Light Show!!

soundlight

Well-Known Member
So, reason number one why I love Bucknell University - they let me take over their theatre space for the first week that students are back, use all of the intelligent toys, and spend very late nights in the theatre programming this insanity that is now known as Steven's Monstrosity...and I have to outdo myself next year!

The results are here. This is the most fun that I've ever had in theatre, and it's just amazing. About fifty or sixty hours on my part, and 20 from other contributing parties. Video taken with my Kodak Z612 Digital Camera, because I didn't feel like going through all the hassle of getting a GL2 out of the library. I converted the .mov from my camera to .avi, edited it in Windows Movie Maker, put the original audio track (high rate mp3) in and took out the crappy camera recorded sound, made even crappier through the conversion.

Here's the specs:
6x Intellabeam 700HX
2x Rosco I-cue on S4 19
2x Smart Move DMX in same units as above
12x Apollo Smart Color 7.5 Color Scrollers
12x S4 26 for gobo projection - Gam Small Breakup gobo
4x S4 PAR MFL for crowd blinders (used 4 of my 12 scrollers)
1 crapload of ACL S4 Par's (not VNSP - these are the first-gen "circle of plate glass" lenses)
DF-50 Hazer with a box fan in front of it, from a platform hanging below the Midrail USL
Control via Obsession 1-750 with MLDRC and standard DRC
Timecode setup and execution via the Obsession's internal SMPTE timeclock
Apollo and Chroma Q power supplies used

There is one socapex cable and one Color Scroller PS Send/Return for each of the overhead pods, and all of the Power Supplies and ML stuff was run off of our nice, new Stage power distro from our 400A, 3 phase company switch.

This show greatly expanded on my knowledge of the Obsession, through learning at least ten new screens in the system - it's amazing what this board can do - and it's outdated technology at this point! I also created a custom profile for the units that had the I-Cues and the Rotators in them that utilized the remote dimmer function so that I could control pan, tilt, gobo rot, and intensity from the ML encoder section on the MLDRC.
 
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Nice work. Didn't you post a video last year? or was that someone else? If you did, it would be cool to see the old one to see how your skills have improved.
 
1 crapload of ACL S4 Par's (not VNSP - these are the first-gen "circle of plate glass" lenses)
DF-50 Hazer with a box fan in front of it, from a platform hanging below the Midrail USL

Wow. Great show. When you graduate there could be a defunct pirate show, volcano, or fountain show in your future! Isn't SMPTE a glorious invention? You said the ObsessionI generated it's own timecode? How did you sync to audio? What I've done is put the show audio on one track of the CD and stripe TC on the other, then everything syncs perfectly.

Please explain more about the "circle of plate glass" ACL Lenses for the S4-Par. Can you really tell the diffrence between ACL and VNSP? I just found the "XWFL" lens on the website, can't wait to try those.

I've found that if you put the fan behind the DF-50 you'll get the same results, but not gunk up the fan, which may produce better results.
 
There will be another, much smaller scale light show in the spring, and another in the fall and spring for two more years - and any more that we do in the middle.

Our DF-50 fan has been running in front of our DF-50 for quite a good number of years now, and it doesn't really get gunked up, and it really pushes the haze alot farther, we've found. The haze usually gets pushed a straight 20' or so before it starts to fall - this is a great fan, and it's just a really powerful box fan.

The ACL lenses came out with the first release of the S4 par, and from what I can tell from seeing them, there is a slight difference, but not much at all. The ACL lenses are literally a cut circle of glass - not concave or convex, just picture a circle cut out of a window pane. That's what it looks like - it's just high grade glass. We only have these with the first 50 S4 pars that the theatre purchased, before ETC stopped including them with the S4 Pars. Maybe STEVETERRY can shed some more light on the S4 Par ACL lens - and I'll try to find and scan the original photometrics, because we have them around our theatre somewhere...

The Obsession I has an internal SMPTE clock that can run at up to 30fps. It can execute events in a single 'stack sequence'. If you have an obsession I - go to the 'Setup' screen, and I think that it's #9 - the run and pause keys for the timecode are in the second page of three pages of softkeys, so you have to press "More Soft Keys" once. I basically set up my cue stack, and put in 147 "GO" commands at the times that my friend found by zooming in on segments of the audio track in Cool Edit Pro, and when I ran the program, it fired the cues internally. The audio was not synced to the light board, I just pressed "enter" on the computer and "S4" (run command) on the Obsession at the same time, and everything was happy. I must say, however, that I got VERY familiar with the Obsession I manual during this show.

A while back, I may have posted a link to a wysiwyg render that I did in the demo software...I just ran the cues live in the program. You can see that as well if you go to my other videos (I only have this one other) on youtube.

The joke around here is "we'll have to have a light show rental budget next year to make a show better than Steve's show this year!"

It'll be a fun adventure outdoing myself twice, in my junior and senior years, and maybe if I stay as the TD intern, but that has yet to be determined.
 

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