Vintage Lighting They want an upgrade not more old gear

[ship]

I was at a 1878 opera house last week in Sandwidch IL... Amazing it's design especially given it's built above the city hall and jail. Free tours every week for all civic functions in one building. Two good antique stores in the town around the block and some places for food of interest. Next town over down the highway... A Trump Store. Literally a Trump store.

The opera house was looking for a quote on modern lighting to their space. Very nice and clean theater even for dirt in the attic, small opera house with the last upgraded in the early 90's.

More like a presentional hall in type. No fly space and like 12' at best for stage depth.

During our tour, my boss and the money guy for the theater naturally discussed some stuff, I and the more tech person for the theater took our own tours and onto our own discussions. All of us leaded by the money people in my boss at times saying... come see this, in where our data would need to go, as opposed to us wandering to makeup mirrors in confirming they were using the best of LED lamps for them.

Something that stuck me during the hours of crawling about ceilings, or examinging most rooms was something from the main person money for the theater. He was talking about all the work he and staff had done to the theater, and at some point mentioned that while he had offers for obsolete lighting gear offered for coming in for donation. He didn't want it. He was looking to upgrade the theater rather than lool to more obsolete gear offered. I was one of those offers.

In hearing say that, I knew I in the past offered this theater obsolete gear for free. Just kind of stuck on that concept I had never assumed of before.. Most spaces don't want the up to factory spec older gear I could donate. Struck me in stand alone concept,. This theater has lots of Fresnels in a closet as with other stuff they have no need for. They want modern and have funding to do it as opposed to just supplement their systems.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Well, even today, it's not the case that that older generation equipment won't be interesting to *anybody*, just because that particular organization wasn't interested.

There's still some breathing room, I think, between "new and expensive", and "not cost-effective to bother with". I suspect traditional S4's are getting cheaper in the used market, as they're replaced with LED fixtures more and more...

 

[jglodeklights]

It's always the props/lighting/sound/video person's least favorite thing- a well meaning donor has offered up something they find interesting and saw "something like it" used in a show 5 years ago, or they've just gone through updating and upgrading equipment at some other theater they are on the board for and figure you will somehow have a use for that 6x9/ridiculously large cabinet speaker/3000 lumen 4:3 projector. The truth is everyone is seeking to improve upon their systems and not just add random things. For one the overall quality of the technical side of productions is being lifted by enhanced access to information, but people are also just tired of bringing dead horses back to life. My theater sent out emails to over 40 schools asking them to take Strand 6x and Fresnel fixtures as well as S4 Revolutions off our hands at no cost to them. We got one taker- a private grade school that has just begun to integrate performing arts into their curriculum for which the ME prior to me is the lighting person. Why dedicate the hours to teching and maintaining old lights when they may not have enough dimmers to really take advantage of them and they can get a lot more Gee-Whiz! Pow! Bang! out of a smaller number of moderately priced LED fixtures? On our end we still get the occasional offer of some older fixture or even S4 Jrs in good condition. What am I going to do with them, though? We have a full complement of S4 LED Series II Lustrs, MAC Auras, MAC Encore Performances, MAC Viper Performances, and ERA 800 Performances. Ok, throw in some Seachanger xGs, too. Generally speaking random 6x's/Fresnels/etc. will not have the punch needed to even be seen on stage. My only plans for the JRs we do have from a donation is as offstage run lights. Even with a ton of specials and set light added to our rep plot for each of the 4 rep season shows I will have a good number of spare S4 Incandescent ERS that I have nowhere to hang even if I wanted to. The LD for the musical we have running right now, in spite of it being a huge show, only used about 40% of our S4 ERS stock.

None of this caught me off guard, though. I've been running into this for years. Any venue that is operating off hand me downs has, like ship said, a ton of crap in a closet or in a dark hole somewhere already. It's just standing by to be scrounged for parts or continue collecting dust. Why live like that when we know we can have better?

 

[ship]

In this case, they have a wealth of S-4 fixtures and some last generation 360Q. As with last job, we propose the LED upgrade for the S-4, I will look at the upgrade on the 360Q I believe similar, otherwise a used S-4 resale to replace. Last install, we sent all lens trains thru the school's industrial diah washer. Worked great. This istall we will have to hand clean unless the city can task a sshool with washing the lens trains. Washing machines is really the way to go.

