In the current difficult situation the entertainment industry finds itself in, cost savings have never been so important to venues and production companies.  Even before Covid-19 effectively shut down most of the business, I’ve noticed a renewed interest in the repair of stage lighting equipment through training enquiries.  This has ranged from questions about training in maintenance and servicing of moving lights, to helping a number of people diagnose and verify specific faults with individual components on a particular faulty PCB.  

But before we start looking for that one tiny rogue component, what other options are there when you have a fully piece of lighting kit such as a moving light or control console and you are tasked with getting it working again?  You’ve moved beyond checking the lamp, fuse, the cable, and the mains supply.

Let’s look at some bigger picture considerations.

Physically broken stuff

It could be a cracked casing, sheared fixing, or just a missing handle, but there are plenty of things that can be repaired at the simplest level like this – if you can get replacement parts. This kind of repair is outside of routine maintenance tasks such as replacing a lamp or an air filter, but often doesn’t require an in-depth knowledge of electronics or even fault diagnosis. It’s broken, it’s obvious and you just need a fit a new part. If the piece of equipment is out of production and parts are not available or expensive, then consider using parts taken from a donor.

 
The key skills needed here are to be able to identify a busted thing, and fit a not-busted one.
There is also a practice related to this, which is to make a working item from several broken ones. One example from not that long ago: I worked a group of twelve unusable CM Lodestar 1T motors into eleven working motors that were then certified by a 3rd party LOLER testing house and put back into hire stock.  Some people like to have a go at this by buying job lots of older broken fixtures and parts from a hire company with a view to getting themselves some moving lights on the cheap.

 A word of warning:  Hire companies are not in the habit of selling off something that is still viable to them.  This means that there is a lot of risk in buying job jots and hoping for the best.

Board or assembly swaps and similar fixes.

This type of repair is very common for in-house technicians in a venue or hire company.  The problem might be a faulty sensor, a ballast, a power supply, or a specific ‘board’ that fulfils a particular function.  The method of diagnosis is usually to identify the fault based on symptoms and narrow it down to a sub-part of the equipment.  This is often then verified to be the problem by way of substitution (e.g swapping in a working part) and the repair made good by replacing the faulty assembly or PCB in its entirety.  This working part can either be sourced new from the manufacturer or from a donor.  One handy tool to have up your sleeve in this case is a known-good working part, for example a sensor or PCB taken from another fixture.  However, be careful not to mis-diagnose the source of the problem and unwittingly blow through a load of working parts by fitting them to a faulty piece of kit.

Key skills required are to understand roughly how the equipment functions, design and carry out a suitable test and verification to identify the faulty part, and fit a replacement.  This is a common level for technicians that I work with and teach, particularly if they have some good overall technical understanding but perhaps are not yet confident in tackling specific pieces of equipment.  This is often the case for moving lights and other complex kit.

Component level repair

This is a much less common skill, confined to a smaller number of specialists. There are reasons for this. Firstly, the repair may end up being as simple as replacing a faulty component but identifying that component takes a high skill level and, more importantly, time.  Time multiplied by a high skill level usually equals a high cost.  This is why board or assembly swaps are the norm in the stage lighting business, similar to practices in the world of modern auto-repair. Secondly, compared to this potential cost of labour and those that come with the loss of utility, assemblies and PCBs are actually relatively cheap. Not taking the time to pin down an individual component but instead ripping out a whole PCB and swapping it for a working one is fast and gets the kit back up and running.  Time spent waiting for parts deliveries is roughly the same but the diagnosis and fitting time is commonly much decreased.

So, why would you even try to repair at component and PCB level?

If you have time, but limited cash, then a ‘cheap’ repair might be attractive.  The idea that that a moving light that cost many thousands when new might be revived by a part that costs a few pence seems like a great deal.  And it is.  When that happens. If the replacement assembly is very costly or not available at all, this also makes component level repair attractive.  There are certain parts that manufacturers sell as a complete unit, making each one quite expensive, when the problem you need to solve is limited to a small part of that assembly.

Get help fixing up your kit.

On Stage Lighting provides specialist repair training, both physical and digital. This can be a day workshop at your venue where we collaborate with you in tackling your maintenance and repair needs but with the focus on learning the techniques for yourself. At the other end of the spectrum, I run 1-1 digital tutoring sessions helping people with a wide range of individual learning needs including fault diagnosis right down to component level. Have a look at the different kinds of learning options we offer.

The post How easy is it to fix broken lighting equipment? first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

During the current situation with many countries in some form of lockdown, theatre makers and other performers are finding new ways to distribute their work. One method has popped up that uses video meeting software to put together either live performances or recorded media works. Without getting into a discussion about ‘what is theatre’, let’s just get down to business regarding this and look at some common practices in trying to create lighting for Zoom theatre. This is gonna be aimed at performers and directors with limited experience of lighting design for stage or screen and keeps things simple for the DIY’er working from home.

As a professional Lighting Designer turned educator, I have also spent the last 10 years or so teaching using the internet and this includes using platforms such as Zoom for live teaching. A lot of my work is not here on the main On Stage Lighting pages but behind the scenes at Learn@OnStageLighting running stage lighting courses online.  This includes teaching and mentoring other teachers around the world who seek to increase their competence in digital delivery of their specialist subjects of production for performance.

All this has give me plenty of experience using video conferencing platforms for communication to go along with my time lighting performances. I’m also working with a number of projects right now that fit into the Zoom theatre genre’.

The examples were created using no special equipment and try to represent the simplest concepts in lighting for Zoom. You can make things as complex as you like!

*Note: The images below are created using a plain grey background image using the Zoom background function. It’s not a perfect tool, but for the purposes of the demo here I prefer the pixel-ly cutout matte look to the visual distraction of real backgrounds.

Camera Angle

Although not strictly lighting, it’s worth mentioning at the start: A laptop with a fixed webcam, used in its natural position on a desk, does not usually create a great camera shot unless your Zoom theatre piece is specifically about webcamming or strange misshapen giant characters looming over the viewer.

Any seasoned Zoomer knows that you need to elevate your laptop (and therefore, camera) to at least eye level and sometimes even higher. It’s common practice to put the computer on a box or something that achieves this.

Regarding lighting, the first image above is lit by directly facing a window, the second using a window further to the side plus a reflection. But we’ll get to that.

Consistent Lighting

One thing we should consider is consistency of lighting. This is particularly so if using Zoom to capture recordings that are to be cut together as part of a bigger piece. In this case, it is going to be very distracting for the final piece if the lighting continuity is very different between lines. It may also be appropriate to consider lighting consistency between performers but this is harder to achieve. The main ways to get consistent lighting are:

Same time, same place every day (for recorded work)
Using tightly controlled artificial lighting and blocking out all natural light.
Considering the weather when choosing a lighting solution.

Hard or Soft Light

When talking of ‘hard’ light, we are usually referring to a light that has a small point source of light. This could be a clear glass lamp or direct sunlight on a clear day. Hard light sources create strong and hard-edged shadows and can be quite dramatic. Soft light such as light bounced from a white wall or daylight on a cloudy day generally has a more even and less angular look. You can’t easily make a soft light source harder but there are things you can do to soften a hard light on your Zoom calls, including:

Draping a thin white bed sheet over the window if the sunlight is very direct.
Bounce your light source off a wall or other matt white object.
Don’t sit in direct hard light but use another part of the room.

Natural Light

Natural light such as the sun or sky has the benefit of being a relatively bright light source in the day time. This can provide lots of good light for your Zoom performance and is often already soft/diffuse enough to provide good lighting. The biggest headache I usually have running webinars and Zoom calls is doing them after sunset and natural light is always my preferred option. Daylight has a slightly blue-ish colour to it that we are used to seeing in life and the webcam can cope with quite well. The downside to natural light is that it can be quite changeable in colour and direction – imagine an orange low setting sun on a cloudless day compared to a grey, overcast sky on a rainy day. This means having to adapt to the lighting conditions each day while being aware of the consistency and continuity mentioned above.

A simple test is to try facing a window for your Zoom performance so that the light comes at you from just over or to one side of your laptop.

Artificial Light

If you are doing Zoom theatre then chances are you are already used to doing live indoor theatre. The most common lighting situation in modern indoor theatre is the use of artificial light that is controllable. This usually means taking away anything that isn’t controllable which is why theatres generally have no windows. The benefits of this light is that you have complete control over it day after day. The downside is that you need a lot of it to get to the same relative brightness that the sun and sky give out for free. In a normal theatre, the lighting system is positioned to give us exactly the light we want.

Running Zoom at home not only do we not have much in the way of brightness or positional control, but the lights you have are not all that bright nor as flexible regarding where you put them. In fact, the most common lighting in the home such as a central hanging light in the middle of the room or wall lights all around the edges are pretty much the least desirable setup for a Zoom performance.

Try setting your artificial light somewhere in front of you at eye level or above but not too high. A ceiling light is unlikely to be helpful, you would be better off sitting in front of an open fridge. But that has it’s problems, you are probably gonna need a desk lamp. Try bouncing it off the wall instead of shining it directly at you. It won’t be as bright but might be more pleasant for you and on your camera.

Artificial light is more likely to have a warmer, more orange colour to it.

Mixing Light Sources

This can work but in Zoom meetings and performances alike, the mixing of artificial and daylight sources can be troublesome without some additional work and things you are unlikely to have at home. In the above images, the two light sources are opposed at either side of the subject to really demonstrate the difference. If you look closely you’ll see that the left side is warm orange light and the right side has a colder hue.

This could be a creative choice but on a lot of Zoom calls, along with poor angle choices, mixing daylight and artificial light doesn’t look great. The solution is often either to use reflection to create more natural light sources OR to shut out natural light and use only artificial lighting.

Harsh Angles

On the subject of angles, we can also be creative with how to light the subject but it should be a creative choice as part of the Zoom performance, characterisation or scenographic. The images above show a single light source to the extreme side and another directly overhead. Where the light is can be deciphered by the highlights and the shadows.

