Happy Monday morning, world of lighting!
Is there a purchase of an LED video wall up and coming in your church’s future lighting inventory? CHAUVET Professional’s Video Product Manager Anthony Chiappone talks about what to look for when buying LED video wall products, and what to avoid like the plague!
Check it out at Church Production Magazine:
This video came across our desks here just a few minutes ago, and it is too beautiful not to share – it will absolutely change your mood.
From director Nobuyuki Hanabusa, animator Seiya Ishii (with Nobuyuki Hanabusa), and performers/choreographers Saya Watatani and Maki Yokoyama comes quite a beautiful work of body motion, video, animated graphics, and art. You have to see this – the group is Enra, from Japan:
Happy Wednesday, everyone!
Did you see the video that 4Wall Entertainment posted with the Nexus 4×4? It was purely awesome. Check it out below!
Have you spec’ed Nexus 4×4 on your show yet?
Happy Monday, everyone! We here at CHAUVET Professional hope that you had an excellent weekend, and that you’re having an excellent Monday morning!
It’s our pleasure to report on the top ten posts of 2013 on the CHAUVET Professional Blog — we love seeing what you love to read, and we love to write for you!
Counting down from post #10 of 2013…
Post #10 of 2013:
TECH TALK, Special LDI 2013 Edition — NEW TOYS!
Post #9 of 2013:
CHAUVET Professional Lights Edinburgh Airport Tower
Post #8 of 2013:
Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders and CHAUVET Professional!
Post #7 of 2013:
A LEGO CONCERT KIT?! Yes PLEASE!
Post #6 of 2013:
KLF (Uh Huh Uh, Uh Huh Uh Huh) – Hump Day Energy
Post #5 of 2013:
Got A Case of the Mondays? How About Some Awesome Grooves?
Post #4 of 2013:
CHAUVET Professional Lights Dance Festival
Post #3 of 2013:
Lighting Insights: CHAUVET Professional’s Industry Newsletter
Post #2 of 2013:
Be Careful of FALLING TRUSS!
…and the #1 post of 2013:
CAT WEST, Lighting Director for KASKADE, Rocking the Star Wars Dress!
Thanks for the excellent year, everyone! We promise to bring more blog reading in 2014, along with some contests, some SWAG giveaways, and more! Stay tuned!!
Wow! CHAUVET Professional’s LEGEND 230 SR Beam recently helped LD Mark Carver rock the largest faith-based gathering in the world – IMPACT NYE. What a compliment! Check out the article written at Live Design Online — great work!
From the article:
The Impact New Year’s Eve concert at Lipscomb University’s Allen Arena in Nashville featured some of the biggest names in Christian music. Broadcast online to churches and youth centers around the world, the five-hour celebration of music and entertainment also represented what many are calling the largest faith-based global gathering ever assembled in one evening.Such an event required a powerful lighting statement, which is precisely why LD Mark Carver of Mark Carver Designs in Nashville selected 28 Legend 230SR Beams from CHAUVET Professional for his Impact New Year’s Eve rig.
Sixty-six outdoor-rated COLORado 1-Tri IP fixtures lit boutiques and small stores set up in four plazas for the holidays, as part of the Christmas March of Orléans event. Nils Limoge with Stars Europe installed the lights in Place du Martroi, Place de la Loire, Place de la République and Place du Chatelet, which lit the areas for 35 days in a row from the end of November to the end of December. Here are some beautiful images:
Very cool! Check out a review of the COLORado 1 Tri-7 Tour from CHAUVET Professional, over at Church Production Magazine! This is a great LED wash fixture with a tight, powerful beam and RGB color mixing, awesome for truss toners or anything accenting a structure or group of people.
From the article:
Chauvet Professional’s COLORado 1 Tri-7 Tour fixture is yet another success in Chauvet’s line of professional-grade LED fixtures. When I first unboxed the unit, I was a little taken aback by how small it was compared to some of the other fixtures currently in our two lighting rigs. In both our fixed venue and our portable venue, we use primarily Elation LED pars—either the Arena Par or the DLED. It was difficult to get a basis for comparison given that these Chauvet and Elation fixtures are so inherently different. Nevertheless, the Tri-7 has a few features and capabilities that let it keep up with its larger competitors just fine.
Check it out!
Were you in Miami for the recent LIFE IN COLOR tour? It was a blast — of paint, light, and electronic music greatness!
The internationally acclaimed Life In Color tour is aptly named. Aside from featuring some of the biggest stars in dance music like Calvin Harris, R3hab and Steve Aoki, the multi-city EDM tour, which bills itself as “the world’s largest paint party,” is a freewheeling festival of sights and colors with lavish spray painting of audience members, zip lines, carnival rides, dancing robots and, of course, an intensely bright, colorful and unforgettable lightshow.
The MVP 18 LED video wall panel from CHAUVET Professional has been an “indispensable” part of this lightship throughout the Life In Color Rebirth Tour, according to designer Collyns Stenzel, who has been the Life in Color lighting director since 2010.
