What do you hate about your light board?

[MillburyAuditorium]

Sorry if this was posted before.

Well, here you can rant about what you hate about your light board.

I'll start,
Well we have a ColorTran Status 24/48. Which I just found out not many people like Colortran and our entire system is through them xD
Well the main thing I dislike, besides it crapping out all the time :/, is that its well, a 24/48. When we get a new board we're getting a 48/96, most likely an ETC Express. I was quit upset when I saw that the Element doesn't have a 48/96 model.
I like to be able to have every light at the tip of my fingers, and since we use more than 48 lights, I cant.
Plus if we had an Express 48/96 I could do some crazy thing with the houselights since each slider has a bump button xD (each row of our houselights have its on dimmer/channel.

 

[Esoteric]

I have so many consoles I work on. But I can tell you there are only 3 consoles that I have no complaints with. The GrandMA, The Hog Series, and the Avo Pearl/Diamond. Every other console that I have ever used (I have never used a Pallette) has its drawbacks and advantages.

Mike

 

[Anvilx]

I hate trying to make little changes or label my cues for my etc express 24/48.

I have to save to floppy>open floppy on my dads computer> transfer the contents to a usb drive> open the show file on my pc> edit the show file>write that to the usb drive>head back to my dads pc> write from usb to the floppy> mount the floppy with the console.
​

What a waste of time.

Plus I wish show files were txt read/write-able, it would make my life so much easier.

 

[MillburyAuditorium]

Wow Anvil, wouldn't it just be easier to redo the whole cue?

 

[erosing]

I hate that it's not a physical desk. I miss buttons and tactile response, only three more days.

 

[Synchronize]

We have a Leigh Millennium at my school and its such an old desk that there is a buildup of dust or something in the grandmaster slider and it never goes to Full. It bounces between 99 and 98 when the slider is all the way up. Not a show stopper, but it bugs the crap out of me. The other thing is that its a memory console with two scene capability and has two DMX universes. It has an A/B fade and a C/D fade so it has go, hold, clear, etc. times two. Hit the wrong Go button and you're good as screwed without making it look even worse that the lights not changing when they're supposed to in the first place.

Good thing it crapped out on me this weekend right before a show. Maybe the school will finally fork out for a new one. Spend some $8,000,000 a year and can't find a dime for theatre.

 

[Studio]

Strand 300 Series 2 go buttons one is labeled NO GO now, freezes if you press Go too long, monitors won't turn on all the time, if you leave a floppy in it won't boot, if you mess with the trackball it freezes, it once deleted a whole show 1/2 hour before opening night, wheel is broken, needs a new ps/2 keyboard.

Our school's light board is named Lucifer and has a mural on the air duct depicting Lucifer in flames. (not that I would say anything bad about lucifer he likes positive encouragement and hates negativity. It is a careful balance and now that I have said this I am glad we have a backup Strand 200 series in our other theater which is awesome).

 

[Anvilx]

Wow Anvil, wouldn't it just be easier to redo the whole cue?

Yeah it is. However you can't attach a key directly to the console so every time I want to label a cue I have to go through the routine.

 

[Les]

We have a Leigh Millennium at my school and its such an old desk that there is a buildup of dust or something in the grandmaster slider and it never goes to Full. It bounces between 99 and 98 when the slider is all the way up. Not a show stopper, but it bugs the crap out of me. The other thing is that its a memory console with two scene capability and has two DMX universes. It has an A/B fade and a C/D fade so it has go, hold, clear, etc. times two. Hit the wrong Go button and you're good as screwed without making it look even worse that the lights not changing when they're supposed to in the first place.

ETC Expression and Express do this too, it's not an uncommon thing. Simple fix: Pay attention to which button you're pressing

 

[mstaylor]

We have an Expression in one of the theatres that I work in. To be honest I haven't done a show on it for a couple of years, had others run the show, but it has had serious issues since day one. Basically they have never gotten the computer to work correctly and has now been taken off, don't even know where it is, essentially making it an Express with double monitors. They have spent hours on the phone with tech support and never have completely gotten it fixed.

 

[MarshallPope]

Our school's light board is named Lucifer

Funny, my high school director was called Lucifer... Lu for short...

Anyway, I'm very pleased by the console we use at my college (a Jands Vista) but my high school's console was...interesting. It was a 1970's-ish board (Don't remember exactly what it was, and it was replaced then they opened a new PAC this year) but it was a memory console that nobody knew how to program, and half of the buttons on the side which no one knew what were for, didn't work in the first place. And the beautiful sliders... Let's just say that about half of them actually had the little plastic things still attached... Luckily, enough of them were loose that we could usually move them around to the most-used sliders.