Of the 65Q Altman Fresnels in the store room, replaced by some sort of LED Pod's in past purchase. Not something familior with but leaving alone for now.

As a designer, I will have left the Fresnels in use so as to have more paint brushes to paint with in addition to the pods of light... But than I never designed there and seemingly they don't put on actual opera's or plays in the theater.

Also did a quick service call to their Altman 1000Q follow spots they were considering replacing... Really good condition.

 

[KyleAnderson]

That's my hometown theater! I grew up in Somonauk, that next town over with the Trump store. I think it was a local dial up internet provider once upon a time. If you're there again a mile or so west is The Farm Basket which is worth a visit for a charming kind of spot that is bringing farmers' fare directly to people. As for Sandwich, most of the community theater shows I've ever seen were in that old opera house. ship is right that it's a beauty. At least as of several years ago, maybe 2016 or 2017 I brought a show there on a very small, "we play on whatever rep plot you have" type of tour and can say that as of then they were still doing concerts and community theater.

As for the hand-me-down discussion, I think labor considerations come up in a place like that. If you've got a part-time person who does all of your technical work then a real practical difference between old gear and upgrades is the time to maintain. The promise of not needing to find someone to spot an extension ladder or having to belly crawl through a dark attic is surely part of the puzzle. I'm interested... if they take those S4WRDs then would they accept the next batch of Source 4s that someone offers?

Best of luck with the project. Be good to that Opera House. My fellow Somonaukians who didn't move to Chicago depend on it!

 

[derekleffew]

if they take those S4WRDs then would they accept the next batch of Source 4s that someone offers?

In the early 2000s, the local university told the casinos they weren't interested in any donation that wasn't a SourceFour.

 

[jtweigandt]

I would accept source fours for our middle school across the street. I could hang about 10 of them for sure tomorrow if they materialized.
Their FOH is a hodge poge of nearly unfocusable Altman boxy 1kL awful things with a few 360q style as well.

 

[SteveB]

I suspect the money guy would gladly accept used incandescent S4’s after he see’s what a package of good LED ellipsoidals costs, plus console, power systems, data distro, etc…….

 

[Les]

I retired the few remaining aluminum-reflector 6x's in my theatre's rep plot sometime last year in favor of Source Four's that we acquired for pennies on the dollar. Luckily, we have taken over our local mall cinema and have converted one of the larger auditoriums in to a small performance space, which is where the Colortran and Altman fixtures enjoy retirement. I still keep a system of Colortran 6" Theater Fresnels in the main plot for top and backlighting, which I don't plan to replace until we are able to add a system of LED fresnels - which will be a while as I am thankful to have at received a grant for 9 more Elation SixPars, which brings our total up to 21+8 SpectraCyc's over the course of 7 or 8 years. So we are a hybrid system and will be for a while yet. My boss asked before this last grant cycle: "so have LED ellipsoidals come down in price yet?" Heh. Nope, not enough that will be dented by a $6k grant.

Maybe once we get that roof fixed we can discuss LED ellipsoidals. For now, I am happy and comfortable with the hybrid system, though I am hoping to replace our remaining 24 Altman Shakespeares FOH with Source Fours. My local school district has converted all schools to LED and one campus in particular should have a large batch of Source Fours hitting the auction block soon. I wish ETC made a Warm White version of the 4WRD. I could see that being a good upgrade path, and I would happily sacrifice color mixing for higher output for our FOH position.

 

[ship]

Off to an install tomorrow at Timothy Christian - Catholic HS in Elmhurst IL. Been an in/out install over the past year. Last phase was replacing all their S-4 Leko's with LED caps and adding some LED fixtures. Networking wiring done TBD also attaching - long lead time on many ETC components. And the industrial dish washer cleaning of the lens trains - which worked great. Will see how well the recommendations on how to donate the Altman 360Q's went. Tomorrow bypassing the dimmers on the dimmer rack cards and going to a bunch of ETC LED wall wort dimmers mounted to a raceway. This will be intersting.

