What do you hate about your light board?

Nope, never. Odd I know :p But the thing is a piece of garbage anyways. But never had it freeze. Maybe because we do things manually? I just move all the channels with fixtures on them down so I can have all fixtures on the channel fader since the board has only 48 control channels and we have 96 dimmers, so if not I cannot use the fixture, and have all houselights on 48, Proscenium 47 and stairs 46. After those are all patched I make the subs I need and go from there.

Unless you can count this, But I do not know if this is supposed to happen or not-

I do not use cues because-
If I make a cue, any cue, doesn't even have to make a light change, if I move the scene faders up to activate the cue, I no longer have any intensity control. The faders, bump buttons and keypad itnensity control is locked out until I flip the switch to 2-Scene then back to Multiscene.
I kind of want to try 2-Scene to see how hard it is xD

But yeah, unless that isnt supposed to happen, then never had it freeze.
 
When I take the tape off, the VIS is still there :(
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At my high school, we have an ETC Expression 1. It's very old-we got it the year I was born. It also has a click wheel. A neighboring high school has the new Ion, which after their tech senior graduates will get absolutely NO use. I feel bad for one of the freshman, who shows a great deal of interest in lighting. It's a shame that he won't have a good lighting board to learn off of, considering the way that lighting is headed in a new direction.
 
MarhabanMicah said:
At my high school, we have an ETC Expression 1. It's very old-we got it the year I was born. It also has a click wheel. A neighboring high school has the new Ion, which after their tech senior graduates will get absolutely NO use. I feel bad for one of the freshman, who shows a great deal of interest in lighting. It's a shame that he won't have a good lighting board to learn off of, considering the way that lighting is headed in a new direction.
Click to expand...

I know how you feel, I hate teaching people on our Status, I keep getting off into side things about normal boards :p
 
CSCTech said:
I know how you feel, I hate teaching people on our Status, I keep getting off into side things about normal boards :p
Click to expand...

I know exactly what you're talking about. Me: "And here is the floppy disk drive..." My 'apprentice:' "This thing uses floppy disks?!?!" And then it froze.

The track ball, floppy disks, and pretty much everything else about the Innovator 600 make it look pretty pathetic when compared to a modern board.

I've gotten used to working with the oldest and most expensive computer in the school district. So have many others on here, I'm sure.
 
It is sad that some of the younger folks here seem to get so negative when they are working with "vintage" gear. In High School and even College, you are learning how to learn and concepts. Does it really matter that the device uses a track ball vs a mouse? is it really that big a deal that it uses a floppy disk vs a memory stick?

It seems that unless you are working with the very latest and most expensive gear, there is little interest. Technology moves quickly but the underlying concepts don't, if you go on professionally you may very well find that if you get into smaller venues some of these vintage boards are still around doing excellent productions.

Just remember that the latest and greatest today is going to be vintage in the near future, so you are continually going to need to understand concepts
vs a specific system this way by understanding how thing work and are designed, when you are faced with the next generation you will be able to learn how to use it properly

It is just like flying, there are a lot of jet/turbo prop pilots who learned on a Cessna 150

Sharyn
 
We have an Expression with Emphasis, and the only complaint I have is that it's not a Ion. I know the Express(ion) line really well, and I'd like to learn something new.
 
Well put Sharyn, too many want to throw away perfectly good equipment because it has some age on it. I work in several different theatres in my area, two have Expresses, one has an Expression, one has an ION and three still have EC two scene presets. I can do an excellent production with any of them.
 
Well, I kind of sort of not really like our Status. But the thing is, it's half broken :p We can't even use two-scene mode so anyone I teach I have to teach using only subs to run shows, and with the, pretty much no features of the Status, it seems kind of useless. But I suppose it isn't really because like you said its all about the concepts. I have mastered the Status inside and out I could program it and run the show blindfolded so to speak. And I just have a good general knowledge of theatre. If you can do the basic functions of the Status or any old board, you can on any new one.
The only difference between say, our Status and a..Expression 3 is that the software is just simply better so it doesnt die every two minutes (lol) and a few features. It's all looks and hardware really.

I WISH my board had a floppy drive. Where the heck do I find a PCMCIA card or something ?_?
 
SHARYNF said:
It is sad that some of the younger folks here seem to get so negative when they are working with "vintage" gear. In High School and even College, you are learning how to learn and concepts. Does it really matter that the device uses a track ball vs a mouse? is it really that big a deal that it uses a floppy disk vs a memory stick?

It seems that unless you are working with the very latest and most expensive gear, there is little interest. Technology moves quickly but the underlying concepts don't, if you go on professionally you may very well find that if you get into smaller venues some of these vintage boards are still around doing excellent productions.

Just remember that the latest and greatest today is going to be vintage in the near future, so you are continually going to need to understand concepts
vs a specific system this way by understanding how thing work and are designed, when you are faced with the next generation you will be able to learn how to use it properly

It is just like flying, there are a lot of jet/turbo prop pilots who learned on a Cessna 150

Sharyn
Click to expand...
I agree... At my college, as a senior member of our tech crew, it sometimes falls on me to help newer people understand some of the general concepts... I'd MUCH prefer showing them how to use our mackie 1402 VLZ than the new M7 we have.

Same with our light board (the Vision): It's a great thing to learn with, especially after you get used to the expression 2 (again, high tech we've got)... at least it teaches you to be on your toes!
 
CSCTech said:
I do not use cues because-
If I make a cue, any cue, doesn't even have to make a light change, if I move the scene faders up to activate the cue, I no longer have any intensity control. The faders, bump buttons and keypad itnensity control is locked out until I flip the switch to 2-Scene then back to Multiscene.
I kind of want to try 2-Scene to see how hard it is xD


Does the board have A/B and C/D cross faders? If so, make sure you load the cue stack into the C/D fader stack, not the A/B.
On many boards, if you load the A/B stack and try to run a cue, then the channel faders etc are locked out - all that will work are the submasters. Bill
Click to expand...
 
The two theatres where I do most of my lighting designs use the EDI Bijou. There are two primary things that I dislike:

1) You cannot record/link effects to cues, only submasters.
2) Unlike the predecessor board, when editing a cue, you cannot use the channel faders to grab a level and bring it down. All reductions in level have to be done via the keypad.

Bill
 
This may be true (haven't used a Strand board in a long time) but it's not an uncommon feature on any board, even low-end ones. My $150 American DJ DP-8A had a blackout button. Then, so did the Expression 3 my high school had, as did any other light board I've worked with recently. Very few uses for such a button -- when do you really need a sudden blackout? Wouldn't you just program it in to a cue? If a cue misfired and you needed a blackout for a scene change, wouldn't it just be better to slide the GM? It's still not an uncommon feature to see.
 
Well, it's not much more difficult to just press 1 [THRU] 400 [AT] 0 [ENTER]. Or, when programming, bring up a previous blackout cue.

Although it does surprise me that Strand doesn't have blackout buttons on any of its consoles. Not a show-stopper, but it just seems odd.
 
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