Hi Paul - lovely to see an administrator wanting to buy tech gear! I'm sure you're aware that $10K is not very much money for lighting gear. You can easily blow that and more on the
desk alone, before you connect it to anything. I'd suggest the following:
- at that budget, you will be using mostly
conventional fixtures. Good quality fixtures never wear out, so it is reasonable to get all your existing
stock down on the floor, given them a good clean and service, replace all the dead lamps, and see what you actually have. They are probably 100% fit for purpose.
- what you might need is more infrastructure. You definitely need more lighting bars, and you need some safe and reliable way of getting to them - often an issue in this type of
venue! You don't say what type and how many channels of dimmers you have, but they will certainly need a good clean. Dimmers are $2-3K each, but second-hand bargains do happen.
Power distro to bars is nice, but extension leads are pretty cheap and may be a better option at this
point. It can be cheaper to get dimmers up into the rig and run one big three
phase line to it, than to have the dimmers side
stage with lots of
distro. Ultimately, you will want some
DMX distro, but probably not yet, except if access is so awful that all your budget is going to go on hoists, in which case at least run the cable.
- as others have said, check out the existing
desk. It might be awesome! But if not, consider PC-based lighting control. I like
Chamsys MagicQ - it can do more that you will ever need and the software is free so all you need is a $100 USB to
DMX dongle eg
Enttec DMX Pro 2. A good
desk will cost you $10 to 30K, a
Chamsys wing more like $3K. iPad remotes are nice but pricey, so do what most of us do and get a long
DMX cable so you can haul the
desk out into the middle of the seats.
Soooo... (and knowing this is all a stab in the dark) my priorities would be 1. sort and service all existing
stock 2. get more bars up, mostly onstage, and more dimmers if required 3. get a PC-based control
system 4. look for awesome bargains on second-hand
conventional fixtures eg I saw 6x
Selecon Pacific profiles for $180 the other day 5. Maybe 6x good quality
LED pars for splashy colours, if you've done everything else on the list!
Hope this helps. Happy to fly over to consult!