Sorry for a later response but here goes.
If the
plug is meant to be that way, I would still get rid of it. Things like that shouldn't exist...
On the subject of a laptop and a
dongle, I personally am a fan of this. Since you probably won't have a lot of time to be sitting at a board with all the lights plugged in, a
visualizer program would be a must for me. Check out Freestyler. It's what I started on. Quirky but it's easy to
build lighting profiles, it has a free 3d
visualizer, and it works with a lot of dongles. Now as for a
dongle I would recommend an
Enttec USB Pro. Do not buy the Open
dongle. It randomly cuts out. I personally own the Pro
dongle and it's worth the extra money. As a bonus if you ever decide to upgrade to a mor. Professional software such as
Chamsys or
Martin's stuff (blanking on the name right now) you can use thr
Enttec Pro with it.
Moving on to things I didn't
cover last time...
I agree you should be good on
power as long as you stick with
LED. If you start to use conventionals such as Source 4s, depending on what you lamp them at you can only
plug in 2 or 3 per
circuit. In my opinion
halogen/
tungsten beats most
LED front lights out there. Just looks better on the skin.
What you have is called a T-Bar. Bar goes across a tripod and makes a T. Place these carefully as people who aren't looking can and will walk right into the
leg. Also make sure you evenly distribute the weight as these are not the strongest/stable things in the world. I would expect to see a T-Bar on the front two corners of the
stage wit the aforementioned 2
halogen pars and 2
LED pars.
Those are not battens. Those are lights on a bar...I suppose they could be considered
par bars, but that would be a stretch and very confusing to those who know what an actual
par bar is. A
batten is basically a strip light. Kinda like a florescent tube but it does not provide 360 coverage.
This would be a
LED Batten/Strip. Really are interchangeable more or less but I use
batten because in google searches it tends to rule out cheaper lights geared for DJs. They make battens with built in batterys and wireless receivers. So all you have to do is set the
batten down and turn it on. No running
power and
DMX to every light and tying to make it look pretty. You just have to be sure you charge the batterys.
As for keeping the lights on the stand, I shoukd have worded that better. Keep the lights on the horizontal part of the stand. Than you can lift that bar off the tripod and when collasped the tipod and the bar with the lights can sit nice and neat on the floor.
After I fire up my computer later today I'll draw you a picture of how I would use your existing gear, and how/what I would add to make it a
bit better. Sorry for all the spelling mistakes I've been doing this on my new phone and I don't have the keyboard worked out yet.