intelligent lighting anyhow. I did run my Cyberlights and scrollers with no issues, there is a custom channeling feature where you can build multichannel fixtures from scratch, you can't use the track ball for steering but at least you can design a preset for given multichannel instrument. For instance: You could easily have an RGB LED run off of a three channel custom fixture.
Bottom line? If you're patient and learn to use a $300 Status Cue I suspect you'll have a better system than any free system with a dongle.
An SC would be just fine with the equipment listed and it doesn't sound like your going to have a budget to rush and buy current intelligent lighting anyhow. I did run my Cyberlights and scrollers with no issues, there is a custom channeling feature where you can build multichannel fixtures from scratch, you can't use the track ball for steering but at least you can design a preset for given multichannel instrument. For instance: You could easily have an RGB LED run off of a three channel custom fixture.
Bottom line? If you're patient and learn to use a $300 Status Cue I suspect you'll have a better system than any free system with a dongle.
