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    Blog Series: Lighting Education

    Demo at Kinetic Lighting Features CHAUVET Professional Fixtures

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    Our dealer from Los Angeles, Kinetic Lighting, recently showcased various CHAUVET Professional lights during a demo. Here are some cool pictures of our lights in action:

    This wall has an artsy look under the light from COLORado 1-Tri Tour wash fixtures.

     

    Legend 412 pixel-mapping moving yokes.

    COLORado Batten 72 Tour linear wash lights.

    The same amazing COLORado Batten 72 Tour lights in green.

    COLORado 1-Tri Tour organized and at work.

     

    Legend 412: different angle, the same performant fixture.

    Competitive COLORado Batten 72 Tour.

    COLORado Batten 72 Tour in blue.

    Richard Cadena Teaches Lighting Design at CHAUVET HQ

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    CHAUVET hosted Richard Cadena, from the Academy of Production Technology, for a three-day seminar  about “Lighting Design and Applications” at its Florida headquarters. Here are some photos of Cadena, sharing his knowledge and passion for lighting with CHAUVET team members.

    Three-point lighting demonstration.

    Cadena explaining one way light is measured.

    Cadena talking group through measuring lux/footcandles.

    In-class, hands-on light lab.

    Light meter testing.

    Also check out our three-part interview of Cadena talking with our own Ford Sellers.
    LD Interview: Take 5 with Richard Cadena, pt. 1
    LD Interview: Take 5 with Richard Cadena, pt. 2
    LD Interview: Take 5 with Richard Cadena, pt. 3

     

    Video in the World of Lighting – Part 3

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    Mike Graham, comfortable in the spotlight.

    Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional

    By now, you know what kind of show you are doing and what it is going to look like. The plot is finished up and all of your gear is in pretty rows of road cases on your show site.

    Now what?

    Here are a few things you need to know before you start loading in:

    1. What kind of rigging kits are you using?
    For example, the MVP modular video panels CHAUVET Professional offers use an individual rig kit. That is to say that every point of the panels attaches individually to a clamp and conversely attaches to the hang point of your structure. Another style also used is the rigging bar. Commonly used in higher resolution panels, this system helps keep the panels aligned. On some rig bars, there are no clamps. Instead, eyebolts used as rigging points for cable hold the rig bar to your structure. Knowing this before you get to the show is really important.

    2. What kind of structure are you planning to attach your panels? Are you using truss?
    If you are planning to use straight truss, you may want to think about getting some schedule 40 pipe and attaching it to the truss as opposed to hanging your panels directly to the truss. This trick is useful because no matter how well you plan it out, there will always be a cross bar in the way of one or more of the rigging kits. Using the pipe will make that problem go away and you will be able to put your panels exactly where they need to be. As we all know, panel placement is critical to the alignment of the show. If you are using curved truss, you may want to think about using aircraft cable and turnbuckles to trim out your panels. Again, placement is important and as sure as you are reading this, there will be a crossbar in your way.

    3. How do you plan to run power?  
    Power for video panels is easy to overlook, and hard to fix if you do. I like to plan exact positions for my power drops in my rig. I also take the step of knowing which circuit powers what device. For example, SOCO 1, Circuit 3 is going to power my stage left stack of 16 MVP 18 panels, which means that Circuit 3 needs to have a powerCON female (blue) connector on it. I can further break that down and use a PowerStream 4 to break that run up a little more. This will also keep my cables cleaner and keep my runs of power much shorter. (I prefer to have my power runs as short as possible.)  If you are using a large system, you may have several circuits of power running your system. If that is the case, I strongly suggest running your power from one direction only (left to right, or right to left, as the case may be) so that you can keep your runs clean and simplified. Again, this is where the PowerStream 4 comes in really handy.

    4. How about signal?  
    If you mess up your signal run, you are in for a real bad day. LED Studio—and as far as I am aware, almost every other video panel addressing software—uses the order of signal cabling to locate the position of each panel in your system. It is critical that when you are laying out the signal flow, you follow it exactly. Otherwise correcting this within the software can take hours. You want to have this clear in your preplanning stages.

    Now you are loading in. The key here is to know your plan and go by it. As long as you do that, you should be fine. There are always bumps along the way, but all in all, should not be that bad.  As you put rows of panels in, it is a good idea to power each line and make sure that all of your pixels are working. Use the test button on the back of the panel to turn the panel to white (all LEDs on). This will confirm that you are good to go for LEDs. Once you have that, I would also suggest that every few rows, you send signal and make sure you are getting information from your server to the panels. Send some content to make sure you have your show. The rest of load in is set and repeat.

