Moving Light as Follow Spot

[jgrimes]

I have done some digging and most people are not recommending this AT ALL. Im starting to agree.

Use of a moving light as a follow spot. I have done this before with 1 light, RoadHog4, and used the pan/tilt encoders to follow a very excited preacher. This was very difficult.

Since then I have been looking into the idea of programming 2 lights to follow the DS edge via a Manual Crossfader with position cues. The problem I am having is getting clean linear movement without having to have lots of cues. 2 cues (1 DSL and 1DSR would be ideal) I have yet to make this clean enough to use in the real world.

Any other thoughts on moving lights as FollowSpots. And tracking packs are out of the question for now. We are not that big of a company.

 

[wolfman005]

Might be easier to use a joystick instead of encoders. I'm not sure how one would go about adding a joystick control to a hog but I'm sure if you got a USB joystick it would be doable.

Someone should make a moving head follow spot telemetry unit. They do it for "robots" in Hollywood. Shouldn't be to hard to make a position detecting device spit out DMX values that the console could read via DMX in and patch those as the P/T channels of a mover.

 

[sk8rsdad]

So You Think You Can Dance Canada used MLs as followspots. However, they disconnected the Pan and Tilt motors and employed humans to aim the beam and took advantage of the colour mixing and other beam shaping fixtures to texture the dancers. I'm pretty sure you're looking to do away with the humans
though.

Perhaps if the pan, tilt and iris were incorporated into an independent controller rather than attempting to do it through the console it would be possible to make it work. I doubt that sticking a Hog in the signal path is going to offer any advantages.

You would need to build smarts into the device to handle the acceleration curve. It would also be prudent to limit the range of motion. In an FOH position a followspot isn't panning much, and tilting even less. The ML would need at least 16-bit resolution on pan and tilt to have a hope of hitting the target with subtle motion. If the ML has vector positioning it would help in managing the wobble. A wash fixture would be more forgiving than a spot.

To automate fully, something like a Kinect or similar motion controller might be made to work. Range and viewing angle are limited though so positioning the sensors becomes part of the challenge.

 

[cbrandt]

On Hog, you can throw the pan and till to the mouse (and it should work with an external mouse/trackball). As long as you have a light touch, you can follow a guy that way. Basically, as a board op, following a guy and still running other cues is more than exhausting, it is almost impossible, much less if you have two spots.

To be successful in this in the past, I've given the presenter/actor a range of allowable motion on stage, where they could move freely, and that I had programmed into the board to be able to follow manually. Martin's M-Series consoles have a great feature called q-blender that lets you put multiple cues onto a single fader throw, and you can follow someone that way, but still a huge pain to do so.

What can help with the jerkiness is to set your movers internally to use a slower movement rate, which will smooth things out a bit, in general. It would limit how fast they would go on the top end, though.

 

[wolfman005]

Maybe this?

 

[microstar]

I have done some digging and most people are not recommending this AT ALL. Im starting to agree.

Use of a moving light as a follow spot. I have done this before with 1 light, RoadHog4, and used the pan/tilt encoders to follow a very excited preacher. This was very difficult.

Since then I have been looking into the idea of programming 2 lights to follow the DS edge via a Manual Crossfader with position cues. The problem I am having is getting clean linear movement without having to have lots of cues. 2 cues (1 DSL and 1DSR would be ideal) I have yet to make this clean enough to use in the real world.

Any other thoughts on moving lights as FollowSpots. And tracking packs are out of the question for now. We are not that big of a company.

Meteor, http://www.meteor-global.com/products-theatricalLighting.php, makes the Elipscan moving mirror attachment for ellipsodals. They used to make a joystick controller for it but I do not see it on their website.
Anyway, the mirror unit does have some kind of speed sensitive control that smooths out the movement s bit. I have seen it used as a followspot and it works reasonably well. One's interpretation of that certainly can vary. It is much more noisy than a Rosco I-cue for sure and I would never use it in a quiet environment.

 

[JChenault]

I have successfully used a mover for very simple moves, where both actors were precise in hitting their spike, and we're consistent in their move ( and I could make the spot larger than normal ). But this was simply writing cues to get from point A to point B.

I've often thought about making a beach ball sized mouse wheel and controlling pan/tilt, but somehow never have as yet.

 

[BillConnerFASTC]

Shades of Izenour's remote controlled follow spots. Big joy sticks. This was 1950s afteall and they worked - kinda - at least for a few minutes - its been reported. Water cooled as well.

 

[StNic54]

The concept of using a mover as a manual followspot has been around for awhile. I think the concept of using a moving light as a remotely controlled followspot leaves too many openings for disaster. There is a human touch that is needed with the light's movement, and correcting oneself if the target shimmies left instead of shuffling right is very important. If not done properly, then you just have the old comic bit of the spotlight chasing the performer but not actually doing its job correctly. I saw a production of Caroline, and Change where they used movers to follow the actors, but the blocking was very, very specific and rehearsed. It's very difficult to pull off. There are expensive options that incorporate motion-sensor technology with moving light presets, but that's pricey. Especially if you can't afford a spot op.