At the opera house... I was biting my tongue in seeing the opera house Fresnels in the closet... I have gotten better about saying "paint brushes" removed stock to use as supplimentary to the LED pod's currently doing something. I did an inspection of the Altman 1000Q follow spots up until they were broght up on the dimmers by my boss.. Who does that - putting the follow spots on the dimmers, especially as I'm doing a professional inspection of them. Good condition. Really good condition.

Get the project or not in like 30 minutes away, the tech people supervising that Opera house, have it well in hand, and what they did in past installs was over the top. This upgrade would be similar in going LED S-4 caps, some networking and at least for now leaving what is on stage alone.

I was amazed by the like 30" wide staircase to the stage given the age of hooped skirts. The lack of fly space and the lack of pre-expansion green room depth... I really has a small stage in all ways... Wish I could have seen the Sycamore Opera house on the other hand, long gone. Hope I get the home county project, much easier than flying back out to Hawaii in service call I sent parts out so today.l

 

[Les]

I was biting my tongue in seeing the opera house Fresnels in the closet... I have gotten better about saying "paint brushes" removed stock to use as supplimentary to the LED pod's currently doing something.

Those are my feelings also. I understand about sacrifices sometimes needing to be made, but I also prefer the "best tool for the job" aspect of lighting design and overall flexibility. At the same time, my venue is spoiled by the fact that the city gives an annual electrical allowance and we usually get a small check at the end of the year for going under our allowance (which even happened when we were an all-conventional house with several 1K pars as our color wash workhorse fixtures). So we are not under much pressure to convert to LED asap. At least the slow roll-out of LED in our venue allows me more time to prioritize as upgrades become available.

Probably one of the best LED investments we've made in the last several years was converting the T12 4-lamp 2x4 troffers in the greenroom, dressing rooms, and corridors to T8 LED ballast-bypass. The reduction of maintenance alone has made that endeavor worth it.

 

[JMBrowne]

I was at a 1878 opera house last week in Sandwidch IL... Amazing it's design especially given it's built above the city hall and jail. Free tours every week for all civic functions in one building. Two good antique stores in the town around the block and some places for food of interest. Next town over down the highway... A Trump Store. Literally a Trump store.

The opera house was looking for a quote on modern lighting to their space. Very nice and clean theater even for dirt in the attic, small opera house with the last upgraded in the early 90's.

More like a presentional hall in type. No fly space and like 12' at best for stage depth.

During our tour, my boss and the money guy for the theater naturally discussed some stuff, I and the more tech person for the theater took our own tours and onto our own discussions. All of us leaded by the money people in my boss at times saying... come see this, in where our data would need to go, as opposed to us wandering to makeup mirrors in confirming they were using the best of LED lamps for them.

Something that stuck me during the hours of crawling about ceilings, or examinging most rooms was something from the main person money for the theater. He was talking about all the work he and staff had done to the theater, and at some point mentioned that while he had offers for obsolete lighting gear offered for coming in for donation. He didn't want it. He was looking to upgrade the theater rather than lool to more obsolete gear offered. I was one of those offers.

In hearing say that, I knew I in the past offered this theater obsolete gear for free. Just kind of stuck on that concept I had never assumed of before.. Most spaces don't want the up to factory spec older gear I could donate. Struck me in stand alone concept,. This theater has lots of Fresnels in a closet as with other stuff they have no need for. They want modern and have funding to do it as opposed to just supplement their systems.

Its been a while since I've logged on Ship, but this post struck a chord with me and you know all about it.

I've dealt with two campaign events in the last year, media events, where the "spec pushers" showed up with LED lights because they turned their noses up to our inventory of vintage Altmans. Lighting and color temp was poor at the candidate location. I convinced them with my charming demeanor to point a few decent condition fixtures in the directions required and even before I slipped some 3208 into the frames they were shocked.

It was as if they had become convinced older lights don't work? Don't they know these fixtures are the standard LED is trying to meet?

I saw a post today on a lighting group about how classic conventionals are showing up in designs mixed with newer gear because people are rediscovering the look. We are not planning to ditch anything conventional and I'm trying to rebuild stuff even though its been 9 months waiting on TP22's.

You should come see our Opera House if you're in the area, it sounds like a very similar space.

