I've been working on this project to add a lighting position directly over our apron; the project's been mentioned here a few times already so some of you already know about it. with 18' of apron downstage of the 1st electric, we ended up with no good way to light our apron, where almost every show wants to have a lot of action happen. Some shows want to use only the apron with the main drape closed. That makes lighting a problem.
The solution that we reached as to have two masts of truss, one on either side of the stage that are 28' tall, with a 68' cross-member, probably of 20.5" box truss, and then in the middle a couple lift lines would be used to take some of the force off of the center point of the truss. The riggers decided the best idea is to set the lift lines up so that they are supporting no weight when the truss is empty, but when fixtures are on hung in the middle, the lift lines would support that weight and prevent deflection over such a wide span.
For electrical, we have 16 circuits that are unused. They are terminated in our torm positions, which are useless to us given their location in the house. So the plan was to take those circuits and terminate them in connector strips across the trusses, and then leave for expansion so that we could add a dimmer rack later on to give us a usable amount of circuits up there.
The problem is that wiring costs money. Dimmer racks -- they cost a lot of money. Enough money that we could never really put a solid estimate on when we'd be able to add in the additional circuits in years to come.
Wednesday of last week I met with a design consultant to discuss the project. Him and I have been talking about this project for 2 months now, and we've been working together since last August. He's heard about a lot of problems since then and has somehow kept in the back of his head all of the different issues we face. So last week he showed up to the meeting with a toy. I knew he was going to have it with him, but I didn't know whatit actually was. First we spent about an hour and a half wandering around the theatre talking about all of the different aspects of our project. Then he started opening the large boxes he had with him. The first one -- relatively unamazing. The box was even labeled "ETC Smartfade ML," and because we already own a Smartfade, that wasn't anything jaw-dropping for me. Then he opened up the other box...
He had a demo unit with him from Prism Projection, one of their RevEAL Color Wash fixtures. It looked pretty interesting. The fixture is technically a PC spot, but it looks like a profile. Weighing in at only 18 lbs, the fixture has no glass. The lens is made of plastic. Normally that'd be a boring selling point, but then he told me that one of the manufacturer's employees was carrying one around and accidentally dropped it down a flight of stairs, and because there was no glass he was able to plug it in without having sustained any damage at all. If you really bounce it around, you can probably cause some dents to the metal body, but short of dropping it off of a catwalk it'll take just about anything that might be thrown at it during regular use.
The fixture is LED based and has five different color LED's in it, and like all LED fixtures, has problems with the LED's aging and fading as time goes on. However, it combats that with a built-in sensor to detect problems in the color temperatures, and then auto-corrects to compensate for the difference, so that when you pull up that color you loved when you bought the fixture a few years later, it'll be exactly the same color despite the LED's aging.
We turned off the lights and I stood in the beam, and it even did a really good job rendering on flesh tones. It was also very bright, even at quite a distance. As is the case with LED's typically, this fixture probably won't be cutting through incandescent sources anytime soon for unsaturated colors, it'll rip through any incandescent when it hits the saturated ones. We saw colors out of that light that a 1kw incandescent with a gel in front of it would have no chance of reproducing.
As we talked more and more about this, I had an epiphany which was that if we bought a bunch of these for our project and only used the 16 circuits we already had with no intention of adding more on a later date, we could probably save ourselves a ton of money. We could run 10 of these on a single 20A circuit, so if our apron electric had 16 dimmable circuits for incandescents, and 2 standard 20A circuits, we would be able to do everything we would ever want to be able to do with that position and more.
The retail price for the fixture is about $1800. We plan on buying about 10. Maybe not all at once, but maybe handful each year for the next few years. We probably couldn't even get a new dimmer rack for $18k, not including the wiring or new connector strips.
We can still hang incandescents for general use and maybe a gobo special occasionally, but these fixtures can do all of our colored, and even some of our white/amber washes. They're certainly worth looking into, except the company is pretty new and right now the fixtures are in high demand. Just for our rep to get a hold of one, he had to beg Prisim Projection, and then once he had it he had to weasel his way into keeping it a week longer than he was supposed to.