For more general Zoom lighting, we probably want to avoid such harsh angles to allow the facial performance to come off the screen. This means using angles that are in the more natural field of vision of the subject e.g light from around the camera. If you want to test a lighting setup before even looking at your screen, you could just take up your performance position and see how hard it is to look directly at the light source. If you need to move your head or eyes a lot, then chances are this light source is providing a harsh angle look.

Wearing Glasses

As a glasses wearer of fairly long standing, these reflecting safety goggles are the cursed tattle-tale that we are checking Facebook during the team meeting. Glasses reflect two things really well: the light source in front of you and the screen. This is not only distracting for the viewer but also hides important eye stuff as part of a Zoom performance.

The solution to glasses reflection is to offset the glass in relation to what it is reflecting. In the first image, the main light source is a window directly in front which results in the whole window being reflected back. In the image without reflection, the light source has been moved slightly to one side. Obviously, the window fixed and what had to move was the subject and the laptop.

Eye Light

When it comes to reflecting things, glasses may be an annoyance but for those without glasses the reflection can give some additional light to the eyes. This ‘eye light’ can add depth and can be the main light source in front of you or your screen. In these images, the main light sources are off to the side to show the effect and you can see an eye reflection in the first picture. This could be the main light source but in this shot it is actually the laptop screen and is easily achieved by turning the brightness on the laptop right up and filling the screen with a white background by opening the Google homepage. If using this technique, it means making your Zoom screen a much smaller part of the screen to allow the brightest reflection.

The opposite is true when wearing glasses. We don’t want a bright screen reflecting in the glass. In this case, the Incognito mode in Chrome was used to darken the screen but any dark background image will do.

Speaking into light

So far we’ve looked at a lot of camera shots that were in the standard Zoom meeting configuration, first person style. It may be that your Zoom theatre performance is designed to have performers not looking directly into the camera but some other arrangement and this may guide your choice of lighting angle. This is likely to be a case of a choice of positioning for your Zoom call as a lot of the control we have over natural light situations actually comes from moving ourselves rather than the light source. One key part of a lighting designer’s toolkit, even in live performance, is the difference between a performance speaking into an oncoming light source vs. looking away from it. In the image above, the key light (the brightest source) is either lighting the face or not with the former being the most effective for clarity of performance.

Reflecting light at home

There are a few ways to get additional light and lighting angles at home, including using white walls, light colour pillows etc. One of the most effective that I’ve found, particularly with a soft daylight window source, is to use a mirror. You can prop up a mirror securely on the opposite side to the key light and adjust the angle while looking at the Zoom screen. For a rough guide, just look into the mirror from your performance position and if you can see the light source in it then you are in the right ballpark. If you can’t see the source directly, move it and adjust the angle until you can.

The image below shows the use of a mirror in an artificial light setup with a single home lamp, mirror and one with an added overhead domestic light.

Using a kicker

Now we are getting into the realm of slighting more esoteric lighting for Zoom and in this case, the lighting for screen practice of a kicker. This is a light that is positioned behind and often to the side of the performer to create a rim of light along the edge of their body or hair. Its purpose is said to ‘kick’ the subject off the background and is particularly on screen to develop a more 3-dimensional quality to the imagery. It also works quite well with Zoom digital backgrounds although the matting in Zoom does tend to put a small rim of background pixels around the subject anyway. In cases of either a real or a digital background, a kicker can really add something if you can find a way to create it. In general, the kicker needs to be quite a bright source compared to other elements in the shot which can be difficult to achieve if you have used all your brightest sources up for general lighting.

In the image above, the first picture shows a bright artificial kicker from a low side angle set behind the subject to create the rim. The main shot is lit using daylight which does rather give us a mixed source problem. The second kicker is created using colour correction on that artificial source which is basically a very light blue colour filter. Most people won’t have lying around but it is included here to show the difference, and also the effect on kicker brightness.

It would be hard to create a kicker with sufficient brightness using a mirror but by all means have a go.

Try It Yourself

We’ve looked through a load of different considerations for creating lighting for your Zoom performance at home, from simple things like getting enough light on the face to more complex reflections and kickers. Hopefully, that will give you some pointers to get you going.  You can let me know your results and get in touch by emailing learn at onstagelighting dot co dot uk.

The post Zoom Theatre – Do It Yourself Video Performance Lighting first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

In previous articles in this series, we looked at some common themes when it comes to keeping LED stage lighting gear on the road, and at some specifics of a particular fixture model, the R2 LED Moving Wash light. We briefly considered the common practice of replacing whole component assemblies, such as PCBs or power supply boards. But what about component level repair? And what about LED replacement in particular?

When is component level repair feasible?

There are number of considerations to take into account when it comes to deciding if component level repair of your fixtures is viable. To start with, this is often down to the time required to find and verify a faulty component rather than a whole assembly. Dealing with such a level of detail is always gonna take time, not to mention expertise and equipment. For many users, identifying that you need a new screen PCB and fitting one is much more easily achieved than hunting down a particular issue on that PCB – and even if you find the issue, can you even get and fit the part you need?

A lot of the time, with a stage lighting inventory that contains many modern fixtures including LED based light sources, component level diagnosis and repair needs the luxury of time that may be in short supply. One common approach is to initially replace a whole assembly and place the faulty one on a ‘donor or fix’ pile, ready to be tackled during the last half hour of the working day. If it the board gets fixed, great we have a spare for next time, if not then at least nobody is waiting on a dead fixture to come back into use.

The main situation where component level repair of a complex assembly is attractive is when the cost of the whole assembly is high and easily offsets the time required and the opportunity cost of a fixture that is AWOL.

I’m going to describe such a situation today.

Replacing an LED chip in the R2 Wash

In our example case today, one of our R2 Wash fixtures featured in the previous article has a dead LED chip. Just one, of nineteen. In fact, the chip is actually not completely dead but one of the four Red, Green, Blue and White (RGBW) LEDs in the chip doesn’t work. We have already verified that it’s not the driver circuit, the loom or anything else – it’s the LED and that’s that. At this point we may have even got to verifying the chip itself which on the R2, like many other LED based stage lighting fixtures, involves stripping the unit right down to the middle of the fixture to actually get at the LEDs themselves.

Is this a reasonable case for component level repair? Yes, because the only other option (and the one usually suggested by Chauvet) is to replace the LED PCB. Replace the whole board, nineteen LEDs and associated circuitry. Just like when you take your car to your mechanic these days, the standard practice is to replace a whole assembly – not just a part of it. There are good reasons for this practice and don’t let me encourage to hack repair your hard earned pride and joy WobblyLEDs against the manufacturers advice…. It’s just… look, the whole LED PCB assembly is expensive. Like, more than your fixture is worth expensive. I can’t remember how much exactly from Chauvet right now but I see it listed on a 3rd party parts seller site for around $1500 USD. Yeah. Er, no.

So, I have a faulty fixture with a missing LED or a huge parts bill that isn’t gonna fly. I need to find a way to swap that LED out.

The problem with LED replacement on the R2 Wash

I can get a single LED chip from Chauvet for a reasonable price. I can also probably pick it up from other suppliers. I don’t know for certain because I haven’t really looked into to but it’s probably the OSRAM Ostar Stage or something similar. Anyway, that’s not the tricky part. I’ve replaced faulty LEDs with brand new ones from Chauvet and also with old LEDs taken from donor boards.

The LED comes in a type of package like a DFN Dual Flat No-Lead chip, it’s a surface mount on the PCB with eight terminals in two rows of four and a large ground/heatsink pad in the middle. Being a LED, the bits and pieces sit underneath a clear plastic window/lens on the top. This mean, unlike many SMD processing chips in a similar package, you can’t apply heat to the top of it in order to solder/desolder it from the PCB. This is only some of the problem when it comes to replacing the LED chip. The main one is the fact that the chip is soldered onto a Metal Core PCB – the whole board itself is designed to conduct heat away from the LEDs and onto the large heatsink that it’s mounted on in the middle of the fixture itself.

So, we have SMD and a large thermal mass. Obviously, I can forget using the usual soldering iron. Also forget using something like Chip Quik, this package has no legs even if I could get enough heat through it. Due to the nature of the entire, heat-sinking PCB, you can also forget a hot air tool providing local heat from any direction. When first tackling this repair, I tried any number of ways to get localised heat to remove the faulty LED and none of them provided enough heat before the PCB wicked it all away again. I needed to get creative and consider how the PCB was made in the first place.

(t’s worth just clarifying at this point, that all this work happened it was with the LED PCB completely removed from the fixture.)

Disclaimer: The following information does not constitute not advice. It simply documents an experimental process that I have undertaken at my own risk.

Reflow of the Metal PCB. With a gas stove.

The LED PCB is a chunk of metal, with tracks, LEDs and some other surface mounted components on it that include 000 ohm ‘resistors’ (jumpers) and multipin headers to connect the LEDs to the driver board. When it was manufactured, the components were positioned by machine on the PCB board along with solder paste and the whole thing was heated up in order to make the solder/flux combination melt and make connections. The board was then cooled to finish off and probably cleaned and all of this was probably highly technical and computer controlled.

I just needed to find a way to do this without all the gear, a hotplate style of heating from below this board. The components sit on top, the board is plain metal underneath. If I could just heat up the board well enough from underneath to melt the solder/flux, then the faulty LED could be removed and a new one put in its place. Once cooled, the LED would be reconnected via the solder joints and with luck we’ll have a working board.

Enter a camping gas stove. The kind of gas hob used for camping is fairly well suited to the size of the PCB in question. While the central flame may have some concentration of heat, the board is not that much larger than the key heating areas of the hob and the metal is sturdy and thermally conductive enough to transmit heat around the place.

In order to keep stuff clean/safe, I scraped off all the thermal paste on the back of the PCB and give it a good clean with Isopropyl Alcohol so you are heating up clean metal.

Risks of gas hob reflow.

Because this is a single sided board with bare metal on the underside, I don’t to worry too much about the flame and components as they are protected from the flame by the metal – it’s like a skillet. I do however need to be concerned about myself and the flame, and also that there are several large holes in the board that allow heat to come through to where I am. Don’t forget I am removing and replacing components manually with tweezers during this process.

