Comment

Comment by Gerard Bourcier on November 5, 2011 at 2:31pm

Just to add a point to David McCall's all LED, all the time comment: yes it seems that LEDs will be slowly but surely become the new light of choice, subject to budget limits. But as we use more and more LED fixtures, that will influence our need for new consoles, capable of handling the additional addresses and colors. With the fixtures using from 3 to 12 or more DMX addresses, a moderate size show could start to max out a universe of DMX. So another factor in the budget should or could be the additional cost of a new console, another $10,000 to $50,000 nut. Change is good, but it can be painful at times.

Comment by David McCall on November 5, 2011 at 12:40pm

I just got back from LDI (theatrical lighting convention) and it was almost all LEDs this year. Everybody has LED based profile spots now and they are bright enough to be useful even in at 20' or so. Most come up a little shy when compared to a Source 4 at full with no gel, but how often do we actually use our lights at full with no gel? The selling points for replacing conventional fixtures are; less heat, long lamp life, no gels (although some units only put out white light), and less energy used. The prices range from as low as $800 for a 3rd party lamp house that fits on your old Source 4 up 2 $2500 for a real Source 4 with an LED lamp. The ETC lights were especially nice due to the extra colors. If you have ever used an Red Green Blue cyc, you know that yellows deep blues and nice pastels are pretty hard to achieve. The extra colors help a great deal. At these prices it is still pretty hard to justify replacing your existing $300 profile spots with $2500 LED units because the pay back probably won't occur in our lifetime. If you are doing a new building or a full retrofit of a really old venue, then they really start to make sense. You don't need to buy racks of dimmers and run individual lines out to each light. An ordinary 20 amp outlet will power several lights just fine so your need for a huge amount of power is greatly diminished. You reduce the number of lights required because you can achieve nice color effects with a very basic arrangement of acting areas without having to tie up a lot of lights just to do color washes. Of course you can still do better lighting with a lot of lights if you can afford them. By the way we have to use the term profile now instead of ellipsoidals because there usually isn't an ellipsoidal reflector involved in the new lights. There were also a lot of wash lights that can be used like PARs with the same features as the profiles. These have been around for a while, but they are finally getting to be useful for us theatre folks. The ETC lights come in many flavors depending on how you are going to use them. Some concentrate on vivid colors to the point of having fixtures that concentrate on reds and ambers, while another version is mostly about blues. They have red-blue-green-amber + to do full color and red-blue-green-white + to give you great pastels. They even have dimming curves available to simulate the red shift that is present in conventional tungsten lighting. Many firms were showing huge modular LED based "screens" of any size you want. I want something like 48' x 20' and that works out to somewhere around $1,000,000 +/-. Sadly that isn't going to happen in my venue. We are doing Aladdin this Fall and I need to make a Genie appear. Flutter Fetti was showing off their line of confetti cannons and making quite a mess (in a good way). They have a small cannon that goes about 8' high with mirrored mylar bits. I think it will be about perfect for that effect. I just couldn't figure out how to fit him in a lamp :-)

David M

Comment by Jon Taylor on September 10, 2011 at 12:47am

Just to add onto Patrick Reading's comments below. I have several 16.4.2 and access to a pair of 24.4.2 and am also one of the early adopters of the new 16.0.2.

To clarify, you can chain up to four of the 16.4.2 together while not connected to a computer for 64 channels. Two 16.4.2 can be connected and firewired to a computer for 32 channels and full computer capabilities. Two SL 24.4.2 can be connected for 48 channels but cannot be connected to a computer because the I/O exceeds the capability of firewire. An SL 16.4.2 and a 24.4.2 cannot be connected together because of their internal architecture. All this adds a wonderful degree of flexibilty to a really great sounding and intuitive piece of equipment. I love my StudioLives.

Comment by Patrick Reading on August 22, 2011 at 6:22am

I am the proud owner of a Presonus 16.4.2 and love it. It is an amazing console and if Jacob didn't mention above, you can daisy-chain like consoles together with a firewire cable (provided) to double your channels. You get your money's worth!

Comment by Erich Friend on June 22, 2011 at 7:13pm

Here's a good shoot-out for someone to do if they can get their hands on all three devices:
* Wybron Cygnus Incite 375W Profile (http://www.wybron.com/products/fixtures/cygnus/incite/index.html)
* Coemar LEDko Full Spectrum (http://www.ledsource.com/products/entertainment/fixtures/ledko-full...)
*ETC Source4 with similar lensing.

How do these look and perform side-by-side?

Comment by Steve Shelley on March 4, 2010 at 5:16am

hey jacob; can you post some pix of the unit casting a beam in a dark room, say, about 20 feet onto a white surface? and have a comparable coventional unit's beam next to it? i have seen the unit, but only on the show floor. very difficult to gauge a comparison. whoops; must run to show floor here at SETC. later, s