    Most importantly, be safe in what you are doing. Always keep in mind that you are hanging hundreds of pounds of aluminum, wire, and LEDs in the air above people’s heads. Also, keep in mind that in an outdoor environment, the wind sees a video wall like a big sail. Watch what you are doing. Keep an eye on the weather. Always make sure that your top and side rigging points are secure and no one has left any tools on the panels as they go up in the air.

    Trying New Stuff

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    Mike Graham looking pensive in front of MVP modular video panels.

    Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional

    My name is Michael Graham and I have tried broccoli for the first time ever this week. I ended up liking it.

    For the past 37 years I have avoided it like it was some kind of evil stalk of green nastiness on my plate. I have been watching my son actually ask for it for dinner. He’s 5 and at that age, aren’t kids supposed to not want veggies? So I convinced myself to try it. We had ordered take out one night and in there was some chicken with broccoli. While I was dishing everyone’s out, I psyched myself up and ate some. All in all, not bad. You all should have seen the look on my wife’s face.  She has been trying for the past 10 years to get me to eat more veggies.

    How does this relate to lighting?, you may ask. Well, oddly enough, I think that we often feel the same way about new lighting products or ideas. We get it into our heads that there is only one way to design a show and we have our favorite lights that we like to do it with.  We get into a rut and forget that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It is important to take that first bite of broccoli and try new stuff. We as an industry are so lucky to have as many new products as we do. Year after year.

    Look around at what else is going on out there. When is the last time you said, “Wow, that pencil sharpener industry is really evolving.” It is critical for us all on both sides of this blog to try new stuff and not get stuck in the same old same old.

    So, come on, try something new. You might be surprised at how cool it is.

    P.S. We are launching some really cool new pencil sharpeners at InfoComm this week.  Come by, I would love to show you how they work.

    CHAUVET Demo Day at Blue Planet

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    Blue Planet Lighting hosted an open house at their new Las Vegas location, in the Russell Commerce Center just off the Las Vegas Strip, featuring the latest in  CHAUVET Professional LED gear. CHAUVET Central U.S. Sales Manager Jeremy Pace was on hand to discuss and demo the gear which included: Q-Spot 560-LED, Q-Wash 560Z-LED, Q-Wash 260-LED, and Legend 412  moving heads as well as COLORdash Par Tri, COLORado Zoom Tour and the new COLORado 1-Quad Tour static wash lights.

    COLORdash Par Tri, COLORado Zoom Tour and COLORado 1-Quad Tour (L to R)

    Q-Wash 560Z LED, Q-Wash 260-LED and Legend 412 (L to R)

     

     

    Tech Talk: Video in the World of Lighting – Part 2

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    Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional

    Mike Graham looking pensive in front of MVP panels.

    When we left our heroes, they were sitting at the front of a theatre trying to decide — to pixel map or not to pixel map? Ideally, you want to do both, but let’s hope that this decision was made weeks ago during pre-production. The Wall took three years to produce. Most of us don’t have three years to produce a show. If I went to the management of CHAUVET and said I would need three years to produce LDI, they would laugh me out of the room. We need the ability to quickly and effectively get our content out to the stage. This is where LED Studio, Art-Net, Kling-Net, and a whole lot of Ethernet with Neutrik NE8 connectors come into play. By combining these software platforms, we can easily control a whole stage of products that use various protocols to speak the same language. With the CHAUVET MVP Media System outfitted with ArKaos MediaMaster Express, you can manage your pixel mapping of DMX fixtures and all of your video products all in one source. Combine this with a lighting controller that can send and receive Art-Net communication protocol, and now you can completely control everything under one network roof. I am not going to go into how to hook up the system in this tech talk. The interconnection of the system depends a little on what you want to accomplish and a lot the scale of how big you want to go. Again, I recommend checking out the ArKaos manual and the manual of the controller that you are going to be using to trigger your show. The simple fact is that, yes, you can make your show pop with what you have available in front of you. The reason that you want so much control is to ultimately make it easier to program your show. Here are a few tips on ways to do some pre-production setup that will save you a ton of time onsite.

    1. Know what you’re “looking” for. Unlike normal show programming, when you are planning out video, you want to have all of your “looks” in the can. In the “video” tab, “looks” stands for video clips. You want to show up with your clips ready and filed. This means that you will really need to know what you intend to do on this show. I highly recommend a blog that some guy wrote called “Zen in the Art of Entertainment Lighting.” It’s a three part series and applies to this conversation.

