to many faders?

zac850

Well-Known Member
I was just looking at ETC's website and their boards and saw that several of them had TONS of submasters, the Insight 3 has 108, and the Express 72/144 has all of those. I was wondering if anyone thought that it was to many subs. My school has an Express 125 and it has 24 subs. For me (and, well, my school does only have 36 dimmers) this is plenty. I can understand how more then 24 subs would be useful, but 108? My thought is that you would spend so much time looking for the sub that you want. They advertise that with all the subs it makes it faster when your doing something on the fly, but I am thinking that it would take to long to look for the sub that you need......

I've never worked any big show with more then 60 lights or so, so if I completely wrong please do tell me, however it just seems like there are to many subs.....
 
We have an express 72/144 and it only has 24 submasters, then there are 144 faders one for each channel on the top part which is good for setting looks. Most times we never go past sub page three but the advantage of having 108 subs is more for a place where you would want certain looks like a tv studio or a dance club. The advantage is instead of having to go to cue 35 you just have to bring up sub 35 or at least thats how I would do it.
 
In a place with a lot of fixtures, they may be setup with a whole variety of "looks". I have seven to fifteen setup sometimes. You can have differewnt colors on subs, and then premix them on others, and you've got an instant look when someone comes in to do something...
 
I agree with all of that, but I can't think of more then 30 or 40 subs and looks that you would need. For me I have maybe 10 subs by color, so red and blue and amber and that stuff, and with maybe another 4 or 5 for position on the stage......

I can understand for maybe a large place venue, but most places I think wouldn't need that many subs....
 
Is it bad to have five times more than enough?
 
When the faders are in groups of twelve say, it can be pretty easy to map out locations in your head. This look is third row second column #122, etc.
 
thats true, I guess your right..... my head wouldn't be able to remember all of those, but I guess people do.

and good point, you can never have to many extras.
 
What sucks is when you are stuck with 8 submasters and a crappy chase as the only memory for your board! Like me!
 
I absolutely love subs! they are fantastic. Specially when working on strands.

I have all my colours in subs, then all my specials, chases then finally i plot down some basic looks like curtain warmers and warm stage washes and cool and whatever else I want. Our desk has something like 60 subs, and I use the groups (pallettes for hog users) to do stuff instantly like if I have specials and everything else up by pressing one button I can make it change looks to a red stage with blue cyc if you want.

You can never have enough subs =)
 
Submasters save my life in so many ways. I have done lighting for many events but dance concerts I have done an abundance of. And unless the lighting gets extremely difficult I prefer to to all the cues manually using subs. Having many subs also makes it much easier to do cues. At many of the concerts I have done I have wished I had more than 30 or 40 subs but our board only has 24. During the most recent event I did I had to do some pretty screwed up patching because I ran out of submasters. Submasters ROCK!
 
Radman said:
What sucks is when you are stuck with 8 submasters and a crappy chase as the only memory for your board! Like me!
what about teh last one i used:
18 channels in preset A,
mirror image in preset B,
a master for each preset.
no flash buttons. definately NO memory at all.

and at one point in the play i had to do 3 different lighting cues in the space of about 5 secconds WITH a sound cue mixed somewhere in the middle there too.
i was not a happy techie.
i manages to pull it off one or two times too.
 
being dumb what is the real difference when used correctly between a submaster and a cue as they both change the lighting state
 
How about two banks of six 600w rotary dimmers controlled by a light switch per bank! No memory. And it is made from an old apple computer.
 
biking_ollie said:
being dumb what is the real difference when used correctly between a submaster and a cue as they both change the lighting state

a cue is in the memory and you hit go and the look comes up
a submaster is a slider that you program with these lights

and don't insult apple computers, apple computers are good (maybe not as lighting boards... but there still good)
 
i dont get how a comp can be turned into a dimmer.
is that like on scooby doo when they used to make the most elaborite thinks using only a cotton ball, a toothpick and a ball of string?
like was it actually a working computer.
 
Our high school musical had 77 submasters....

The show that I will start on in a few weeks will have a min. of 98 subs!

I really can't imagine how you can run a show on 24 subs!?! Our high school show was not even that big!

We average from 3-4 cues a scene for our high school shows... and then we have 3 cues for preshow.... and anywhere from 4 to 10 curtain call/post show cues.... and we still ran 2 FX effects manually with out putting them into subs!
 
ricc0luke said:
I really can't imagine how you can run a show on 24 subs!?! Our high school show was not even that big!

Well, my high schools musical had about 115 cues, but I had them as cue's, not as sub's. Also, my school only has 75 lights or so... and 36 dimmers...

I guess I was wrong about not needing that many sub's
 
I don't use the submasters cause when I programmed a show, I would have no less then 50 cues for a short play. I did Blood Brothers my Junior year and ended up with 1,230 cues. You don't even want to know how many I had for Into The Woods and I hung, focused and programed the show all beofre the 8PM show the same day. Talk about a headache. :roll:
 
digitaltec said:
I don't use the submasters cause when I programmed a show, I would have no less then 50 cues for a short play. I did Blood Brothers my Junior year and ended up with 1,230 cues. You don't even want to know how many I had for Into The Woods and I hung, focused and programed the show all beofre the 8PM show the same day. Talk about a headache. :roll:

I just did Into The Woods, and that was when I had 115 to 125 cues (I lost count when I started putting in 62.3 and 62.5). I wanted to set it up so that every time you entered a different part of the forest, there would be a different forest look. Of corse, I only had 36 dimmers to do it with, so it did not work.

Regardless, for my school, when a show with 25 cues was big, Into The Woods was still really big.

What I do when programing is have the different colers and areas in subs, and mix and match to what looks good. If I want it to look exactly like I already had it, then I will go into the boards memory and copy that look.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back