So is your facility a "
road house" where it's travel lecture friday, Jazz Group on Tour Saturday, and elementary school musical all next week?
Also you might check with "Kelite" Keith about the status of you scrollers. He might be able to help you out.
For a
Road house I would focus on things that give you as much variety bang for the buck so Scrollers are great.
Right Arm/
I-cue give you the ability to quickly reposition specials either for a single song or for a show. Put an
instrument on a
Right Arm with a
scroller/
seachanger and a remote
DMX Iris and you've got quite a tool for specials. True you are getting up there into the price of a VL1000 or Revolution, but the benefit of doing it this way is you've got
HPL lamp life and the versatility of four separate units (a color changing device, a repositioning device, an
iris, and an
instrument). You can use them all together for one show and you can use them in separate locations for the next show... you can't do that with a mover. That's why I'm such a fan of getting a good full collection of small toys before moving into the big ones. If you don't have the budget, you can buy a lot more versatility by investing in a variety of small toys.
How about a thousand bucks to fill up your
gobo collection?
Have you seen those
Gam SX4 devices. The multi
gobo tray's would give you a lot of bang for your buck.
You might also want to look at some VL1000's or S4 Revolutions (there are MANY threads about the these two products). They'll get you some moving tricks without a lot of cash output and they'll match the
color temperature of the rest of your rig.
Beyond that it starts to get very expensive.
But before all that get your
console fixed or replaced first. See the many threads about the new
strand consoles,
Ion,
EOS and Congo. My vote would be for a Congo... Jr for about $13k or preferably full size for about $23K (again search for many opinions). While there was nothing wrong with the
Strand 300 it's old technology and it's not working right... ouch bad combo.
EDIT While I was posting Footer said much of what I said. The only thing I would add is that you can buy one
strand node (List about $700) and use it to input the
ETC console into the
shownet system and then leave the rest of the
system alone. Also want to
point out that I'm getting a
Strand console for my new theater. There's nothing wrong with the
Strand consoles except their poor customer service repuation and the fact you have to spend over $30,000 to get one with
encoder wheels on the
console.