 

[coldnorth57]

I have done it a few times with varying results actor never hitting thier mark or not moving with the cue. there has been a few diferent system that have tryed to ude a computer to "SEE" the stage and run a command to drive the DMX to the movers......

http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?244417-Spotlight-with-automatic-following

http://www.wybron.com/out-of-production-products.html

http://www.controlbooth.com/threads/self-tracking-followspots.7144/

 

[Fountain Of Euph]

Could you put the pan and tilt on seperate submasters, and control ot that way. Like sub 1 @ 100%=16 degree pan and such

Sent from Taptalk for Android, this was.

 

[MikeJ]

Can you Make a 2 cue stack on a hog and set the fader to be a manual cross fade? If the person is walking a straight line, like down an isle, than it is easy, cue 1 is where they begin at one end of the isle, set cue to at the other end of the isle. Move the fader to follow. This works fine on GrandMA, its pretty basic so I would hope that it can be don similarly on the HOG. You can do something similar using a temp fader and only one cue, but your starting point would be based on whatever position the light is currently in before moving that fader. Very useful for on the fly specials though, for solo and such that you don't know are coming.

 

[Calc]

To all the people saying "Throw it on a cue," the problem comes in when your mover isn't centered on the path of the actor's movement.
If you're putting the mover where a spot would normally go, the few feet don't make a whole lot of difference. That'd be quite the zoom lens for a mover, though.
If you're trying to shoot from closer, the distance begins to factor in. Hitting an actor further away needs a smaller iris and and slower motion. As they come closer to the fixture, it needs to speed up and iris out just to keep the same speed and appearance, all on a non-linear curve.
Not impossible, but not as simple to do properly as you make it sound.

 

[JChenault]

The other "throw it in a cue" issue is that a strictly linear fade on pan/tilt usually does not give you her path you want on anything other than short moves. Ie if your actor is crossing UR to DL, and you simply fade the Pan tilt, your beam will not move in a straight line from UR to DL.

 

[Hrvoje]

Well, I has been done.

For position detection I use video or web camera and not the sensors. It is much easier and it does not require any specific knowledge.

I love working with visual tracking technology and on many occasion I have been asked to produce a small, reliable, simple and relatively cheap system.
Video Follow Spot is my suggestion.
www.vidfspot.com is the place where you can find software, feel free to download it and…

Tell me what you think.
There are some videos also, it is a Lego stage example. Just to show that the system can be setup in the office.

Best Regards,

 

[What Rigger?]

I saw Slayer do a version of this about 5 years ago. No spot operators on the Strongs at Local Arena, but for guitar solos in each song, Jeff and Kerry had their areas of the stage lit with several movers. Granted, they pretty much just stayed within the giant, strobing, evil areas without any running around. When Megadeth played their set, it was back to humans on the traditional gear.

 

[Hrvoje]

I agree,
I forgot to say that I was talking about small theatres and community theatres, schools… places where you have no options to use a human controlled follow spot, simply because it cannot be placed.

For large concerts, stadiums and arenas this will not work for more than one reason. Video camera is shaking for example.

 

[JonathanHarpur]

There are too many scenarios which wouldn't work to make this practical without a large budget. I'm assuming, though, that a simple, straightforward, low(er)-cost approach is what is needed here, and that the mover is placed in a location somewhat similar to a traditional followspot - i.e. somewhere in your FOH.

It can be done, depending on your console, and on your operator. If you've got, say, an MA with a trackball, you can use it to follow a position pretty reliably with practice, as long as your operator isn't busy doing other things, or running the show off the programmer. For this method to work you need to have the mover, and (probably) only the mover, selected. It still doesn't give you easy use of beam size or colour changes, unless you've got separate stacks for them. I've used this method successfully with a Rosco I-Cue on a few simple shows.

If your console supports multiple cue stacks on its faders, another technique which might work is to set up a pair of faders - one for pan, one for tilt, both with the extremes set in a pair of looped, crossfading cues - so fading pan would run the fixture from, say, far stage right to far stage left, and similarly the tilt fader could run it from downstage to upstage. In theory, if the fixture is set correctly, both faders at about 50% should land you somewhere near center center. Pan at zero and Tilt at full should land you USR, and crossing both faders should bring you diagonally down to DSL. If your fixture has an iris or zoom capability you could incorporate that into the tilt fader as well, if you needed the beam size to be comparable... It's not as good as the real McCoy, and it will take some getting used to, but can get you by in a pinch. It's similar to using encoder wheels, but you don't have to worry about the speed you place things - and there's the advantage that you know where a location is based roughly on the fader position - pan placed at 25% or 75% in the above examples should put you somewhere on the stage's quarter marks, for instance.

 

[Catwalker]

Maybe a slightly off-topic question, but is there a device that can automatically follow the performer? The person being followed wears some sort of belt pack, and the fixture has a tracking device on it. The device has either a laser, or GPS system to track the speaker/singer's movement. The mover will follow instructions from the receiver, and thus follow the performer.

I know this thread is old, and this pondering may be off-topic, but I believe it may still be relevant.

 

[rbalewski]

The person being followed wears some sort of belt pack, and the fixture has a tracking device on it

I kind of remember seeing something like that advertised many, many, many years ago in Lighting Dimensions magazine, I believe. I'm also rather curious if it's still around.