I just finished reorganizing our lamp collection and revealed to our preferred techs that I had gotten some EHF's and GLD's and a few other neat lamps if they wanted to punch up with the Altmans. Not in the general access cabinet, but in the Reserve choice one. I even got a box of Mark's BTH's to try out in fresnels if we can land some campaign gigs in the next month to push the color temps high with minimal heat in our menagerie of 65Q's.

Which include two of your superb rebuilds!

 

[JMBrowne]

I retired the few remaining aluminum-reflector 6x's in my theatre's rep plot sometime last year in favor of Source Four's that we acquired for pennies on the dollar. Luckily, we have taken over our local mall cinema and have converted one of the larger auditoriums in to a small performance space, which is where the Colortran and Altman fixtures enjoy retirement. I still keep a system of Colortran 6" Theater Fresnels in the main plot for top and backlighting, which I don't plan to replace until we are able to add a system of LED fresnels - which will be a while as I am thankful to have at received a grant for 9 more Elation SixPars, which brings our total up to 21+8 SpectraCyc's over the course of 7 or 8 years. So we are a hybrid system and will be for a while yet. My boss asked before this last grant cycle: "so have LED ellipsoidals come down in price yet?" Heh. Nope, not enough that will be dented by a $6k grant.

Maybe once we get that roof fixed we can discuss LED ellipsoidals. For now, I am happy and comfortable with the hybrid system, though I am hoping to replace our remaining 24 Altman Shakespeares FOH with Source Fours. My local school district has converted all schools to LED and one campus in particular should have a large batch of Source Fours hitting the auction block soon. I wish ETC made a Warm White version of the 4WRD. I could see that being a good upgrade path, and I would happily sacrifice color mixing for higher output for our FOH position.

I've ran the calculations about five times in the last 6 or 7 years about switching to LED as asked by our board and the calc's always come back that ROI is not going to be anytime within our careers in this space.

People just don't understand that a ColorSource at full whack is drawing 340W while a 575 is, well, 575. People are used to this idea that home LED lights are sipping power and have no idea that theater fixtures are being pushed beyond efficiency curves just to get the light and spectrum output to be compared with a tungsten fixture drawing only 150 watts more and producing better light in many color ranges.

I have to explain to them, if I replace a 575W with a 340W we are not saving that much power. While power costs have gone up, power is still incredibly cheap compared to a 2 or 3 thousand dollar fixture. I have 15 years worth of lamps now.

Would it be cool to get some Colorsources for certain things? Sure. Is it going to save us money? Not in my career here.

 

[ship]

Late tonight but very curious. By the way, the TC install went perfect - all Eco upgrades once programmed went perfect. Relieved in a church groop coming in over the weekend and limited time to fix problems.

 

[Les]

@JMBrowne , I am hearing what you're saying. Especially in our space, which is an oddball given the fact that a committee, some 30 years ago, negotiated a very good deal with the city in that they give us a yearly energy allowance which we always come under forecast on. So we see zero savings in going LED. I still have motivation in moving forward (slowly) as LED fixtures afford flexibility and provide what designers expect or want to see in a space. Especially in eliminating pinch points such as no longer needing 1k Par 64's for color washes -- I'm glad those are gone. But I am not in any kind of hurry to ditch the Source Fours or even convert the entire FOH rail to LED.

For one thing, once we go LED, it is a commitment. Gone are the days of a lighting package lasting 30 years with minimal complaints from the instruments themselves. If we replace our FOH catwalk with ColorSource Ellipsoidals, we can probably also expect to begin chasing expensive maintenance issues on those instruments in 15 years or less. Not because I think ETC's product is problematic, but because I don't think it's realistic to expect such complex instruments to last decades without any problems. Conventional fixtures age on more of a human scale and I think LED fixtures will be more like projectors - aging in Dog Years.