With reflow work like this, I risk distorting the PCB with poor timing, temperature control or uneven heating. While this is still a risk, the chunk of metal that is the base of the PCB is more robust than a normal composite board. I just need to be a bit careful.

While replacing components, I am working with every solder joint on the board in a molten state. This means that every single component is ‘loose’ and free to move. It’s very easy to knock something out of position or accidentally swipe it off the board completely while concentrating on the task of replacing another component.

Reflow Profile

On researching manufacturers reflow techniques, there seems to be some good practice in terms of the use of temperature to get the best results. This is usually controlled by machines, but I attempted a stab at a reflow temperature ‘profile’ in order to make a nice job of it. Profiles come in a few stages:

• Initial Ramp Up – heating the workpiece up to Soak temperature
• Soak – Keeping the workpiece at a steady temperature, lower than the melting point of solder.
• Ramp to Reflow – Temperature rises to reflow melting point.
• Reflow
• Cool Down

So my plan was to gently heat up up the board to a base level, leave it to stabilise at a soak temperature for a short while, then step up a gear in order to reflow, then cool down. The great thing about a gas hob is that there is no lag in control of the heat of the flame itself – only the workpiece metal.

The first time I attempted this, I didn’t use a thermocouple or any other kind of temperature sensor. During a later repair, a colleague lent me an Infra Red Thermometer which was useful for interest but didn’t really change how I did things.

To recap, I was going to attempt to slowly heat up the PCB by setting the hob on its lowest flame setting, let it ’soak’, then bump up the flame to reflow. Then shut the flame off (and probably use a desk fan to help with the cool down).

During experiments, the first thing that I noticed was that even the lowest flame on the gas hob created quite a bit of heat (turns out the board got to 160 degrees on the IR thermometer, even on the lowest gas setting).

The adjustment was to hold the board in a set of long nose pliers and introduce it to the lowest heat gradually.

The second thing was that the metal of the PCB held the heat pretty well after gas shutoff. This observation led me to decide that I would do all the replacement work with the gas off, after the reflow temperature had been achieved. This was not only safer for me but the solder remained workable and the cool down didn’t rush me too much , as long as I was organised and swapped the LED without too much messing about. (On boards where I have swapped a number of LEDs out, I sometimes give the gas a quick blast again to keep the reflow going.)

Solder Paste, Flux, or not?

When PCBs like this are made, a solder/flux combination in the form of a paste is usually stencilled onto the board and this is what makes the connections during the reflow process. I had some solder paste to hand, but pre-repair experiments with this suggested that it was too easy to use an excess of paste and, because the PCBs themselves already had solder on them, there was a risk of too much solder on the pads. This had the potential to result in bridged connections and short circuits. This is very much the case when using LEDs from a donor board, as adding more solder to a PCB with ‘old’ solder on it that is accepting a LED, also with ’old’ solder on it, equals too much solder on the board. In early trials, I did use solder wick to clean the pads as much as possible but even then it was easy to overdo the paste. Similarly, this also could lead to adding too much flux and problems resulting from this – particularly underneath the LED itself. If I was going to use extra flux, I would opt for some of the No-Clean type as there is no telling what is happening under the chip once it’s been reflowed.

In the end, I was satisfied with the results of not adding additional paste or flux and just using what was already on the board. Bear in mind that these chips aren’t that big, the pad connections are pretty small and close together, and so aligning stuff and not creating shorts isn’t that easy. I felt that it was gonna be made even harder by adding too much additional ‘product’.

Reflections on the process of R2 LED replacement.

I should once again stress that the above procedure is not what Chauvet tech support suggest you do to your prize R2 Wash. I mean, if I told them I had some form of properly controlled hotplate reflow equipment then perhaps they might be OK with it as a method of LED replacement and reflow. I’m pretty sure that they don’t advise you cook up a $1500 PCB on a camping stove.

First thing to note was that I was able to try some stuff out on an already retired board due to an issue with track corrosion. Now, PCB track repair is perfectly possible and on another day I’d have sorted that too but on this occasion the fixture was to be a donor anyway. This meant that the first times I tried this relflow process out, and the various other failures on the way, I didn’t have to do it on a board I was trying to fix. 

Another reflection on even attempting this kind of ‘off-piste’ repair process is that it is not gonna be appropriate in many other situations and with other fixture models. If a fixture is of higher value, or newer, or the process itself is impossible due to the design, then plenty of times this hack isn’t gonna be the answer. There still could be issues with the method that may only manifest over time – although in this particular case, the units repaired didn’t actually have a lot of prime time left and were no longer A or even B stock.

What we have highlighted today is the issue of equipment longevity and repairability, including that of LEDs themselves, is not a discussion that is over in the world of stage lighting. In fact, when it comes to LED based fixtures, it’s only really just starting. We’ll look at that next time.

See you then.

The post Chauvet R2 Wash LED Replacement first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

In the first article in this series, we took a look at some distinctive traits of LED stage lighting fixtures in 2019 when it comes to keeping them running. This included considerations for Switch Mode Power Supplies (SMPS), LED driver circuitry and the LED light sources themselves. Today we are going to consider a typical LED moving wash light and use it as a guide to other LED lighting fixtures. In this case, I’ve chosen the Chauvet Rouge R2 Wash as it is a commonly available fixture in a middle-of-the road price bracket, one that is stocked by hire and production companies, and also owned by venues. There are more expensive LED wash lights and there are cheap and cheerful designs, the R2 fits somewhere in between and makes for a good study.

Chauvet Rogue R2 LED Wash

Without repeating the manufacturers marketing guff, the R2 is a RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) moving wash with a wide zoom range and light sources comprising of nineteen 15W RGBW LEDs, controlled in five zones. The fixture can be set to range of modes and has some level of ‘pixel’ capability but only to the extent of these zones. The user interface is a colour non-touch OLED display accompanied by the common Menu, Enter, Up, Down buttons, so one of the simple but functional interfaces. The fixture has DMX In and Out on both XLR5 and XLR3, plus PowerCon In and Thru. The PSU is mounted in the base, the main board is in the yoke, and the driver board is in the head itself.

It’s a LED moving wash light. Not much more I can say. An affordable workhorse that flings coloured light about the place in a generally pleasing manner.

Maintaining the Rogue R2 Wash

Being a simple wash light, the key maintenance point for the R2 after keeping it clean on the outside is cooling. Keeping the large fan, fins and vent at the back of the head free of gunk, and similarly the cooling system in the base of the fixture – where the power supply is situated. This is the key routine service task with the period between servicing rather depending on how hard life is for the fixture. In a busy hire stock, the unit will see some serious action week to week and the service intervals are suitably short.

In general, there is very little to keep fettling with on an moving LED wash light other than keeping the thing clean and able to stay cool. There aren’t a ton of service points, optics to polish, or lots of complex mechanics to worry about. The fixture is fairly light weight so the Pan and Tilt mechanisms are untroubled by their respective burdens and the zoom system isn’t that complex or particularly fragile. In general use, these bits just work.

I have identified a not-so-obvious service task that may not be on the owners agenda, but we’ll talk about this later as part of the common repairs and how they can perhaps be avoided.

Rogue R2 Wash – Common Issues

Let’s be clear. This isn’t a review of the robustness of the R2 Wash nor a hatchet job on Chauvet kit. We are looking at common issues when owning these fixtures as a demonstration of the kinds of things we are now faced with running LED based stage lighting fixtures. With that little disclaimer out of the way here is, in no particular order, some common issues experience running a stock of R2 Washes.

Interface Buttons

Usually the simplest to fix.

A niggle and potentially a load-in stopper, the Menu, Up, Down and Enter buttons can get gunked up and stop working. The buttons are the only way to interface with the fixture and it’s not fun trying to set a DMX address with no Down button, and no Enter button makes it game over. The interface buttons start to become a bit finnicky and at this point are just an annoyance, but eventually they can stop working.

The fix usually just requires removal of the Screen and Interface PCB and carefully aiming some contact cleaner into each push button before wriggling the button around in its housing. I suggest steps are taken to avoid getting the cleaner onto or into the screen and that removing the PCB is the best method, rather than trying work with it in situ on the base panel.

If the button cannot be revived with some switch cleaner, then it needs to be replaced.

LED drivers

A common issue, and one that can be mitigated with some additional service routines at suitable intervals. Firstly, lets look at where the LED drivers are and what they do.

The R2 Wash LED driver board is a ring shaped PCB fixed to the back of the head. A fan on the back of the PCB drags air through the fins around the centre of the unit and the PCB also has it’s own heatsinks to help cooling of the driver components. The components are an array of fairly simple circuits based on the PT4115 PWM driver, each driving one of the RGBW LEDs. This board is populated by Surface Mount Devices (SMDs) and in places has some fairly close tracks and pads, while the whole thing is facing into the fixture situated in a place where ‘bad things happen’ regarding air flow, crud, and haze fluid residue.

One common fault with R2s coming back off the road is a low level bleed of an LED cluster even when the fixture is meant to be in blackout. This is an indicator of the onset of the R2s Achilles Heel: a dirty driver PCB. Conductive gunk can gather at certain points in the board and start confusing the driver circuits or control signals. In the worst case, a build up can fry one of the PT4115s. With luck, these problems with the driver won’t go on to send nasty stuff to the LEDs themselves as dealing with a zapped LED a lot more work – as we’ll see later.

Issues with the dirt build up on the LED Driver PCB can lead to track and solder joint corrosion which again can stop the LED drivers working properly.

For this reason, I suggest that removing and cleaning of the LED driver PCB becomes a routine in the service schedule. Not every service, but often enough during the fixtures life to catch the problems associated with this issue before they start. Just take care not to knock one of the SMD electrolytic capacitors off the board while cleaning the PCB – luckily I can say that this hasn’t happened to me but I can see how it could.

When it comes to repairing a faulty LED driver board, the whole board from Chauvet isn’t all that expensive and oftentimes there is little point spending a lot of time tracing a fault and trying to make a nice job of swapping out a PT4115 properly because you need the right tools to do it and the consequences of making a bad job of it include zapping an LED which is a whole other world of pain and expense.

