Unless you are doing film or TV production, I don’t see a need for the
Daylight or
Tungsten.
We did a big
purchase this past spring and are now on our 6th production for our Theater Dept. plus an Opera, with a lot of Lustr 2’s and D60 Vivids. Our
current show just loading in has zero
incandescent outside of practicals. Our Lustrs were supplied with HD lenses, though we have at times swapped out for non HD and I’ve not noticed a difference.
Your best bet is to get a local sales facility to bring in a variety of fixtures and look at the
ETC, a Chauvet,
Altman,
etc.... and do side by side comparisons. Set them all up with an
incandescent to compare, bring an assortment of gels AND
gobo’s. Run some cues and color changes. This will give you a chance to see where all that money is going.
Some lessons learned.
- The Lustre doesn’t do
gobo’s, or at least a breakup, as well as an
incandescent, thus our student LD’s have learned to use an regular S4 for that. Learning curve on this and the juries still out. Look at this closely with a variety of commonly used
gobo’s
- I have not seen issues with the “no hot spot” beam to beam blending. We do not have any Smooth
Wash Diffusers but it’s on the list. Maybe ask to
send some with a demo.
-
Power Con pass thrus and more PC pass thrus. Order a lot now. We also use Lex
Orchestra E-Strings as they are cheaper than pass thrus. All our
LED uses
Edison connectors as BTW.
- 5 & 10 ft
DMX and lots of it, order now.
- Maybe order LightSource Mega-Clamps. The Lustr’s a $2500
fixture and you don’t want to hang that off an old
Altman c-clamp. Ours came with an
ETC clamp, but MegaClamp is the smart choice.
- If an
ETC Sensor rack order a lot of relays.
- Think about data
distro. Do you need 2 port, 4 port, 8 port Gateways ?, order Cat6 and good stuff. We have been friggin plagued with cheap
Cat5 crap that won’t connect. I have thrown out a dozen and it’s immensly time consuming to
track down a simple error like that. Pointless.
- Upgrade the
console with add’l
address capability. I’m doing shows now that have 17 - 1&2 port Gateways and 4000
address used. Who would have thought.
- Big lesson learned, be prepared for twice the electrics
load in time required per event. Every
fixture gets hung, then
power cabeled and pass thrus, then
DMX, plus prep and land the nodes, swap to relays, then
power stuff up, then
address, then test,
etc..... LOT MORE TIME NEEDED. And smarter electricians who have done it before.