This impact of the MVP 18 panels was very much in evidence during the tour’s final 2013 stop at a jam-packed Sun Life Stadium in Miami at the end of December. A total of 189 MVP 18 panels captivated the crowd in Stenzel’s eye-popping “Rebirth” design, which also drew on two other CHAUVET Professional products: the COLORado Batten 144 Tour and the Legend Wash 1200E.
The inspiration for Stenzel’s design came from the name of the tour – Rebirth.
“I associated ‘rebirth’ with the Phoenix rising and created the stage lighting design around this image,” explained the LD. “In the middle area of the stage is a circle symbolizing the head of the Phoenix. The ‘body’ is the upstage wall; the wings emanate from there; and the talons are the DJ booth.”
Stenzel created this design on a 40′ x 40′ (12m x 12 m) SL320 mobile stage. He built a video wall mid-stage using 99 MVP 18 panels, and positioned 45 additional panels on each wing. Most of the panels were hung in vertical strips with the exception of the upstage wall.
For Stenzel, creating an elaborate video wall that covered all sections of his intricate and thematic stage design was essential to conveying his message and connecting to the audience. “Life in Color is really a multi-dimensional show,” he said. “It’s not just about the stars performing on stage, or the lights or any of the other visual elements; it’s about everything coming together to create a total experience. In this design, the video wall is essential to pulling all of these different elements together visually.”
Aside from their wide viewing angle and the color consistency afforded by their calibrated tri-colored SMD LEDs, the easy-rigging features of the MVP panels also made them ideal for Stenzel’s Life in Color design. “The rigging on the MVP panels is really easy to work with,” he said. “There are no extra parts needed to hang the wall, it’s all built in. I wouldn’t have chosen any other panel for that design. The angles that we needed to hang the video at are impossible to get unless there are rear threaded M10 holes on the wall to install a clamp and the panel is light enough to fit the design. I can tell you without reservation that the MVP panels were a ‘perfect fit’ for this design.”
Stenzel also praised the MVP panels for being “bright enough to keep up with” the output of other fixtures on stage, notably the COLORado Batten 144 Tour from CHAUVET Professional. “When you are up against the extremely bright COLORado Batten 144, you need a bright video panel,” he explained. “The MVP 18 is a very bright panel for its resolution. When switching back and forth from lighting to video, we needed the brightness to be somewhere in the same range to avoid too much eyestrain. The MVP 18 proved itself to be perfect for this job.”
On the Life in Color Rebirth stage, Stenzel used 46 COLORado Batten 144 Tour fixtures in Block 2 Mode. Every batten was hung vertically between the strips of video on the stage and on the wings. Stenzel also relied on four Legend Wash 1200E fixtures to add an extra dimension of wash colors to the stage and provide tight audience sweeps.
It was the COLORado Batten 144 Tour, though, that really made magic with the MVP 18 panels. A widely-used batten-style wash with 144 calibrated red, green, blue, white and amber LEDs, five dimming curves and dual 15° and 30° optics, the COLORado Batten 144 Tour produces a very broad, bright wash for covering stage applications like the Life in Color tour.
Stenzel drew masterfully on the COLORado Batten 144 Tour’s performance features in his Life in Color design. “I used them as a blinding overpowering effect for simple chases and a little bit of pixel mapping-like effects,” he said. “In Block 2 Mode I was able do some low res mapping effects that worked out really well.
“Overall the Batten 144 Tour commanded the stage with its brightness,” he continued, “but the MVP panels were bright enough in their own right to stand up to them and allow us to create a balanced, richly colored lightshow that played off perfectly against all the other exciting things happening on stage to create the great sensory experience – which is what Life in Color is all about.”
Gear list:
189 x MVP 18
46 x COLORado Batten 144 Tour
4 x Legend Wash 1200E
Our Nexus 4×4 enjoyed quite a “rookie year” in 2013, showcasing its vibrant colors and intense brightness at major events like The Voice, The American Country Awards, One Direction’s Central Park performance on Good Morning America and more. Along the way, our RGBW LED blinder/wash picked up a prestigious 2013 Parnelli Award for Indispensable Technology in the lighting category.
So what do we do for an encore? Simple, we’ve expanded our Nexus Series to offer you more ways to shine than ever with insanely bright light, rich saturated colors, warm whites and scalable pixel mapping.
Like the ground-breaking Nexus 4×4, all of our new Nexus products are controllable by Art-Net, Kling-Net or DMX protocol, making it easier for you build massive lighting arrays without worrying about addressing each fixture individually.
Our new Nexus products include the Nexus 4×1, a 4-cell linear panel and the Nexus 2×2, a smaller square shaped panel version of the original 4×4. The two newcomers are powered by 27-watt (2A) COB (Chip On Board) LEDs, just like the Nexus 4×4 — and like the original, both also feature an advanced Chauvet reflector design that takes brightness to new levels of intensity. Linked together with the 4×4, the two new Nexus products make it easier to create a wide array of geometric patterns to add extra dimensions to your lighting designs.
We’ve also introduced two Nexus Affinity products, the Nexus Aq 5×5 and Nexus Aw 7×7, penetratingly bright narrow beam panels that excel as blinders, but can also be used to display text and animated graphics. Our 5×5 is powered by 25 10-watt RGBW LEDS and features an 8° beam angle; while the 7×7 has 49 3-watt warm white LEDs and a 7° beam angle.