Rouge R2 Wash LED Repair

So, you have an issue with a LED or a zone. How do you know if it’s the driver or the LED itself? This is something you really want to verify because getting to the 15W RGBW LEDs themselves is a lot of work. The LEDs are right in the very middle of the fixture and require a lot of disassembly before you can even see them. There are a few possibilities:

• The LED driver circuit
• The LED / LED board
• The wiring loom that connects the two

You can hope it’s the LED driver and certainly that is the ideal situation because it involves the least dismantling. Verifying this can be as simple as swapping the driver board for another known good one – if the problem goes away then great. On this particularly model, there is also potential for swapping the multipin headers running from the PCB to the LEDs themselves which can verify if the issues is with the driver board or something else. I’ve not yet ever found a problem with the wiring loom. If it’s not the driver board, it’s probably the LEDs themselves.

Checking the LEDs

The RGBW LEDs on the R2 are right in the middle of the fixture. In order to even look at them, you have to take everything off including the front cover, the lens, the optical condensers, the zoom motors, everything on the front of the fixture has to come off to reveal the LEDs and the loom terminations on the LED PCB. There is quite a lot of parts, screws, posts and other bits and pieces that all need to be carefully removed.

Once in, we can check the LEDs in circuit using a multimeter. Each 8 pin LED chip contains 4 LEDs and with the MM set to diode mode and the correct polarity you can get Red, Green, Blue and White LEDs to light a tiny amount using the small voltage from the meter. On these particular LEDs, the anode and cathode of each LED are adjacent on the same side of the 8 pin package and the colours are marked on the PCB.

Changing the LEDs

Once we have verified that a LED needs replacing, we have a couple of options from the ones outlined at the start of this series:

• Replace the entire LED PCB
• Replace a single LED

The first option is mega-expensive as a populated board with all new LEDs and other bits from Chauvet is not a cheap option.

The second option is a little bit tricky for DIY and worthy of a whole other article, we’ll save this for the next one.

Conclusion

The key maintenance and repair issues with the R2 Wash can be considered as a good indication of the kinds of things we now have to deal with owning LED moving light rigs, particularly failures of driver circuits and LEDs. The only thing we haven’t really looked at today is power supplies. This is actually because the R2 Wash power supply seems to have fewer problems than some (in contrast to the R2 Beam) and so it hasn’t featured at the top of our repairs list with the R2 Wash itself.

Power supply issues are also much more of a feature of cheap and cheerful LED based products, so we should probably look at those another day.

What LED fixtures have you got? Are there common faults that are particular to the fixture? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Chauvet R2 Wash – Repair and Maintenance first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

In the early days of OSL, we looked at LEDs and their limitations as a stage lighting source in what was a new development back then.  Ten years later, we revised and acknowledged the some of the improvements towards LEDs as a main source of light for a wide range of fixtures and applications.

Fast forward to today: LEDs are everywhere in performance lighting, for all users and all levels of budget.  Now the industry as had access to workhorse LED fixtures for long enough to start to understand what it takes to keep them working.

I’m going to skip over discussing the merits or otherwise or LEDs from a Lighting Designer point of view.  We also won’t go into to much depth regarding the supposed ‘savings’, either in terms of energy or cash – this is somewhat up for debate.  Suffice to say, LED stage lighting fixtures need looking after and can fail and this is what we will be looking at in the series.

Keeping the previous generation working

For anyone working on the upkeep of moving lights from the past, they will recall common issues with these little robotic lights that could be remotely controlled.  Common areas of interest for the repair technician were often in the area of mechanical parts, the discharge lamp circuits, or that of the internals that included stepper motors, motor drivers, sensors and associated circuitry – along with the all important ‘main board’ and firmware. Service and repair of older style moving lights is often focused on the mechanical elements such as belts, drives and optics along with cooling systems.

There are some parallels here with LED systems, but some areas of concern are more prominent than others with the kit of 2019.

So what’s different in 2019 with LED stage lighting technology?

LED Fixtures – New technology, New challenges

If you take a fairly standard moving head wash light, it will contain much of the same parts as a ‘traditional’ fixture.  It will still have a main board (motherboard, ‘mobo’, etc), still have some motors and sensors plus some kind of user interface.  While the user interfaces are sometimes a little more snazzy, from a maintenance and repair point of view they are pretty much the same.

Spending time with LED kit that has been on the road for a while now, it seems that we spend a lot less time on belts, motors, and their drivers and more time with the ‘new’ bits of the technology.  In the case of a LED moving head this is basically the driver circuits and the LEDs themselves.

The other thing we spend more time with is the power supplies.

Power Supplies

Modern stage lighting fixtures in 2019 are no different to those back in 1999 – they need a working power supply.  Not only does this power the light source and the moving parts, but also the processors that control everything.  One bit of a power supply breaks, no working fixture.    This isn’t a new problem, but in my experience the power supply is becoming a more common failure point in modern fixtures particularly those built down to the lower price points.

The developments in moving light product design has continue to move toward efficient and lightweight power supplies.  Like everything else in the world of electrical technology, this means a switching power supplies (Switch Mode Power Supply or SMPS).  These power supplies provide a range of usable stable voltages for everything from the lamp right down to powering individual microprocessors.  SMPS are a marvel of electrical engineering and are robust and potentially long lasting.  However, a lot of the magic behind these power supplies can put their different parts working near their limits and they can break down.

Power supply components fail and everything on the fixture stops working

It’s likely that fixing a SMPS isn’t just going to be as simple as changing a fuse.

LED driver circuits

Like SMPS, the bit and pieces that make the high brightness LEDs in a moving wash light fade up and down are a marvel of technology.  Consisting of just a few components and a microprocessor to the naked eye, the driver circuit is actually doing quite challenging work in order to run those LEDs how we want them to.  As users, we have asked manufacturers for affordable, and bright light sources, and with high quality dimming.  In order to achieve this, components in the driver circuits are working hard and this means they can just fall over.  LED driver circuits are a common point of failure in modern lighting and one that is regularly addressed by the repair tech.

LEDs as Stage Lighting Sources

Finally, we come to the LEDs themselves.  Often a chip with multiple LEDs of different colours in them, these are not the little red or green dome shape that we use to think of when the word ‘LED’ was mentioned.  LEDs have many benefits as a light source and, when driven well, they can achieve some pretty great things for Lighting Designers.  However, there are two key issues with LEDs.

• LEDs can easily be damaged electrically.  This can happen when part of the driver circuit fails.
• Changing a blown LED is not like swapping out a dud T1 or HPL750.

There is no doubt that LEDs are bright, efficient and long lasting – if they don’t get fried.  When they do get fried, it’s often a single colour in the LED chip that has gone AWOL (such as Red, Green, Blue, White etc) and the whole chip needs replacing.  This is often NOT an easy thing to swap out.

Service and maintenance of LED Moving Lights

For fixtures that share a lot of optical and mechanical similarities with an older style moving spot or wash, there are still similar jobs in the service list.  Stuff like checking and maintaining moving parts, cleaning optics and the like. There is also similar emphasis on cooling.  Even while LEDs may not crank up to the temperatures in a discharge light source, cooling of the LEDs and the driver and power supply components still are important.

The other common issue with any fixture, regardless of type, is dirt.  Crud and particulates from haze fluid get sucked into the fixture (or control desk, in fact) and sit around gunking stuff up.  In modern fixtures, particularly LED units, this is increasingly reason for failure when the gunk builds up on PCBs that are open to the cooling flow of air and starts to cause problems with the tiny components, microprocessors and tracks. These can cause leakages, shorts and future nasties that mean that properly cleaning PCBs can be an important service task on certain designs of LED fixture.

Fixing LED Moving Lights

OK, so you diligently maintained your LED kit, but you have a busted moving wash light.  What options are there?

You could just chuck the unit.  In the case of cheap imported LED fixtures, people do actually write off whole fixtures and use them for spares.  The only issue with any kind of ‘donor’ system in any repair field is that the same issues arise over and over and the donor can only provide a single-shot fix for the problem.  Writing off fixtures is part of buying cheap kit, knowing there is little point trying to fix it in many fault cases.

You can source and fit manufacturer parts.  This includes whole power supplies, LED driver PCBs, LED chip boards etc.  The issue with whole assemblies is that you are often swapping out a lot of good stuff in order to fix a problem with one bad component – and these whole parts may not be cheap.  Many people use this method of keeping their kit going while parts remain available.

You can identify faults at component level and replace, either with new or ones from a donor fixture.  This is cheap on parts but can be expensive on technician time.  It also requires a level of knowledge, and tools and facility to do this kind of repair plus there is a risk that you identify a fried component only to find that the failure took out a whole bunch of other things too.  This kind of fix is for more skilled techs and is often the only option for fixtures that parts are no longer available for.

Conclusion. And coming up…!

We are now at a point in the development of LED stage lighting technology where fixture repair is becoming a key topic for equipment owners at every level, from a school with some moving LED wash lights, right up to large rental houses with the most expensive and complex gear.

In the next article in this series, we are going to look at a fairly common LED moving wash light and use it as a template for the kind of things that need to be consider in keeping our LED based rig working with both repair and service.

Have you had experiences of having to maintain and fix broken LED fixtures?  How you find the transition over to LED now we have had time to break-in the kit?  Get in touch via the comments below.

The post LED Moving Lights Service and Repair – What keeps a rig working in 2019? first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

You might also be interested to know that at Learn@OnStageLighting we teach CAD for production lighting.

Uses Of Software In Lighting Design

Whilst being no stranger to scribbling a lighting plan on the back of a tour schedule with a biro (usually as the first few rigging boxes are coming out of the truck), you may want to present your ideas and technical information in a clear and more professional way. As the complexity of the design increases so does the number of people involved in making it all happen and the consequences of a planning or communication mistake. If you have ever swapped out more than 150 Source Four Par lenses from a massive 20” box truss trimmed at a height of 7m because the LD should have specified ‘wides’, then you’ll know the cost of shoddy calculations.