    2.  Accessibility is the key. When you file your video clips, make sure that they are done in such a way that you can quickly access them when you need to. In ArKaos MediaMaster Express, you can set up your folders for specific songs. You also have 64 visual presets per page with 64 pages at your fingertips. You can easily set your clips on each page and have each individual page can be a song or scene of its own. You can also have up to eight layers of video running at the same time. Since you can also tell the video preset where on your playback surface you want your video to show up, having these eight layers really handy. Since ArKaos MediaMaster Express was designed for the lighting professional, it is stunningly easy for us to use.

    3. Keep your eye on the plot. While you are getting all of this set up, have a sketch of the show plot that you are working with. Honestly, it can be napkin CAD, or the finest of visualizers, but have that sketch handy while you are working on setting all of this up. That sketch needs to include all of the elements that you want to send video content to.

    4. Finalize your fixture layout and DMX address scheme. When you are setting up your pixel mapping, this is absolutely critical that the DMX addressing is correct and done before you start working on this.

    5.  Save early and save often. Goes without saying, but just sayin’.

    6.  Keep your products in mind when you are choosing clips. Keep in mind that low resolution and high contrast clips will look much better than high resolution and low contrast clips on higher pixel pitch. Big looks with simple content.

    Whether you are planning on busking, pre-programming and operating live, or using time code, you should now be just about ready to load in.  What to expect on show site?

    … That is for another day.

    Planning, Panic, and Preparation

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    A Look Behind the Trade Show Curtain
    by Carmen Diaz, trade show coordinator for CHAUVET

    My little countdown clock tells me it’s less than 25 days till show site. That means I’m getting down to the wire for shipping, rental and production. InfoComm, it’s big, it’s AV, and it’s breathing down my neck like Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire (which really isn’t too bad of a prospect… rawr).

    Let’s take stock of what we’ve done so far… We have two 53-foot semis hauling 300+ fixtures 2,518 miles to the Las Vegas Convention Center. We’ve placed our orders for 400 AMPS of three-phase electrical power, carpet, a monster distro, labor, fabric, and lights. I’ve got over 200 emails regarding this tradeshow alone, and this is just one of three shows I’m working on currently.

    It’s a lot of work and meticulous attention to detail to make a trade show worth the substantial investment an 800-square-foot booth entails. I’ve got a three-inch binder filled with schematics, order confirmations, maps, and more check lists than I can shake a stick at. Even as I write this blog post, I keep thinking of more small tasks I still need to do, like get candy for the booth, and silverware for lunches, and a million other “unexpected” problems you have to prepare for “just in case.”

    But through all of this planning, panic, and preparation there is the satisfaction of a finished product and a beautiful booth to “oooh” and “awe”. There’s this unbelievable sense of accomplishment that you get when the build is complete and the show opens. Lights are blaring, music playing softly in the background, sales people chattering as the first of the attendees streams into the hall. I try to take a moment to look around in the first few hours, as the traffic ramps up and the exhibitors really start crowding around your booth, to enjoy everyone’s hard work paying off… and maybe even get a tasty beverage as my reward.

    Here is a look at last year’s booth for you to “oooh” and “awe” at (although this year’s will blow it out of the water!):

    CHAUVET booth at InfoComm 2011 just before the door opens.

    Zen and the Art of Entertainment Lighting, Part 3

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    Mike Graham looking pensive in front of MVP modular video panels.

    Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional 

    I can remember sitting in the audience during a show on one of the ships, I was auditing.  There was a banjo player on stage and he was working on creating a mood. He was trying to create the image of sitting on his grandfather’s front porch in the evening learning how to play the banjo.  All of a sudden, every single moving light in the rig started doing ballyhoo. In Technicolor.  It looked like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. The mental image, destroyed for the audience and the banjo player was about as mad as a banjo player can get. The point is that in a situation like this, on can accomplish more with less. More often than not, this applies.

    In the above case, I have to think that the programmer simply lost their mind for a minute. Clearly, they were not thinking about the talent onstage. Or how to serve the show best. In a stage show, such as a rock concert, or even on a cruise ship, you have a ton of lights in the rig because you have to be able to create tons of different looks.

