Leviton control boards

Stoldal

Active Member
The development office at the high school i help out at just emailed me the spec of the lighting system that is going to be in our new theatre. I have never used leviton control boards. does any one have any experience with leviton and there console called "Innovaor".
I will attach the PDF that i got, it includes the lighting system for the whole theatre.
When a theatre is built is a standard that there is a panic/fire line that runs to the dimmers?
I am the most experienced person at the school i help out at, and i have a lot to learn, Thanks for any help.
 

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In the 1990s, NSI, a sub-standard manufacturer, purchased Colortran, then Levition bought NSI. Your future Innovator is of Colortran heritage, which shared the top of the market with Strand until ETC came along. So the console and dimmers should serve you well. The only drawback I see is they are no longer "industry-standard," as Leviton has made the decision to concentrate on the educational, and not the professional, market.

As to your question re: panic, it is quite common for an installed system to include some sort of architectural interface, so that knowledge of the console operation is not required for a teacher to simply turn on the houselights/worklights on an auditorium. Different manufacturers deal with this in different ways. The simplest, is "panic" switches located inside each exterior door. At the dimmer racks, the user can select which dimmers react to the panic switches, so that not all stagelights come to full when panic is pressed.

You may or may not also have an "Emergency transfer switch" installed on certain circuits, to allow for egress lighting during a power failure or fire.
 
Thanks, ya i the lighting systems for the whole theatre is tired in to the light control board. I was reading another thread, about when the fire alarm goes off then all the lights go to full. I was just wondering how i could see if that is the case in this system.
 
The Electrical Contractor's drawings will tell you. But you may not have access to these yet, if ever. You're probably getting the I-Series dimmers, so here's a link to the PDF of the User's Manual. Leviton's site seems painfully slow right now. Until the building is completed and signed-off, you have to trust in your architects, consultants, and contractors, and hope they did the right things. There WILL be mistakes, things not to your liking, that's a fact of construction. I've never seen a "perfect" theatre yet.
 
I've never seen a "perfect" theatre yet.
I take it you haven't been to Washington D.C. lately then?
http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/harman/index.aspx
proxy.php
 
I have a feeling Sean would be glad to point out the imperfections if we asked him, but let's not go there.
 
On the subject of Colortran Innovators, does anyone know a Colortran dealer who would sell me the training video for this desk?
The Australian agent for this product is less than brilliant.
 
Here's a post from 2004 that may be of help.

Might also try emailing Ken Vannice. If anyone can help you, he can.
 
My problem is that Leviton will not deal direct, they insist on using the Australian agent and I'm not prepared to wait a year to get parts,{last time after a year I gave up} So I just need someone to deal with.
I'm trying to be diplomatic about their agent, it is difficult.
 
The development office at the high school i help out at just emailed me the spec of the lighting system that is going to be in our new theatre. I have never used leviton control boards. does any one have any experience with leviton and there console called "Innovaor".
I will attach the PDF that i got, it includes the lighting system for the whole theatre.
When a theatre is built is a standard that there is a panic/fire line that runs to the dimmers?
I am the most experienced person at the school i help out at, and i have a lot to learn, Thanks for any help.
I can't really tell from the pdf....but I think I've used that console way back in the day...the remote is what looks familiar. Pretty straight forward from what I can remember...easy to change back and forth between tracking and q only which can be a blessing and a curse.
 
Don't get me wrong, the leviton is a nice board, but it is definetly some what out of date for todays time to be spec'd and installed in a new theater, I would have expected an ETC or Strand board. In terms of learning curve for the leviton board, it is fairly easy and shouldn't take long to learn, it is really flexible in the formats which you can use things in but the only down side is that the monitors get the image of what ever active screen is on burned into them really fast.
 
It's a nice board. I've used the NSI version before (NSI released the 24/48 model of that one when Colortran and NSI merged in to one company as the MC-2448). The ML control also isn't all that bad for a board with that price, and the submasters are easy to program, as well as effects. The programming is really easy to pick up, but I remember that my only problem was that the [DELETE] key was hidden in the softkey pages, and I wanted to delete and record subs live and it took a bit of poking. The Cue, Effect and Sub timing packages are pretty nice, though, and easy to use.

My only huge complaint was the monitor color scheme. Make sure to get a really high-contrast monitor, and crank contrast and brightness all the way up.
 
On the subject of Colortran Innovators, does anyone know a Colortran dealer who would sell me the training video for this desk?
The Australian agent for this product is less than brilliant.

Hello David,

The part you're looking for is # 31496-00 and costs $ 35.00. Let me know your Postal code and I'll let you know what postage would be.
 
I was thinking about ordering the training videos, what is the easiest way to order those videos?

btw my zip is 89129
 
I used the Innovator in high school, and there hasn't been an update for it in about 5 years, we've had it for about 8 years now.

Likes: It's not bad for high school. I did like the hybrid between conventional and intelligent lights. The encoder wheels didn't help much, but the software had device pages and such. I liked the dual monitors. And having 3 universes was a plus.

Dislikes: I have had issues with it not saving to disks properly, but only rarely. When we turn it on, again very rare, but it would come up with Memory Corrupted. And all information not saved to a disk is lost. This happened a little too often to be happy with, but still rare.

Although many people I worked with that used this console before me would say they absolutely hated that console, I disagree because it met every expectation of a memory console, and not as expensive as an ETC console. But it is starting to be older than most consoles and has not had a software update in 5 years.

Hope this helps. If you have a specific question about the console, I'd probably be able to answer it, so PM me if you need to.


For the training videos, if its anything like what my school got...its NOT worth it. The video was not helpful at all.
 
Well if they are not worth it then, i don't think i will spend the money on getting them. I should, be able to use the Offline editor.
 
Dislikes: I have had issues with it not saving to disks properly, but only rarely. When we turn it on, again very rare, but it would come up with Memory Corrupted. And all information not saved to a disk is lost.
We had that same problem with a Scenemaster 60 Plus that was about 15 years old at the time.
 
Well if they are not worth it then, i don't think i will spend the money on getting them. I should, be able to use the Offline editor.

The offline editor is probably your best bet for learning the software. Maybe someone else can comment on the videos but the one my high school had, was very short, and didn't go into any detail on how anything worked. It shows how to patch...breifly, it shows that you can add devices, and name cues and stuff. but not much "how to" more like what it can do.
 

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