Using a computer to help the lighting design process has many advantages over traditional hand drawn lighting plans and manually collated data methods. These range from A for Accuracy all the way to Z for, well, Z: The 3rd dimension in 3D CAD modelling (a useful part of getting those calculations, angles and distances right). There are also great possibilities in digital storage and collaboration, reuse of previous hard work and just generally getting a computer to take the donkey work of repetition or maths when planning lighting design and system.

The pitfalls to using software in lighting design are similar to the use of computers for any other purpose. The dangers of digital file storage, crashes or file compatibility are familiar to most in the modern world, along with the steep learning curve required to be able to work as effectively using the software as with paper and pencil. Even in an age of seemingly “free everything”, the cost of owning and updating specialist CAD software must be a consideration, particularly with the most comprehensive packages. We will also look at some software with extremely specific uses with which the cost of ownership must be weighed against the amount of actual use for a given user.

This article will refer to this use of digital software tools as CAD in the “Computer Aided Design” sense, as not all the tools available to us a lighting designers are used for drafting. It will consider specialist stage lighting software, and also look at more generic applications that can be used for parts of the design process.

What Do We Need From The Software?

Different users require different functionality from their lighting software along with things that are important or workflow areas that have to be easier than others. Let’s look some possible requirements:

• Drawing and presenting lighting plans (or light plots, if you are in the US)
• Creation and sharing of lists such as equipment inventories, gel cuttings lists, cable allocations etc. (a relevant US term would be Shop Orders)
• Noting of data and, as important, changes such as cue lists, focus notes, equipment shortages.
• Calculation and communication including power requirements, circuit information, weight loadings.
• Lighting Designer tools such as beam angle calculation and experimentation, design choices such as gobos (templates/patterns)
• 3D lighting visualisation and presentation of CGI virtual lighting design
• Pre-programming of data into a lighting console using visualisation software

You may notice that, while a few requirements are planning tools simply for the Lighting Designer, the majority of items in the above list centre around communication with others. If you are going to be designing a show, owning and preparing the equipment, rigging it and operating the lighting system in isolation you could get away with nothing more than a few Post-It notes and making it up on the day. Even this would assume that you didn’t have to agree with the Sound department where their speakers would go or show the riggers where to put your points before you arrive.

Putting on shows is nearly always a collaborative effort, and successful collaboration comes from effective communication.

Lighting Design Software And Collaboration

It’s a good time to look at collaboration in lighting software, as ‘cloud computing’ is becoming a buzzword throughout a wider world than simply the early adopters. Before we even consider ‘software as a service’ in specialist stage lighting applications, we might reflect on the benefits of digital file sharing that doesn’t involved pinging emails backwards and forwards and wondering if you have the latest version or can even open it. Using services such as Dropbox, our stage lighting partners can easily work on the same files in a single place and always have access to the latest version of the lighting plan or the equipment inventory. For a while now, I’ve been a huge fan of Google Docs (now generically called Google Apps) which not only allows for such file sharing but also puts the software functions of word processing and spreadsheet firmly in ‘the cloud’.

The collaborative possibilities of this kind of workflow are currently changing the way many of us work in all walks of a life and lighting design communication is no exception. Being able to work directly in a cloud based spreadsheet while the Production Electrician is also accessing the latest version is the kind of real time collaboration that makes Google Apps great for me. I must add that as a web publisher that is against monopolies and market domination I have plenty of issues with Google as a whole, but currently still find myself at the mercy of the free crack that is Google Apps (with Gmail etc.) :(

Providers of stage lighting design software are moving into thecloud computing space and functionality that puts the emphasis on the collaborative nature of stage lighting planning. By way of example, Vectorworks (the base production of the Spotlight lighting design software) has specific cloud services and John McKernon’s Lightwright was always designed with a portion of it given over to the concept of different ‘users’ and tracking changes, not just presenting the current state of play.

While Lightwright has some great lighting design specific tools and a huge amount of thought has gone into it, such a collaborative concept can be also be found generically in a shared Google spreadsheet. Different stakeholders have access at different levels, changes can be made and are and can be reverted to. All in real time and for free in the case of Google Docs, if you are prepared to put in the time create your own. Perhaps in the future On Stage Lighting will do a series of tutorials on using Google Docs in lighting design.

The Cost Of Software In Lighting Design

Or “The Benefits of Being Born Free”

When considering the choices of stage lighting design software for any or all of the above requirements, the issue of cost forces one to ask some tough questions. While there are a range of software options ranging from free to mega-expensive, some of those questions might be:

• How much of my time do I spend using ‘x’ function?
• Do I get paid directly for doing ‘y’?
• How much time ( = revenue, opportunity cost etc.) will I save if I start using ‘z’?
• Do I just fancy a piece of fancy software to mess about with?

An answer of “yes” to the last question is a perfectly valid one, but one that should be answered truthfully.

Stage lighting design software can be extremely expensive to own and in my experience the most comprehensive (read:expensive) does often not fall into the “good buy” category for your average independent Lighting Designer based on the economics. Also, there is a temptation to think that being able to use, even better, own such shiny software makes you more employable and even a better LD! This is not the case. While being able to use CAD is a useful skill it does not make you a Lighting Designer, better or otherwise.

As a freelance LD making your own way, running the latest version of the fanciest software is a lovely overhead eating into your profit unless it can be financially proven that you are actually more productive or your client experience is so improved that it keeps you ahead in the game. Or at least stops you falling behind.

Perhaps it’s already becoming obvious why in the world of fast turnaround events, the biro/tour schedule system of communication is often favoured. No one, not the client, not the ad agency, not the production company, nobody, is going to pay for anything. Why would they when the show will happen with or without all those beautifully crafted drawings and lists? Why bother when it doesn’t matter to them how awkward your workflow is, so long as the show opens? Not all that many Directors / Clients / Mums know a good lighting design from an average one. In the end, they certainly can’t tell if your design has been lovingly wrought in layers of vector-based beauty from the most expensive Bezier curves money can buy. Or if you drew it in chalk on the floor. The show either looks good and the minimum number of creatives had a crying fit. Or not.

At the concept or pitch stage, there is an case for an expensive computer-generated finish, but we’ll discuss that later.

There is also an argument for you making your own life more bearable or enjoyable with the use of dedicated lighting software, but this should not be confused with an actual business case. In order to even need to be more productive with fancy software, you need to have a whole lot of relevant lighting gigs in a year.

All this means that you should seriously look at the free / cheap end of the lighting software market first and consider all the information below before making that big purchase.

However, with the need for collaborative communication, professional outputs in your field and cost in mind, let’s plough on.

2D Plan Drawing Software

To generate simple schematics and two-dimensional lighting design layouts so that your crew can rig and set up correctly is the minimum software requirement by any Lighting Designer. The ability to cleanly draw a lighting plan, print it out or email it.

You can actually draw a lighting plan using MS Word if you need to (I’ve seen it done!) but life is too short for bad drawing with a word processing software when you could be producing bad drawings in a more suitable package. Whether the application uses the ‘CAD’ title or not, the key thing we’ll need is something ‘vector’ based. Vector drawing uses mathematical equations to create lines, curves and solids which means they are accurate, completely scalable and resulting drawings or details are disconnected from screen or print resolutions. Layout of 2D lighting symbols based in ‘raster’ format (bitmaps, basically images) on a plan without accurate dimensional information isn’t ideal and really only a digital version of our scribbled biro drawing.

Any mainstream vector drawing software will produce a nice lighting plan with annotations showing colours, circuits and focus information. If you are already familiar with Adobe products, we are looking at Illustrator rather than Photoshop, and there are plenty of vector titles available including free software. The downside to using a non-lighting specific CAD packages for the production of 2D lighting plants is their lack of scaled stage lighting symbols to drag and drop into your plan and the immediate availability of other stage lighting data such as manufacturer details or specific calculations etc.

The difference between vector based graphics software and dedicated CAD products is only really the presentation of the tools, in particular dimensional and other data entry and reporting. The difference between generic CAD software that might be used by architects or engineers and stage lighting specific drawing packages is again the presentation of the tools, with developers putting what the lighting designer needs front and centre. Professional CAD software generally has the functionality that we could shape for our needs, stage lighting design drawing packages have just already shaped them and put them into toolbars with names that we recognise.

Then there is collaboration and integration with other systems such as being able to use existing venue plans or add stage lighting data to a drawing from another CAD software. Any drawing software that can cope with the AutoCAD standard .DWG and .DXF formats is a must when working alongside others with similar capability, for when you don’t all use the same CAD software. The ability to import these formats can be used with lighting symbols that are available from equipment manufacturers but it is vital to watch out for scaling errors when importing symbols this way. In fact, when working with imported vector data such as .DWG and .DXF drawings, watch out for scaling errors in general! Such errors have the power to make grown men weep into wireless ergonomic keyboards.

The most dedicated lighting design drawing software packages can save you the trouble of importing loads of different lighting symbols by shipping with their own fixture library. They also usually come with with the ability to generate some useful lists such as fixture quantities and gel cuts based on data attached to the symbols. The level of complexity or functionality is, unsurprisingly, related to software cost when these functions are built into a thing with “CAD” in the title.

Choice: If you need to draw 2D plans and are on a budget, get the extra usefulness of one of the free or cheaper lighting design software or basic generic CAD packages . Don’t mess about with raster based image software or something totally unsuitable like Powerpoint. There are free / cheap options that are better suited, some of which are listed below. Ideally find something that will be able to deal with the .DWG files that are thrown at you unless you are going to be simply producing neat lighting plans for others to follow with minimal external input.

Lighting Design, Draw and Specify

What if you want to do more than draw a 2D lighting plan? What about all those lists, calculations and the communication of technical information in other formats other than a CAD drawing.

Using MS Word as our example, you can use Word (or Open Office, Works, whatever) to create neat a list and store it in digital format. What you don’t get from a simple word processed list is the benefit of good quality spreadsheet functions. For this reason, many lighting designer’s have made good use of Excel and other spreadsheet software for many years to deal with equipment totals, cable, accessories and gel allocations. Without an advanced knowledge of spreadsheet functions, we can still benefit from be able to at least set up an Auto Sum or tally and, using something like free Google Spreadsheets, collaborate on these lists in real time.

