Alright, so I'm looking for personal opinions here on an install I'm getting quotes for and planning. We want to project gobos onto the side of our building. There's a blank, light-grey, concrete precast wall that gives us enough room to toss a 30' diameter image on. It happens to our fly loft, and the facility is located on a hill, so it'll carry over nice to the nearby roadways.
There is an existing lamp post, 35 yards northwest of that face of the building, almost giving a perpendicular angle onto the wall. That doesn't even matter much, because we can get our gobos custom-made to include the keystone counter-effect. So far, I'm looking at the Clay Paky VIP 1200 to do the job, which can be equipped with a rain shield, color changer wheel, six-gobo rotating wheel, and long-throw lenses. I've also had a Martin fixture suggested to me that I have not looked very much into, but the sales reps are including in their alternates lists.
I want to control it with our existing Unison system, and set it up on an astronomical time clock to light up the exterior wall with our gobos, which will include a full-color, high-res, glass gobo with our logo, as well as cheap custom steel gobos for one-off events. So we can equip it with 6 gobos at a time, and 8 colors, including white. The color wheel is to give some extra pizazz to the otherwise black/white steel gobos. Inherently, the fixture does not strike/destrike via DMX, so I'm putting a DMX-controlled relay on the power feed to the fixture, which would be located indoors.
To isolate from lightning, I have planned to use fiber optics to transmit the data signal to the fixture, with data transceivers and ETC Net2 nodes on the receiving end, both located in an outdoor enclosure with 120v/15a power feed. This means that should our fixture, mounted on a 20' metal pole, get vaporized in a spectacular event, only the fixture, node, and transceiver get destroyed. Aside from that, the respective branch panel circuit breakers would be tossed, but Unison and other systems in the building would remain safe and isolated, with no path for electrical current to travel down the data lines in excess of 100,000 Volts.
However, control is where things get interesting. We want to be able to program the fixtures via ETC's LightManager software, which we're including the cost of training for. However, our original plan was to add 15 buttons worth of button stations to control colors, on/off, and gobos. We're including this in our quotes, but as I think about it, I'm not sure we'll need it.
If you had this setup at your venue, could you ever see yourself manually controlling the setup, or would you leave it entirely to Unison?
There is an existing lamp post, 35 yards northwest of that face of the building, almost giving a perpendicular angle onto the wall. That doesn't even matter much, because we can get our gobos custom-made to include the keystone counter-effect. So far, I'm looking at the Clay Paky VIP 1200 to do the job, which can be equipped with a rain shield, color changer wheel, six-gobo rotating wheel, and long-throw lenses. I've also had a Martin fixture suggested to me that I have not looked very much into, but the sales reps are including in their alternates lists.
I want to control it with our existing Unison system, and set it up on an astronomical time clock to light up the exterior wall with our gobos, which will include a full-color, high-res, glass gobo with our logo, as well as cheap custom steel gobos for one-off events. So we can equip it with 6 gobos at a time, and 8 colors, including white. The color wheel is to give some extra pizazz to the otherwise black/white steel gobos. Inherently, the fixture does not strike/destrike via DMX, so I'm putting a DMX-controlled relay on the power feed to the fixture, which would be located indoors.
To isolate from lightning, I have planned to use fiber optics to transmit the data signal to the fixture, with data transceivers and ETC Net2 nodes on the receiving end, both located in an outdoor enclosure with 120v/15a power feed. This means that should our fixture, mounted on a 20' metal pole, get vaporized in a spectacular event, only the fixture, node, and transceiver get destroyed. Aside from that, the respective branch panel circuit breakers would be tossed, but Unison and other systems in the building would remain safe and isolated, with no path for electrical current to travel down the data lines in excess of 100,000 Volts.
However, control is where things get interesting. We want to be able to program the fixtures via ETC's LightManager software, which we're including the cost of training for. However, our original plan was to add 15 buttons worth of button stations to control colors, on/off, and gobos. We're including this in our quotes, but as I think about it, I'm not sure we'll need it.
If you had this setup at your venue, could you ever see yourself manually controlling the setup, or would you leave it entirely to Unison?