1. What kind of dimming would you suggest I get:
Given it needs to be
portable, or out of the floor space, I would go with shoe box type dimmers mounted either on
portable trees or perminantly in the lighting
grid. That way all you have to do is
drop down the
DMX line to the temporary control booth for shows and you are set.
Power can very likely be brought to the
grid if such a thing were hung, otherwise some cable ramps and trees placed by wall outlets would be appropriate. Granted you would really need to do a electrical
layout of the room to see which
outlet is on which
breaker and distribute the load after that. Or have the maintinence crew
wire such outlets for your purposes. This would be more expensive than giving you somewhere backstage to
tie in the dimmers at, but allow you to have the full
stage area without necessity of a cage around it all to keep the kids out when not in use. Such a cage will probably be necessary in this
multi-purpose room given you have a
stage and it's not something
portable. If
portable, much easier to put the
dimmer packs in the air. Hopefully you can get a lighting
grid or some pipes installed with
power to them. This would not be asking too much and allow you to store most of your lighting equipment in the air given you are not too worried about food fights and thrown objects.
This type of
dimmer pack is also very cheap in expense -
Leprecon is the best in this type. A six pack
dimmer can be powered by two twenty amp circuits thus you are getting either two dimmers at 2.4Kw or some combination of six dimmers at 600w each. Leaves you more money for lights and a control board. Also, as opposed to needing to run each
dimmer circuit from where ever the pack is, you can just run two
power cables to it and one
DMX line daisy chaining all packs. You will be able to add more
dimmer packs without much cost and put the
power where you need it. Best
system for a perminant
portable or multi-use space on a budget. You will also save a lot of money on the amount and lengths of cable you otherwise need. If you do have to
snake your cable all over the
stage to get to outlets, for any run over 75' I would
switch to 10/3 SO grade of
wire feeding the
dimmer over the 12/3. It just won't take the load otherwise.
2. What kind of control would you suggest I get... I currently try... and fail a lot... to light a 32 x 28'
stage space with 16, 1.2kw channels using 4 RD6000+ NSI
portable dimmers and a 2-scene, 16
channel non-DMX controller.
Seems you already have this type of
dimmer. NSI is not bad and since you have them I would stick with that brand, just get the bigger brothers either
Leprecon or NSI for your primary locations and save the four
channel ones for other work. How many depends upon how many lights you have. As for boards, not my field.
On the other questions now gone, $0.65 per
foot for 12/3 SO is not too bad of a price. If you keep looking you might be able to get it down to about $0.50 per
foot if you buy a minimum of 500' at a time from souces such as an electrical supplier. Think I'm at about $0.33 per
foot given a price increase recently, but I buy one or two thousand feet at a time in addition to other spools.
For fixtures I would probably go with used S-4 Lekos for the primary lights, perhaps 2/3 of them at that, and some otherwise used
Altman 360Q series fixtures in wide focus for use over the
stage. Same with used S-4 Pars and Fresnels. You will probably be only able to get the 575w versisons - no big loss for your situation. Perhaps two rated at 750w.