    A rock show is completely different from the straight play I wrote about before. One of the great things about moving lights is that you can position them wherever you want with the roll of a wheel, a slide of a fader, or a stroke of a key. The basic principles of front, side, top, down, and back lighting still apply. However, now it is ok to add in a little flavor—BUT ONLY WHEN NECESSARY. For a great lesson in this, I highly recommend checking out the U2 concert video for Rattle and Hum. Largely shot in black and white, you can clearly see how certain songs call for strong beams of light to position down onto each member of the band at certain times. The end result is absolutely stunning.  Some of my favorite looks are just simple shafts of light coming from asymmetrical positions. I really like to have odd angles coming in from at least two positions. If you have good spot light operators, it is even better!

    Moving lights can also lend themselves to becoming an evil temptation. Yep, they move, change color at the blink of an eye, and you can even drop in a gobo. For some programmers, this is like putting a Twinkie in front of the sound guy. Just because a light has a particular function, it does not mean you have to use it every cue. Once I discovered the move-in-black function on the Wholehog II, it was like someone gave me the key to life. I learned how to use moving lights as a conventional light (conventional lights are lights that don’t move, have one color in them, and are focused to a specified location). Now, I could make these big “statement” looks like I saw in all of these concerts I had seen before. I was also able to effectively use the tools at hand and create a Zen-like state in my shows.  It gave me the subtle lighting show that I wanted to have without having distractions. I found that I was much more at peace with the whole process once I figured out that you don’t have to overdo it.

    Another important part in the Zen of programming is that you, as a programmer and designer, must be in a place in your mind where you are at peace. You must be clear of mind so that you can make good choices. In order to be clear of mind, you must know what you are programming and for what type of show. Know your act and know your audience. If you are doing a Rush show, go big with big beam looks and excitement. If you are doing something that calls for an intimate design, then that is what you should do…create a mood. Becoming part of the environment is critical to this. (I am not saying to become the lights, but hey, who am I to argue if you do?) The goal should be to feel at ease with your lights. If you watch a true master of design and programming at work, it looks easy. A true Zen master will be so in-tune with what is going on around them that they are completely aware of their surroundings. For me, if I am able to, I will video tape a rehearsal and work from it. This gives me the ability to design and program without the act there if I have to. This way, I don’t have the pressure of having to rush to get my looks down. I also try to be alone. Too often, people who are “just trying to help” will really ruin your Zen thing. Turn off the cell phone, put on your headphones and get into your zone.

    Keep in mind as you go, “Does this look natural?”  How does the color reflect the mood of the subject? Is the lighting conveying this mood? Should this be a sharp beam effect or diffused? Does this call for a gobo breakup? Do I need a strobe light hit here? Every lighting change must be motivated. I can remember hearing over and over in acting class, “What is your motivation?”  Well, what is it?  Is there a change in the action that calls for you to write a cue? Did your principal actor just cross from stage right to stage left? Did your band just change tempo? Was there a murder on stage? If the answer is yes, then write a cue. If there is no change in action on stage, then there is no need. I’m sorry, but “Because it’s in the script” typically is not good enough and may need to be challenged. So challenge it. Wisely.

    Now go forth, young Grasshopper, there is nothing more to teach today.

    Read Zen and the Art of Entertainment Lighting, Part 2
    Read Zen and the Art of Entertainment Lighting, Part 1

    Tech Talk: Video in the World of Lighting – Part 1

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    Mike Graham looking pensive in front of MVP panels.

    Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional

    Now, more than ever, having elements of video in staging is really popular. If you look at successful shows like Roger Waters’ The Wall, U2’s 360 Tour, any of the WWE shows and television shows like The Voice, American Idol, or The X Factor, you can clearly see that video elements are here to stay. Follow these guidelines to gain a better understanding on why and how you should use video elements in your show:

    1. Build according to a scale and end result. While having video onstage is really cool, one of the tricks is to know how to use it, not overwhelming your design. Keeping an eye on the scale of your design is critical. It is really easy to let video products dominate your stage, and the key here is to know what your desired end result is. You can still use 100 MVP panels from CHAUVET Professional, but making them blend in and become part of the show can be challenging. Since video wall deign is also part of the scenic design, it is important to work closely with the scenic designer and/or the client to see what their intents are. Sometimes, they might have an idea that is not going to fly and it will be your job as the expert to steer them in the right direction. An example of this would be a client wanting to do high-resolution graphics on a lower resolution screen. It is your job to make the client understand that in order to make the video wall look like a high-resolution painting of New York City in “Death of a Salesman,” then using the MVP 37.5 may not be the answer and they will need to switch up to the MVP 18 or MVP 12. On the other hand, if you are looking to show lower resolution graphics such as monochromatic shapes, water effects, line art, or flame, then the MVP 37.5 is ideal.