A database / spreadsheet model is the angle Lightwright, Focustrack and things like Cast’s WYSIWYG reporting functions come from. The benefit of these specialist pieces of software is that a lot of care and attention has gone into creating something that works out of the box for the lighting designer. Some of these CAD packages or software combinations can have their data input at the drawing or at the list, depending on the way you like to work as an LD.

If you would like to get your software to provide extra features such as sectional and elevational drawings, basic 3D views and organise information, then the more robust lighting design software is a better option. The benefits of creating your CAD design in 3D is that you don’t have to keep redrawing sections and elevations and instead can view the “model” from any angle even in different finishes. You also have 3D geometry that you can use for visualisation or pre-programming either within the software or for import into another package.

These packages can “model” your theatre space or venue, including your set and lighting rig which can take the effort out of creating sections or elevations. Using different views of a 3D space are vital in lighting design, particularly for a theatre show, to help you make decisions of angle, light positions and flying heights (and it sure beats doing lots of different drawings!).

Equipment lists, lighting accessories, gels and control channels can be generated by the lighting plan drawing process which saves time and effort on your part while electrical power calculations or weights can be easily viewed.

Choice: If you are working in lighting design and do a lot of shows but do not need to pre-program or see fancy visualisations of your show, you will be looking for a combination of 2D / 3D CAD and spreadsheet software. These can be found as different entities such as using AutoCAD (with or without the LD Assistant plug-in) and a generic spreadsheet software like Excel. Alternatively, these could be rolled into one like Cast’s WYSIWYG or, in the case of Vectorworks Spotlight and Lightwright, be complementary software that bolts together to share data and work in sync.

Visualisation Software

While still in a communicative frame of mind, we should consider the business of visualisation.

In this case, we are looking to be able to demonstrate to interested parties (Directors, Clients, your mum etc.) what our lighting might look like if only we were given the gig or allowed to have all that expensive kit or what would happen if we blew the entire gel budget on Follies Pink.

For me, the key to concept visualisation software is to produce credible images (sometimes even video files) of key points in the show, and produce them with the minimum of time cost. This is because much of the work of visualisation is done before contracts are signed, gigs got or anyone has even agreed to a hire budget. So, what are our options for this kind of visualisation?

The cheapest form of visualisation of show that is yet to happen could be images from a previous show that have corresponding design elements. If no relevant image is available then the Lighting Designer might create something, either using their art material of choice or even lighting a 1:25 scale model of the set and taking photos of it. The digital step up from this is photographic images that have been through a Photoshop style editing software to create an impression of what the Lighting Designer wishes to communicate. This might be based on a venue shot or an artistic impression created by another key designer.

In the world of corporate events, visualisation of the environment is often farmed out to a graphics artist to be used by the production company to secure the work. This means that a certain amount of work has already gone into the data for visualisation and created in any number of software packages and presented in a range of file formats, including 3D virtual tours.

It’s with this background in mind that the Lighting Designer must choose their visualisation method and therefore select appropriate software. The most comprehensive and specialist of the stage lighting software genre could be Cast’s WYSIWYG or a software set such as Vectorworks Spotlight with Renderworks or even ESP Vision plugged in. WYSIWYG has benefited from steady improvements in the rendering engine, while remaining a broad tool that doesn’t require the Lighting Designer to understand every little detail of 3D CGI shaders and render settings to be able to produce the images.

The specialist software also tries to integrate all or most of your lighting design into one process and can spit out plans, lists and visualisation images at any point. A downside to the use of this kind of software vs. generic 3D CGI modelling and rendering packages is the requirement to have already produced your lighting design before you get the images. One of the benefits of something like 3DS MAX or Maya is basically your ability to cheat all kinds of things in order to produce lighting you want your stakeholder to see. Remember that above we needed these visualisations to happen fast, often before a contract, so we need to cheat. 3D CGI graphics is basically the art of cheating physics which brings us to ‘realism’.

One of the things that we hope for as Lighting Designers in a visualisation software is realism and having it ‘look right’. Initially we think we can get there through the use of mathematical models and ‘accurate’ materials in computer space to simulate the real world. Architectural lighting designers are big on real data such as photometric lighting, IES models etc. but they are often most interested in measured light levels.

The longer I studied 3D CGI graphics, the further I got from the idea that if only I used all the data and the right materials, it would look how I wanted it to. This ignores the vagaries of the rendering engine and all the maths involved in ray tracing, shader specularity and radiosity calculations. This does mean that the Lighting Designer needs to know what the show will look like in order to create the images. If the LD is hoping that the modelling software will show them the end result in lighting terms, they are going to be disappointed. Visualisation software in stage lighting should be used to communicate to someone else, you know in your head to be true. And what you produce at that point may well be the difference between getting the gig and not.

Choice: When choosing software for lighting design visualisation, consider at which point in the process you need to create the outputs and if some of the work has already been done by another party. There is no point in spending days creating a full lighting design to produce a visualisation image in CAD if a Photoshop wizard somewhere has already produced a 2D raster picture that you could make adjustments to using a virtual paintbrush. A while ago, I worked with Autodesk Viz (the cut down version of 3DS Max) because many of the show visuals were coming off the desktop of the graphic artist in that format. I simply ‘lit’ the model and sent them back in time for the production company to pitch. It was also easy to quickly import AutoCAD data in 2D or 3D, add some shaders and cheat some lighting.

Pre-Programming Visualisation Software

At the top end of lighting design software functionality, real time plotting of your rig is the name of the game. The software enables you to set up your virtual lighting rig with control systems, plug in a compatible lighting desk and plot your show before even committing lantern to pipe. This facility is most useful with large moving light rigs and helps the Lighting Designer and Operator build up some of the elements of a show before setting foot in the theatre. Conventional lighting dimmer circuits can also be programmed although the light intensity levels cannot really be accurately depicted however posh the software is.

What pre-programming does assist with is the setting up of moving light positions, palettes and effects and even base cues without the cost of time in the venue with all the kit. This saving is real in the world of performance, but the question of who should bear the cost of running a pre-programming suite is often answered by when you know that lighting production companies are increasingly providing the best software and facilities, along with the actual lighting consoles themselves. The option for cheaper owner/operator consoles may also be linked with the development of cheaper pre-programming visualisers designed to be run from more modest laptops with fewer functionality in the other areas of stage lighting design software.

The different software packages available to do this vary in cost, with the cheaper ones often trading off CAD or paperwork capabilities against the facility for real time programming of your light show. All require you to also have a fairly decent PC to run them on plus the hardware to input a lighting control signal (DMX or Ethernet) that will control the virtual lights.

Similar to the previous visualisation section, there are things to be taken into account when choosing pre-programming lighting software and they fall broadly in similar areas: Workflow patterns, time required and level of learning needed to get a good result. One of the features of simpler pre-programming software is the ability to place lighting fixtures in 3D space without the need for rigging structures etc. If you only want to see what fixture beams are doing, you don’t need a full set and trusses all over the place and can work with the minimum of information for your programming needs. With regard to the cheating of visualisations earlier on in the process, this flexibility is another plus point for building your own system around a kit of software parts as you can choose to put resources in where required. The converse view of the proponents of the all-in-one lighting design software package would argue that such software provides a central point of creation that reduces repetition.

Another element worth considering is native compatibility with your chosen lighting console and the options for sharing of data between them. Only having to create a patch in one place is a time saver. Console specific visualisers such as GrandMA 3D, Avolites visualiser and now the alpha version of the Cham Sys MagicQ visualiser all feature this and WYSIWYG has a long standing tie-up with Flying Pig Systems Whole Hog when it comes to data exchange. The most basic visualisers work using either a DMX input device or ArtNet straight in, while the ones that exchange data use a more proprietary system of communication.

From the other end, a visualiser such as ESP Vision works with data and 3D geometry from Vectorworks Spotlight, meaning that your plan and visualisation environment are created at the same time in a similar way to WYSWYG. This is not the case with the cheaper visualisers.

The question is at which point you need your visualiser to plug-in to your own working practices and, indeed, which parts of the process you use and which you don’t. There is little point in using a visualiser that integrates beautifully with your CAD drafting package if you rarely produce drawings. If you regularly use a particular console, perhaps you can live with a break in connection with your cheap CAD drawing software and free spreadsheet program in order to have stronger ties with your console data. Everyone will have a different solution.

Choice: Software such as Light Converse or Capture are good value visualisers and produce quick results for pre-programming as well as allowing the user to edit lighting fixture personalities as new models are brought to the market. Cast Lighting’s WYSIWYG Perform is all singing and dancing with 3D CAD, good paperwork creation and comprehensive programming and rendering. It is used by professional lighting companies and designers on the biggest theatre shows and events but all these features come at a price and a subscription service keep the fixture library up to date. Such software requires some pretty hefty hardware to run it on.

The latest addition to the console visualisation market is the alpha version of the MagicQ vis from Cham Sys. The visualiser is free, basic and works with the also free MagicQ lighting control desk and software, and is certainly going to be of interest of the growing number of MagicQ users around the world.

Choosing Your Lighting Design Software

Wherever you sit in the stage lighting CAD market, there are choices to be made. These centre around your own particular needs and working patterns, what your collaborators use and, let’s face it, what you can afford.

The post Stage Lighting Design Software – Choose Your CAD first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

I spend most of my time teaching modern stage lighting techniques and in particular lighting programming and lighting systems. When you first learn about ‘moving lights’* and DMX lighting systems, you learn that there are few elements that must align to successfully control the fixtures. DMX Address and Mode. If these elements are not correct at the desk or the fixture, your system will not behave as you expect.

*A catch-all term for what I’d call ‘complex fixtures’ that have more than one channel of control.

One common question that I get early on from absolute beginners when you set up a few moving lights with them is why you might need a second universe. This is related to the the next question which is why a fixture has different modes. Why not just do one thing in one way, using up one chunk of DMX channels?