As is true of all Nexus products, the new Nexus Aq 5×5 and Nexus Aw 7×7 are controllable by Art-Net, Kling-Net and DMX protocols to give you greater flexibility in designing shows. Each Nexus product can be remotely accessed from any web server through its unique IP address. This allows you to do things like update software and calibrate colors remotely online.
The unique interlocking system on the Affinity products makes it easy to align them horizontally or vertically, which significantly reduces set-up time. Using an optional Affinity Rig Kit (sold separately), you can hang up to 16 fixtures together, making it easier to create bigger, bolder and brighter shows than ever – which when you get right down to it is what the Nexus Series is all about!
To learn more about the Nexus Series visit, CHAUVET Professional.
A premier American art fair, Art Basel drew a record 75,000 visitors to Miami Beach in December to view exhibits from over 250 leading galleries representing 30 countries around the globe. None of these exhibits shone brighter than the Alexander Mijares Gallery, which featured a massive 36-foot wide by 26-foot high surrealistic mural on its front wall, bathed in a stunning rainbow of colors by our COLORado 1-Quad IP wash lights. CHAUVET Professional fixtures were also in high profile inside the Mijares Gallery, where award-winning Ovation E-190WW LED ellipsoidals focused warm white light on the most important works of art in the 30-piece display, giving them weight and articulation.
According to lighting designer Ruben Laine of DMDS7UDIOS, the CHAUVET Professional products helped him meet the challenges of illuminating the outdoor mural and indoor space at Mijares, which, like many Art Basel exhibitors, was a “pop-up” gallery located in a leased venue. The huge front mural, painted by Alexander Mijares in 12 hours over two days, was built around the theme “Make Art, Not War” and featured many of the artist’s recurring themes such as angels, women and flower petals along with a decorated M16 machine gun. “As far as non-architectural large canvases go, it was by far my biggest subject,” said Laine.
The hardest part of illuminating the mural, according to the designer, was rigging the lighting fixtures in place without being able to make a permanent installation, however the easily linkable, outdoor-IP66-rated COLORado 1-Quad IP LED fixtures proved more than up to the task. “Once hung, the COLORado’s shone by their own merit and made the job as easy as daisy-chaining weather-proof connectors, addressing the fixtures and pressing ‘Play,’” said Laine.
Powered by seven 70-watt quad-color RGBW LEDs, the COLORado 1-Quad IP provides extremely smooth color mixing and brightness, featuring an 11.5° beam angle and 25° field angle. Laine mounted a total of 10 COLORado 1-Quad IP units on the top of the wall, spacing the center 8 units evenly at 36 inches and extending the peripheral units 44 inches out.
“The beautiful beam spread of the COLORado 1-Quad IP units did all the work,” said Laine, “shining evenly from the top of the wall all the way down to the sidewalk. The units’ four-color LEDs provided the perfect application for the job, allowing us to wash the piece with a nice, even white light for showcasing the art, while at night it gave us a chance to play with the art’s high contrast and super-saturated colors. By applying a nice crawling rainbow wave, we offset the visual white balance of the entire space and … transformed (the mural) into a living, breathing, very organic monster surrounded by otherwise white and neutral galleries.
Further praising the COLORado 1-Quad IPs, Laine commented, “They are a perfect example of the evolutionary process of the CHAUVET brand. I love the quad lens, its wider beam spread, great color mixing, amazing punch, soft pastel and bright whites, oh and they hung on a rooftop for a week resisting the elements.”
Inside the Mijares Gallery, our Ovation E-190WWs made an equally distinguishing mark. The 2,960K warm white LED ellipsoidal, which recently captured the prestigious WFX 2013 New Technology Award, features a flat, even field of light and 16-bit dimming resolution for extremely smooth fades. “I can totally see this fixture becoming a go-to product at art shows,” said Laine, “where priceless art pieces need a controlled environment that goes well beyond light output to include other important elements such as room temperature. With the Mijares Gallery being a pop-up type venue, we couldn’t risk running a truckload of lights without knowing if there was proper ventilation and air conditioning. The E-190WWS helped us in every aspect imaginable for this event.”
With a limited supply of Ovation E-190WWs at his disposal, Laine re-focused the units on different pieces of art each night of the show. One of the pieces eternally lit was a painting of an angel. “The tungsten-like hue of the Ovation E-190WWs provided the perfect glow it needed. On the main event night, we focused two E-190WWs opposite each other on a sculpture made of sheet metal treated with heat and patinas, and created an intensity wave going back and forth. As the light shined through the cutouts and edges of the piece, the angel almost came to life; also, the lucky photo-bombers standing nearby got gobo-like shadows of the piece on them, thanks to the Ovations’ nice, even field of light.”
But perhaps the strongest tribute to the Ovation E-190WW at Art Basel came in the form of its prodigious salesmanship during the five-day fair. “Every piece we lit with the Ovations sold within 48 hours,” reported Laine. “It was a testament to the fact that proper lighting is key.”