    2. Incorporating video walls in your show. It is very important to know how to rig the walls into the show. Are you going to fly them, or do they need to hook into a floor support system? Perhaps, you want to bolt them directly to a wall, which is very easy with the MVP system; but you have to think of this in advance, not on the job site. If you are going to fly the panels, the easiest way to make sure that you can get your panels lined up with no off-center gaps is to hang a pipe below the truss before you hang it, or just use batten pipe in the first place. Trying to hang panels directly onto truss is a serious pain in the tail because every place you want to put a clamp, there is a truss support in your way. This is especially true when you are trying to hang a wider wall. The wider you go, the more likely you are to hit a support. For using a free-standing ground support, we suggest sections of support every four feet and mounting your clamps directly to the back of the panels. Make sure that you have enough counter balance on the floor stand. I strongly suggest using truss base plates for this method of hanging. For bolting to the wall, making connections can be tricky. You should keep a few inches of offset between the wall and the panel, which will allow you to easily make connections between panels for both control and interlocking. This will also make panel maintenance possible.

    3. Addressing and controlling video panels. Now that you have decided how many panels you are going to need and how you are going to install them, it is important to think about how you are going to control them. The simple fact is that the video wall is not completely unlike any other lighting element. It needs to know where it is and what it is supposed to do. With the MVP system, we use the LED Studio software to tell the walls where they are and what they are doing. We can create multiple walls (called screens in the software) and make them in any shape that we want them to be in. Essentially, it’s like pre-visualization in lighting. We can build up the entire system before we even get to the job. In this software, we choose how many panels are in a particular screen, then we tell each panel what number it is, how many pixels it has, and how it is connected to the panels next to it. If we are doing this before the show, make sure that when you get to the show, you plug the panels in exactly how you laid them out in the software, or you are going to have a messed up looking wall. If you are doing this onsite, typically you build the show file after you set up the wall. The key here is to be consistent to how you are cabling the signal to the panels. Don’t choose to snake left to right on one set and zig-zag up and down on another. While it is not impossible to configure the software this way, it does make it much more time consuming than it needs to be, much in the way that not grouping your lights properly only leads to a long night of programming. After you have your addressing done, it’s time to make sure that your screens are all in the right place on your monitor. (I’m not going to go into screen positioning here, for that, we have manuals online and also offer training at our office if you purchase a system.)

    4. Display content on your video walls. So, the panels are up, configured and positioned. Now what? A good idea is to throw some content out to the screens, right? There are several ways to get content out to the screens. You can use LED Studio to put up video from any number of file extensions. It will play back anything from a .wmv file to an .avi format. This is ok if you don’t need any other control except to play a video loop over and over again. This is also fine if you are using a video processor to bring in content from a DVD, live camera, USB, or just about any other source of video you can think of. Like the man said, “If your computer monitor supports a video source, so does the video wall.” But let’s say that you need to have a lot more control over what is happening on stage. Is it possible to choose video clips as easily as rotating a prism in a moving light? Absolutely! If you are using s software package like ArKaos MediaMaster Express, it is fairly easy to control your content output right from the controller. The great thing here is that you can use anything from a super high end lighting controller like an Avolites desk or grandMA, to the most basic of fader controllers like an Obey 10. With the higher end desk, you can run Art-Net from the controller to the MVP Media Server with ArKaos MediaMaster Express installed and then treat it like any other fixture. For something simple, you can use an open source DMX to Art-Net converter and use the Obey, or just use Midi control. Assign a DMX address (or midi note) to each video clip fader and now it acts like any other fader on a lighting control desk. You can fade it in, snap it on with a bump button, program it in as part of the show, or anything else you would like to do with it. With the vast amount of parameters that are editable for each clip of content on each individual fader, you have more control over your creativity than you ever thought possible. Furthermore you can still input a camera feed from your signal processor (or any other video source) over ArKaos MediaMaster Express and again treat it like any other clip on a fader. You can still add all of the effects and positioning that you could on any other fader. As a shameless plug, I would highly recommend checking out ArKaos’ YouTube channel and see a lot more about how cool and incredibly easy to use their software is.

    So now you are sitting at the front of the theatre with this video system staring back at you. Intermingled between all of those panels are Legend 412 moving head lights, COLORDash Batten TRI linear fixtures, PiXPar 24 pix battens, and COLORado Batten 144 Tour lights. Now you wonder: do I want to integrate all of this under one large pixel map and run my content over the entire set, or do I want straight DMX control and program each pixel? Or, perhaps I want both?
    … See you next month