Fixture Mode Basics

To start with, let’s look at an example situation with a common simple fixture, an LED PAR. Even the most basic of these have a few modes of operation and each of them use up different numbers of DMX channels. Some modes might be:

• Red, Green, Blue – 3 Channels
• Red, Green, Blue, Dimmer – 4 Channels.
• Red, Green, Blue, Dimmer, Strobe, Effect, Colour Macro – 7 channels.

If this was more complex LED unit with more colours including Amber, White, UV, Colour Correction it would have many more channels, even in the most basic mode.

If a moving LED fixture could be split into different zones within the unit itself, this would also add to the channel count. E.g

• Zone 1: RGBWAU, Strobe, FX, Macro – 9 Channels
• Zone 2: RGBWAU, Strobe, FX, Macro – 9 Channels
• Zone 3: RGBWAU, Strobe, FX, Macro – 9 Channels
• Zone 4: RGBWAU, Strobe, FX, Macro – 9 Channels
• Zone 5: RGBWAU, Strobe, FX, Macro – 9 Channels
• Zone 6: RGBWAU, Strobe, FX, Macro – 9 Channels

This may be in addition to some channels that control some more global attributes such as Pan and Tilt and a bunch of others that are commonly found in modern fixtures. Before you know it, you have a fixture that uses 70+ channels. Now with a hard limit of 512 channels in a DMX universe, it becomes apparent why all but the simplest lighting system that involves complex fixtures needs two or more universes.

16-Bit – Fine Control

A big consideration with LED fixtures is the dimming and colour scales. You hope for, and don’t always get, pleasant dimming curves and the ability to make subtle changes to colour. DMX uses an 8-bit scale of control which means each channel has 256 steps in it, from 0 all the way up to 255. In order to get more steps of control, the fixture maker incorporates two channels of control for one item such as Dimmer or Red. They might be called Dimmer and Dimmer Fine. This is 16-bit control and when applied to each colour LED, each Dimmer channel plus Pan, Tilt, Focus etc. and it very often doubles the channel count for a complex fixture. In our example moving LED fixture, this might take it nearer to 140 channels.

Why have fixture modes?

Modern lighting fixtures are complex, particularly ones that move and have multiple colour mixing capabilities. Add 16-bit control to many attributes and you end up with a fixture that requires over 100 channels of control to just get it working. Not everyone wants to have to deal with that many channels. Not only does it require anything but the smallest of rigs to require more than 1 DMX universe, but there are many occasions when the user doesn’t want to have to wrangle 6 zones of 16-bit multi-colour mix fixture just to get a red splodge of light on the drummer.

Using a different mode can bring the complexity and channel count right down, in this case to perhaps 20 or so channels.

Fixture makers give the user different mode options so that they can cater for a large range of use cases, including as many features as possible while allowing the user to pick and choose which are the most important to them. This results in a simplest, smallest channel count mode, a complex, huge channel mode, and some inbetween. A lot of the time in professional lighting practice, the middle-sized modes are chosen for their balance between features and ease of control, plus being a little more frugal on the DMX channel count.

Having all of the features, all of the time, isn’t necessarily an attractive option. Fixture modes give us the choice.

The post Fixture Modes: What and Why? first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

The release of QLab 4 saw the addition of lighting control to the already pretty comprehensive audio, visual and show control toolset. This time last year, it was early days in the public release and since then the new tools have started to emerge into their intended market. Today we won’t go back over the current toolset or UI but instead consider the market itself.

The QLab course over at Learn@OnStageLighting is a bit different to our usual stage lighting content and there is often a demographic gap between your standard ‘lampie’ and those using QLab. With the planned development of the QLab lighting toolset, this has the potential to converge and already I’m seeing techs with a lighting control background branching out into audio and video control and learning QLab skills.

Different Folks

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come from the QLab move into the lighting control space is the highlighting some silos in the market. Here is the On Stage Lighting guide to some typical technicians and how they relate to QLab:

Solo artist/performer with tech skills.

This is a significant market for Figure 53, one where small performances are developed with multimedia elements alongside live performance. These are often run from a central system and often triggered by the performer themselves.

Sound/Video person.

Who knows very little about lighting control but knows QLab.

This person is your typical sound / video playback person. They hung a fresnel a while back when someone asked them to but it was upside down, which the lampie was kind enough not to mention. They are maybe a whiz with a Digico or Avid, but lighting is a ‘black art’ and they aren’t sure if they really want to start getting into at this late stage in their career. This person may be a big-deal Sound Designer, in which case they are even less interested in lighting control.

Lighting person that doesn’t know QLab.

This ‘black-art-ist’ tries to avoid getting into stuff that looks like it might be a soundie gig. On the last tour, they noticed that some of the big bass speakery box things were facing the wrong way but didn’t like to mention it. Maybe the sound comes out of the wheels end on that model.

Lighting person with wide lighting control experience and has big needs/expectations.

This person loves nothing better than to program the Grand Whole 4 software to command an impressive array of nodding buckets and be master of all they survey. Instead of socialising, they prefer to hook up the visualiser and knock out a few looks on a Saturday night. They can see a need to get into video but anything that looks like sound kit can take a hike.

All-round tech that does a bit of everything.

And produces shows that needs everything!

This person knows a bit about absolutely everything and is indispensable to every poor-assed theatre company and circus act in a 50 mile radius. Their value is huge and their remuneration usually pitiful. They make magic happen using their own Mac and bits of hardware scraped together to cover the fact that, again, the producer has champagne ideas on Tizer money. Yes, there are probably bigger and better tools for each and every job but QLab does enough of everything to a fair level. Maybe one day they’ll be able to get a lighting desk in, but today is not that day.

The QLab market

Between huge, complex shows and Mrs. TiggyWinkle’s Theatre Company, Figure 53’s QLab has a wide market and a toolset to match. Being known for audio (and latterly, video) tools obviously gives QLab a head start with all those technicians and designers in those areas of the sector. Thought of by many as theatre software, QLab is actually now the go-to for other types of event and performance including corporate shows and site-specific installations.

Will lighting ever really be a QLab thing?

Yesterday, Chris Ashworth from Figure 53 confirmed that they definitely want QLab to become a ‘lighting thing’.

QLab is unarguably a sound and video thing. It’s also a show control thing. It has lighting control tools. Will it ever really be an actual lighting thing? There are a few factors that would contribute to this.

In sound and video, techs view QLab as a thing even if there are other specialist tools available to them. In lighting, most lighting people don’t yet view QLab as a thing in the same way. They might not like a particular lighting desk, but they acknowledge it as a part of their world. QLab, not so much. To them, they often don’t know QLab particularly well and all they see is the first draft toolset and not what they are used to. Even the bottom end of the lighting system that they now control is ever more complex.

The sound/video people are happy enough to leave lighting alone. They are broadly happy with the high level of support and feature implementation they are getting from Figure 53. They just need to feel like they still matter when it comes to development.

The All-round tech sees the value in being able to do a lot with very little and is willing to deal with the trade-off. When they do get a chance to bring that ETC Ion in, they’ll be OSC-ing up the wazoo and gleefully getting back to a ‘proper’ lighting control. But perhaps as the lighting toolset grows, they’ll find that option less attractive.

This requires a push in both conceptual and UI development from Figure 53 to bring the trademark QLab simplicity to complex lighting control. It needs significant input from people that understand complex lighting control at a level beyond the theatre-stack-Go-button-ETC-is-lighting people and fresh eyes that avoid any toolset or UI being just a fancy-paste from lighting control concepts that were worked up in the 20th century. Let’s just consider for a moment that the UX for a majority of lighting control tasks was actually developed before mouse/screen interaction. Even today, lighting control paradigms of the Strand Galaxy and it’s forefathers are still lurking beneath shiny touchscreens and keypads.

In order for QLab to a ‘lighting thing’, we lampies will have to see a value in its simplicity and learn of all the other things QLab can do to bring a show together. It is actually cueing software, after all.  That’s it’s main purpose – cueing. (Although I may actually write about busking in QLab at some point.)

All-round techs, drama groups, performers and multi-skilled freelancers in all genres of performance are dipping their toes in the QLab water already, many are already swimming. I’m also seeing more lighting techs taking an interest in the QLab overall cueing and control toolset, irrespective of the lighting functionality. I’m personally excited to see developments in the lighting toolset because I know that it’s likely to be something I’d enjoy.

Getting Started with QLab

As you are still here, I’d be willing bet you are one of those people that is always looking to learn new things and experiment with different stuff. I know because I’m exactly the same.

I’ve been teaching QLab since version 2 was released and during that time have seen the product gain popularity and become the standard in many corners of the performance industry. A young person with any level of technical production training should be exposed to QLab and it’s an important skill for those in stage management as well as technicians.

If you aren’t yet into QLab, the good news is that I still have a couple of places left on the next QLab 4 online course where I take learner through to the completion of a project – a working show file of some complexity. This which would get you programming and running for own shows in 2018. As far as I know, this is the only QLab course of it’s kind that is available to anyone in the world and is delivered through the flexible medium of a custom Virtual Learning Environment.

At a full price of only £98 GBP, the course represents absurdly good value anyway. But as an On Stage Lighting reader, you can also benefit from the discounted cost of £68 by clicking on this link:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=598MV4MAJKZW8

You’ll need to be quick though, as we start on 24th November 2017 for the last time this year. I’d love to have you with us on the ‘other side’ and we can get started.  Just click on the link and go through to Paypal to secure your place on the QLab course.

The post Will QLab Ever Be A Lighting Thing? first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

Coming up at Learn@OnStageLighting, I have the next group of learners taking part in my Introduction To Busking Stage Lighting online course . As an introduction to the basics of modern busking methods, we start with the use of a combination of ‘busking in the programmer’ via palettes, and using playback stacks for Intensities or FX. These techniques are the foundation of busking modern stage lighting systems and these building blocks can then lead on to the learner developing their own busking strategies. At the moment, there is a marked rise in the use of Executor based busking strategies and I’m going to take a look at some of the reasons why.

What is an Executor?

