Luke_R
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Out of curiosity, why?
Venue Spot Booth Guard rails
- Thread starterJonathanHarpur
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For questions or issues about venues
What is your experience level in operating follow spots? It's relevent, as the models that kind of operate like a camera tripod will have you doing really odd twists and turns to orient the fixture (unless you're square-on with the target). I had 3 arena shows in a row where only 4 of 8 (or 10) were reasonably on-axis. The crazy stuff happens when you're 45° or more from straight-on. Upstage and to L/R? It's gonna be 'fun' with those units.
The ones that operate with mouse or joystick are better, but still "not there yet."
I've run spotlights for close to 40 years (including re-trimming carbon arc lamps mid-show). These things mostly suck.
I've used both small scale spots on swivel bearings (source 4, CCT Sil 2k) which you could operate like a camera tripod if you were perverse enough, and super troupers, and all of them I operate to the side of the unit. I have a feeling trying to follow spot with a tripod like yoke would just feel alien, and of course I've no idea what kind of inertial feed back the remote spots give you. I guess it's a whole new skill to learn.
Hi Al-
It deserves a little more explainin'
The *fixtures* can be mounted on any truss, so they may not be square, level, or oriented on any plane of the set.
This is gonna be hard with out pictures, but envision a drum risers set "diamond," with the points up and down center. The fixture/camera is hung square, the tilt axis parallel with the stage and upstage a couple of feet from the drummer's throne. Now, centered on the pan axis and tilted up slightly to "halo" the drummer, he gets up to play down stage. The fixture has to twist (pan) to whatever side the drummer is exiting the riser, while the operator is tipping the beam up, as the drummer stands. In conventional spotlight, the operator makes a diagonal move and it's all good. With the units I'm talking about, they will need to twist/pan/tilt independantly, and you may need to aim the fixture in the opposite direction to "center" the fixture.
I think these are the VER (or PRG) design (there are a couple), and they're frankly a real pain in the ass to run unless you've got the center downstage light.
The joystick/mouse lights have the same limitation under the same circumstances, it's how the *moving light* operates in relation to its current position and the direction of travel from the operator, but for some reason these don't seem to fight me as much.
A moot issue in the future as ASM-mananged venues want to give "tour spotlight" operation to the TRUCK DRIVERS, taking away local jurisdiction. Not a problem for you, Al, but ASM is the largest private management company of publicly owned facilities in North America.
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Yep, and that's why I say what I do. If it worked as expected, even the TV camera tripod-style handles and controls, it would be usable. The "reverse double gainer" to make the fixture twist, turn, and tilt to follow the talent is not intuitive.
An arena across town just installed FollowMe, one of the puck-operated options. For their setup the fixtures all share a single camera hung on the truss with them, with the option of another camera hung further back for a wider view.
The training was interesting as he showed us some of the things it was doing in the background- of course it's doing the math to figure out pan-tilt values, but you could also enable features to allow it to run the zoom to keep the beam a fixed size, while you ran the iris. The gymnastics mentioned above- it would let you move until you neared one of those points, then flip the fixture on it's own (with or without dowsing it first). Because the camera was independent, you could tie multiple fixtures to one target, letting one op run them all. Predictive motion- can be set to lead your motion. Build masking objects- Don't want the light on the videowall? It'll dowse when you aim at it!
That said, for all the features it's not the greatest for replacing FOH spots. Never mind any control lag, the fixtures are always going to be the limit of the motion speed. You need something big/bright enough to replace a spot, but the bigger you make the fixture the more inertia it gains and the slower it moves. It'd be an academic experiment, but I wonder how a modern version of one of those old tilting mirror fixtures would do.
For true truss spots, it makes 100% sense at this point. No climbing truss, no need for all the life-safety gear, etc. It solves so many problems.
Also an interesting note: The younger crowd seems to be better at running the new puck/mouse systems, for a couple reasons. They don't have the habits or expectations built of how a spot 'should' be run. Seemingly more influential is that they grew up playing video games- using a handheld control device to make a virtual thing move on a screen, with small amounts of lag.
The training was interesting as he showed us some of the things it was doing in the background- of course it's doing the math to figure out pan-tilt values, but you could also enable features to allow it to run the zoom to keep the beam a fixed size, while you ran the iris. The gymnastics mentioned above- it would let you move until you neared one of those points, then flip the fixture on it's own (with or without dowsing it first). Because the camera was independent, you could tie multiple fixtures to one target, letting one op run them all. Predictive motion- can be set to lead your motion. Build masking objects- Don't want the light on the videowall? It'll dowse when you aim at it!
That said, for all the features it's not the greatest for replacing FOH spots. Never mind any control lag, the fixtures are always going to be the limit of the motion speed. You need something big/bright enough to replace a spot, but the bigger you make the fixture the more inertia it gains and the slower it moves. It'd be an academic experiment, but I wonder how a modern version of one of those old tilting mirror fixtures would do.
For true truss spots, it makes 100% sense at this point. No climbing truss, no need for all the life-safety gear, etc. It solves so many problems.
Also an interesting note: The younger crowd seems to be better at running the new puck/mouse systems, for a couple reasons. They don't have the habits or expectations built of how a spot 'should' be run. Seemingly more influential is that they grew up playing video games- using a handheld control device to make a virtual thing move on a screen, with small amounts of lag.
I've had my guys use both Robospots and Follow me on shows. All in all, it seems like most of them prefer follow me, but that's far from scientific. The nice part about followme (and similar systems) is that it makes it way easier to use those fixtures as part of the rig when they aren't being follow spots.
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