Lighting Light Sources & Bulbs

working in a high school with a budget so small that i find myself using wood with the name of a show from '98 written on it, and being a computer geek/future electrical engineer, I have started looking into making scanners. My school used the coffee can par 38s for a while. We did get some decent instruments a few years ago tho. My idea has been to make a moving mirror fixture to stick on the front of an ers. This saves the liability issue, all you are doing is bending the light beam, so unless your device falls and breaks someone, you are safe. props to you for trying to do something awesome with nothing.
 
Thought I'd go ahead and give an update on my progress. Yes, I have called around and thanks to some of my drama geek buddies (who owe me favors), I might be able to use some excess lighting equiptment from the University, which has lighting coming out the a**. However, this is up in the air, and right now is unlikely.

I have taken into consideration fire and electrical codes for safety. I moved away from constructing lights (especially moving-mirror fixtures) from scratch. I had a new (and cheaper) idea when I was playing around in photography class. We have an old slide-projector in the photography classroom, and I turned it on. That's when it hit me. The light exiting this thing was very bright (82 v. 300 w.). It was no arc-lamp, but still. I thought, why not pick up a few of these at the local thrift store, and build the color wheel and gobo assemblies where the film slide would normally be inserted. It would only have a 20 foot throw or so, but it'd do what I need it to. Then, another idea came to me, when I was wiring up one of the school's computer projectors for a lecture in class. So, to make basically a ghetto version of a DL-1, I would build a moving-mirror rig that would attach over the lens of the computer projector. Not a very wide movement range, but the projectors we have are 2000+ ANSI lumen output projectors. So, with a simple moving-mirror attachment (and possibly rubber wheels on the lens to allow remote zoom and focus), we could construct some very advanced lighting fixtures from what we have.

One Problem... How do we run it? Right now, we were planning to run the projectors on seperate DVD players with pre-made video and color. However, this is not the best idea for a live show. So, does anyone know of a cheap (or possibly free) program to run DV out? Maybe even DMX through a USB or Firewire output? MAC would be the ideal OS, but we can settle for windows :mrgreen: . Anything you can suggest would be good. I have another idea for a way to run lights off of a computer, but it is kinda out there and it would only be able to turn lights on and off, dimming could be achieved but I don't want to take the time to do that..


What do ya'll think?

-stephen
 

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