 

[hhslights]

Well, we just got an Ion but I can tell you what I HATED about my old board. It was an EDI Minstrel Plus. It was the devil, I swear. It would dump its memory on occasion. It liked to especially during tech week or something important. Most memorable, when it dumped during lunch for double run. Had to reprogram as we went through the second run through. Then occasionally it would set itself to a five minute fadeout. There is also the fact that most of the buttons on the keypad don't work like they should (idk if it is because of its age or if something happened to it at one point). During our musical last year, it and the dimmer rack were starting to crap out. It would send lights into random seizures. The remedy? Screaming and hitting. Well, perhaps the screaming could of been done without. It was a 48/96 but it still was bad. We could only control it with the sliders. Had to patch any circuit over 96 to one unused slider, that process took about five minutes. There were only four pages of submasters and page four sub 6 would never save. The blackout button was a switch. There was no noticeable warning on the monochrome monitor. Almost all control had to be manual. I don't know why it hated us so much or why it was such a pain but it was. I am so glad it is gone now, although, I do kind of miss hating on it. It added extra stress to my life and I love stress. It add spice to things. But I love the Ion and have no complaints so far.

 

[MaxS]

We have an Express 48-96 sans-Emphasis, which would be all fine and dandy if we didn't rent large amounts of moving lights for every show. (Just wrapped up Les Mis about a month ago and used tons of SmartColors and High End 575 CMYs.) The trackpad is also broken and erratic, and we have problems with some of the individual channel sliders. We end up having to rent a Zero88 Fat Frog for the movers, and running two boards is inconvenient. I'm trying to lobby for an Ion, but seeing as the financial oversight for the venue is such that we can't even get a rigging inspection or reapply fireproofing to our expired soft goods, somehow I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon. The last substantial amount of funding put into it was a donation in 2001 from an enterprising CEO of a national company headquartered in the city.

 

[KeepOnTruckin]

I had to use a Strand Mantrix from 1980. What a crock of sh*t. The soft patch keypad didnt work, the board would dump the submaster memory if it was bumped at all, and it overheated if left on more than an hour. Oh and it is 4 feet long but the window is only 2 feet wide, so if i am on the right side of the board then I can't see.

The Express Trackpad was just a big piece of fail in my opinion, it never worked well. The Expression at least had those 2 big wheels that you could turn, or you could plug in a mouse and use that to move the automated lights.

 

[mrtrudeau23]

expression + emphasis server + dance show tech week = crashing every night during programming. it was enough to make me want to push it out the booth window. we ended up using our insight 3 to do the show. thank god the things are probably going to ETC to get check-ups over winter break. if it were me, i'd just get an ion or eos and move our department forward. if only...
a few years ago i got to program on a strand board that was literally falling apart (don't remember what model it was). i was able to actually pick up the banks of channel sliders at the top of the board. the wheel also caused the board to go crazy if it moved, so they was tape over it to keep it in place. the director actually freaked out at me for even asking about the tape, worried i would crash the board :/

 

[shiben]

We have an Ion, and I really dont have any complaints about it, for what we use it for, anything more complicated would be overkill, and anything named Innovator would get beaten with a stick (woops, already done that to 2)

 

[chris325]

and anything named Innovator would get beaten with a stick (woops, already done that to 2)

Fellow Leviton users, I feel your pain.

Pretty much everything in my high school's auditorium is Colortran, and as I've gained more experience in lighting, I've begun to dislike their products more and more. Over the last 2 shows I've designed the i96 dimmers and Innovator 600 have managed to fail me a total of 6 times, one of them in the middle of a show. The monitors on the board are giving out, and if the board isn't hard cleared on a regular basis it will freeze. I don't know how many times I've told directors "Hold on, the show's still loading." And the trackball is completely useless. I felt really bad for the actors when the board lost control over just about every single channel in the auditorium for an entire act opening night. The board freezing has become a common occurance during rehersals. Looks like we may be aquiring an Element or Ion soon, so its time here may be finally coming to an end.

It's kind of funny to think about how the most expensive computer in the school is also the only one that uses floppy disks.

 

[Grog12]

I hate trying to make little changes or label my cues for my etc express 24/48.

I have to save to floppy>open floppy on my dads computer> transfer the contents to a usb drive> open the show file on my pc> edit the show file>write that to the usb drive>head back to my dads pc> write from usb to the floppy> mount the floppy with the console.
​

What a waste of time.

Plus I wish show files were txt read/write-able, it would make my life so much easier.

I'm a little confused why you have to use the OE to edit your cues on an express. I understand the labeling portion but why the editing?

 

[coldnorth57]

The board it elf I am now it is over 4 year starting to like the board it is a Marquee BUT the help file and opeator manual is so bad I went frok m a Strand GSX to this Marquee and WOW what the heck is a look and attibuts??? well i had a lot of reading between the lines and going over and reading the Strand Pallet help

 

[g15]

we have an Express 24/48 with Emphasis. Not really any complaints about the Express but I could go on for days about Emphasis:

-We have lost countless amounts of stuff from it crashing while programming.
-Lags like crazy when pressing bump buttons...or doing anything for that matter.
-we're getting some strange DLL error...haven't looked into it but it probably explains some of the issues.

the list really just goes on and on...

but we're pretty sure it's getting replaced with an Ion in the very near future!

end rant!

-Danny