I worry somewhat about the school districts having gone all-LED. Based on their history, they build the space and let it run for 25-30 years without expecting much additional capitol outlay or maintenance. I hope they have planned on the fact that LED fixtures may have a shorter upgrade cycle while needing more specific preventative maintenance programs since LED and microprocessor-based equipment doesn't much enjoy being full of dust. Same with the integrated LED troffers they've put in all the classrooms. You can change out tubes and ballasts, or even swap in ballast-bypass LED tubes in legacy fixtures. However, the integrated LED fixtures won't likely have the ability to be maintained down to the component level in 10-20 years, and they will run in to issues of some fixtures appearing much brighter as they replace them piecemeal. Like most advances in technology, there will be some growing pains in expecting the new products to behave in ways that they're used to. The elementary school I attended in the 90's (back when it was new) is still using the same lighting it did back then. Surely, repairs have been made many times over the years, but they have kept going in preserving the aesthetics and avoiding swapping out entire fixture assemblies. I don't think the facilities being built today will have those same luxuries.

I'm not implying that these leaps in technology are a bad thing at all - I'm just voicing my concerns in the new stuff not being as user-serviceable or standardized.

I wouldn't turn my nose up if it were announced tomorrow that my space was going all LED, but I have noticed a backwards slide in lighting design for these modern spaces. One thing probably comes down to planning and "not knowing any better". Many spaces are ending up with only a few different variations of fixtures, and as @ship discusses paintbrushes, it seems that they are getting more paint but fewer brushes. Maybe I'm old school for preferring a fresnel over a zoomable wash, and a similar thing happened 20 years ago when theatres were getting Source Four Pars in place of fresnels. Did it slow them down? Maybe not, but I would miss my fresnels. I also think designers have become increasingly flexible in what they consider "a blue wash" but that's a rant for another day. The final thing is probably placebo, but it seems that I can always tell when the front wash is LED. Maybe it's just a learning curve thing, but the LED front wash usually looks kind of flat.

I'm sure similar discussions were being had when theatrical lighting transitioned from incandescent to Tungsten Halogen. In fact, at least one famous designer retired because of it if I remember correctly. Someone has to pave the way, and I welcome the changes. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little hesitant about jumping in head-first.

 

[LukeDelwiche]

People just don't understand that a ColorSource at full whack is drawing 340W while a 575 is, well, 575.

ColorSource Spot V is 197W max. Maybe you are thinking of Source Four LED Series 3 with the Daylight HDR engine at 340W? That fixture is a fair amount brighter than a Source Four 575LL tungsten fixture, at least in terms of field lumens.

 

[ship]

My long winded reply reply gone.. Yey!

Les on the other hand has expressed my concerns as a general concern to design better than I have been able to over the years in installing such systems. Re-Read his post and go back to your design concepts in front and back lighting for acting areas and sculpting etc. to reveal the depth of his questions.

Question about in above Luke comparison of HPL lamp in actual use - anyone using long life lamps? What voltage lamps are you comaring this to:? As per the above, in installing many over the years... It's a LED RGB if not RGBW spotlight. It's one lighting fixture taking the place of three or four fixtures. Yep you can dial it in for color, but pay attention to one light as a directional source. Is that really painting with lighting?

 

[almorton]

When we went over to LED we didn't reduce the number of directions we lit from, just that we didn't need to double or triple hang at the same point for different colour based effects. We still use side, top etc for sculpting, we just don't need quite as many fixtures.

 

[jtweigandt]

We did our FOH in stages. Always had source four 5 areas each with 3 fixtures WNC put in phoenix's first RGBAW in the center neutral position.. Again didn't reduce the directionality, but gave us some color control without re gelling. Last year or so we replaced the remaining source fours in the W and C positions with ETC Lustr LED.. The ETC's have much better replication of the ambers and better skin tone, but also can go very dramatic saturated colors when we want to without hanging specials, and re gelling. So as to "painting" with light.. we gave ourselves a much better set of brushes and paint. 1st electric is 5 areas WNC with the neutrals replaced by some propar V12 with holographic lens/beam shaping. Eventually would like to see some of the ETC colorsource fresnels with the remote focus.. in the W and C spots.. Had one in to test in our space and it was wonderful. We have down washes that are 10 year old or better elation opti tri's I put holographic diffusion on those to smooth them out. We also use etc parnell style and conventional fresnels for side lighting and other specials. Also the LED freed up the source fours for special use like our side thrusts (please Noooo Mr director not there)

So We're loving the LED, but still use the conventional where we need to or can.. but lots less ladder and lift work as we have put in more LED..

 

[almorton]

So We're loving the LED, but still use the conventional where we need to or can.

Pretty much our experience. We still use conventionals from time to time.