I'd suggest that everyone keep an eye on this company and their fixtures.
The solution that we reached as to have two masts of truss, one on either side of the stage that are 28' tall, with a 68' cross-member, probably of 20.5" box truss, and then in the middle a couple lift lines would be used to take some of the force off of the center point of the truss. The riggers decided the best idea is to set the lift lines up so that they are supporting no weight when the truss is empty, but when fixtures are on hung in the middle, the lift lines would support that weight and prevent deflection over such a wide span.
For electrical, we have 16 circuits that are unused. They are terminated in our torm positions, which are useless to us given their location in the house. So the plan was to take those circuits and terminate them in connector strips across the trusses, and then leave for expansion so that we could add a dimmer rack later on to give us a usable amount of circuits up there.
The problem is that wiring costs money. Dimmer racks -- they cost a lot of money. Enough money that we could never really put a solid estimate on when we'd be able to add in the additional circuits in years to come.
Wednesday of last week I met with a design consultant to discuss the project. Him and I have been talking about this project for 2 months now, and we've been working together since last August. He's heard about a lot of problems since then and has somehow kept in the back of his head all of the different issues we face. So last week he showed up to the meeting with a toy. I knew he was going to have it with him, but I didn't know whatit actually was. First we spent about an hour and a half wandering around the theatre talking about all of the different aspects of our project. Then he started opening the large boxes he had with him. The first one -- relatively unamazing. The box was even labeled "ETC Smartfade ML," and because we already own a Smartfade, that wasn't anything jaw-dropping for me. Then he opened up the other box...
He had a demo unit with him from Prism Projection, one of their RevEAL Color Wash fixtures. It looked pretty interesting. The fixture is technically a PC spot, but it looks like a profile. Weighing in at only 18 lbs, the fixture has no glass. The lens is made of plastic. Normally that'd be a boring selling point, but then he told me that one of the manufacturer's employees was carrying one around and accidentally dropped it down a flight of stairs, and because there was no glass he was able to plug it in without having sustained any damage at all. If you really bounce it around, you can probably cause some dents to the metal body, but short of dropping it off of a catwalk it'll take just about anything that might be thrown at it during regular use.
The fixture is LED based and has five different color LED's in it, and like all LED fixtures, has problems with the LED's aging and fading as time goes on. However, it combats that with a built-in sensor to detect problems in the color temperatures, and then auto-corrects to compensate for the difference, so that when you pull up that color you loved when you bought the fixture a few years later, it'll be exactly the same color despite the LED's aging.
We turned off the lights and I stood in the beam, and it even did a really good job rendering on flesh tones. It was also very bright, even at quite a distance. As is the case with LED's typically, this fixture probably won't be cutting through incandescent sources anytime soon for unsaturated colors, it'll rip through any incandescent when it hits the saturated ones. We saw colors out of that light that a 1kw incandescent with a gel in front of it would have no chance of reproducing.
As we talked more and more about this, I had an epiphany which was that if we bought a bunch of these for our project and only used the 16 circuits we already had with no intention of adding more on a later date, we could probably save ourselves a ton of money. We could run 10 of these on a single 20A circuit, so if our apron electric had 16 dimmable circuits for incandescents, and 2 standard 20A circuits, we would be able to do everything we would ever want to be able to do with that position and more.
The retail price for the fixture is about $1800. We plan on buying about 10. Maybe not all at once, but maybe handful each year for the next few years. We probably couldn't even get a new dimmer rack for $18k, not including the wiring or new connector strips.
We can still hang incandescents for general use and maybe a gobo special occasionally, but these fixtures can do all of our colored, and even some of our white/amber washes. They're certainly worth looking into, except the company is pretty new and right now the fixtures are in high demand. Just for our rep to get a hold of one, he had to beg Prisim Projection, and then once he had it he had to weasel his way into keeping it a week longer than he was supposed to.
I'd suggest that everyone keep an eye on this company and their fixtures.