An executor is basically a trigger than can be a selection, palette, playback or macro. It’s not a base thing, it’s a layer up from those elements. The advantage of executors can be that they allow the use to create a highly customised and flexible busking interface. The disadvantage is that they often require additional steps to create. The rise of the executor in busking setup popularity is, I suggest, a result of that additional layer of work mattering less as consoles have developed.

The Busking Hierarchy Of Need

If we were to think of busking tools as a Maslow-esque ‘Hierarchy of Need’ then executors are arguably a long way from the base level. My Hierarchy starts with ‘I can busk with this if I have nothing else’ and builds up in terms of effort, time, and availability. The Hierarchy simplified version of pyramid looks something like:

-Macros-
–Executors—
–Fader Playbacks–
——-Groups/Palettes——-
———Presets/Programmer——-

This assumes we have some level of lighting control desk and the argument for the Busking Hierarchy Of Need is as follows:
If I had nothing (and no time to program), I would use any preset faders/controls and also busk ‘in the programmer’ by calling up fixtures and adjusting their attributes by hand. (If I only had a two-preset manual desk with faders, this is the base point and pretty much all there is.)

If I had a little time, I would create Groups and Palettes for fixture and attribute selection. Intensities would be handled in the programmer, preset faders or maybe via Intensity palettes.

If I had more time, I would add Playbacks for Intensity and movement, ideally with dynamics (flashes and moves)

If I had a lot of time, I would create Executors and even Macros to create the most flexible and user friendly busking environment possible.

Why are Executor busking setups popular in 2017?

Creating an executor-based busking setup is a pre-production labour of love for many lighting control enthusiasts. It is time consuming to get all your ‘ducks in a row’, sort out icons and create a work-of-art show file ready to take on any busking challenge. The payoff is often a reduction in button presses during the show plus access to more lighting options with that single stab. I believe that there are a number of factors behind the rise of executor-based busking setups today and I don’t just mean the availability of executor-style playbacks.. It comes down to the way that pre-production work now happens and the resulting return on that investment.

Pre-Production Work

The basis of executor setups is pre-production effort. I don’t mean patching the desk and stabbing in a few playbacks just before doors as we would do 15-20 years ago (and still do), I mean the availability of software and tools to enable a lot of higher quality work to go into your show file before you get on site. Not that long ago (if you are as old as me), most prep work on a console involved patching the fixtures and maybe a few palettes IF you had time or access to a desk. If you were really organised, you had a stock of large rig show files built-up over time that would then be deployed and tweaked on the day. With any luck you had a show file that had the correct fixtures patched in, enough of them patched, palette-ised and programmed to cover your rig that day. You built that large rig file on another gig, because that’s the only time you had access to, er, a rig. You could sort out palettes and stuff with a couple of fixtures back in the warehouse, but that would only produced a limited file when it comes to prep.

In 2017, visualisation tools are readily available, along with the console software to use at home. Everyone is creating and refining show files wherever they are, access to a rig or not. This makes the option to do this work within reach of all.

But there is more to it. The ROI on the effort.

20 years ago, if you spent time creating a stock of base show files for a rig that you commonly encountered there was still a limit to how much this work would be repaid. You still had plenty to do on site to make this file useful (not least tape/mark up the desk) and this is without the issues of having a varying size of rig with different fixture types every day. Long story short, there was only so much time available to do show file prep work on most shows. And this work only gave us so much back.

Fast forward to 2017, why are these prep-heavy show files increasingly popular? Why is it more attractive to put all this work in your ‘ultimate’ busking setup?

Morphing/Cloning

With the tools now available to apply your existing programming to new fixture types (Morphing) and to expand your programming to new fixtures in the rig (Cloning), console prep work has a much higher ROI than in the past. Along with the capabilities that modern desks have to fit pre-existing FX to groups of fixtures that change in quantity every day, you can create your hand-crafted, time-consuming ideal busking setup laden with executors and that time is not largely lost when the gig is over.

Executors = On Trend.

While the most obvious answer to the rise in popularity of an executor-based busking setup would seem to be simply the availability the function, I submit that it is combination of a wider base of desk owner/operators, access to visualisation and the opportunity to easily re-use that prep work which are the key factors in contemporary stage lighting practice. This is interesting as in terms of the Hierarchy, many of the lower needs are more easily met and so we climb higher up the pyramid. Sharing of ideas online is also leading to a trend in particular busking setup solutions, for example the pretty looking Colour/Fixture Executor grid popularised by the YouTubings of Mr Christian Jackson.

But, there are still plenty of shows where turning up and stabbing a patch in before creating a few playbacks are the order of the day and the skills and knowledge based on the building blocks of busking in the programmer and using playbacks are still key.

Intermediate Busking Course: Coming in 2018

I still have a couple of places left on the successful Introduction To Busking Stage Lighting Course starting again on 17th November 2017. This is last run of this course this year.

In 2018, I will be rolling out a NEW Intermediate level Busking course (really need to think of a snappy name for it). This takes the learner on to the next level of mind-bending techniques for running stage lighting the fun way – live. Perhaps that sounds like something you’d like to be part of? I’ll be releasing more details of the course content over the next few months but there is a reason that I’m mentioning this now…

In order to make the Intermediate course work properly, I need to ensure that we are all on the same page as the course will be a continuation of the Introduction level course. It is difficult running such a course with a wide variety of prior experience, particularly with self-taught learners from all over the world. For this reason, the Intermediate level Busking Stage Lighting course will ONLY be available to those who have completed the Introduction level course. This ensures the best possible learning experience, completion rates and satisfaction for everyone.

The post Trends in Busking : The Rise Of Executors first appeared on On Stage Lighting.

With the summer festival season full swing, stage large and small pop up and down while Lighting Designers and Techs go from gig to gig, preparing for and running stage lighting busk files. Wouldn’t to be great if there was an Ultimate Busk Setup base setup that shipped with every desk and you could select an option to get it running during patching? Just click “Yes, give me the Ultimate Busk mode” and I can do a quick rig check and get going. The LD for the next band heaves himself into the FOH Tower, asks “Are you running the UBS?” and with a nod you can leave him to get on. Imagine a pianist asking “is it the standard keyboard layout” when they turn up to soundcheck the Steinway. “Sure, mate. All the right notes, definitely in the right order.”

I teach some online busking stage lighting courses and a common thing for learners to ask is “what would be in your ultimate busk file?”. They then ask about different strategies for laying out stacks, palettes and playbacks in a theoretically perfect setup that would work in all situations. We even used a similar here a while back, although this was a way to start thinking about different techniques within a series of forced restrictions and teasing out a minimum set of controls.

Arguably, there are a bare minimum requirements for a reasonably flexible busk file. The ability to deal with fixture selection, Intensity, Colour, Beam and Position plus some form of flexible approach to dynamics (Int, Col and Position at least) using FX. You could probably strip out Beam all together and still have a workable file. You probably couldn’t do the whole show in Open White without someone asking questions.

However, you could probably get away with a minimum four options for each attribute family and four FX and still be able to produce good shows. In fact, I think it’s often optimal to have fewer things to get lost amongst in order to produce good busked shows. I would call this the B.B King approach to busking and those that know who he was will probably instantly know what I mean. B.B King was a legendary blues guitar player who pretty much played one or two notes 80% of the time – but what notes!  The right notes, in just the right places.

But Minimum Busk File isn’t what is meant by the word “ultimate”, and this is where I think we have a problem. Fact is, there is unlikely to be an “ultimate” anything other than that which is optimal for you and the rig at that moment. There are too many other factors:

• Programme material. What kind of gig is it?
• What is in the rig? Fixtures plus media/pixels/whatever. Even good ol’ PARs and Moles.
• Rig layout. Where is it all?  What does it actually offer, visually?
• How familiar are the operators with the busk file? Or even the desk itself?

There are many more micro factors here too but in a festival environment, none of the above are common enough between different stages and different operators. The thing about a Steinway is that it is self-contained, each key only does one note and the rest is up to the human at the other end.

When busking lighting, we often have even fewer keys (unless you happen to have endless fader/executor wings) but a fairly limitless array of possibilities of what each one can do. This is before we even get to the question of layout!

Looking at the above list, you can perhaps see situations where it is be easier to create an “ultimate” busk file. Somewhere that not all four things don’t change as much as they do between festival stages. A venue/club with a reasonably fixed rig. Often one that has a small pool of operators who are familiar with the busk setup and have honed it down in a way that suits them and the venue.

There is a risk to creating this level of ‘ultimate-ness’, though. It’s not unheard of to turn up to a club with a personal busk setup so finely honed and complex that it is next to impossible for a ‘walk-up’ LD to use.

“Hey, yeah, I know it says Steinway on it but I’ve tweaked some things around so I can do really cool stuff much more easily. All the black notes are in 4ths and that little section of 8 white notes is basically F# minor, the rest run in reverse chromatic order starting on the right, while the two notes right in the middle are the same E3.”

“Great, how do I find middle C?”

This brings us on to the other side of the Ultimate Busk File which is the optimal busk setup for the incoming LD . This has become common with the use of Morphing and Cloning techniques and portable LD/Owner desks. Who cares that you set up your piano differently to everyone else? You can just take it with you and integrate it with any stage you arrive at. With more affordable visualisation tools, no longer do you have to patch a large number of dummy heads for when you hit that ‘big’ rig or sit in the warehouse with one spot and one wash trying to work out your palettes for every single fixture type you’ll encounter this summer.  “Take two show disks into the tower?  Not me, I just Morph ‘N Go.”

Having spent years researching busk file setups, I have come to the conclusion that there there is no single ultimate busk setup but that it can be helpful to think in terms of Minimum functionality. What things can this file absolutely not do without? A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in terms of busk file.

Any optimal busk file is also well labelled and easily understood and used by anyone with a some basic learning in busking setups.

It wouldn’t take too many additions to the current functions of pro lighting desks to be able to pull this Ultimate busk file up at a moments notice, labelled and ready to go. In fact, at least half of it is already there in Auto Groups / Palettes (Auto Menus or other terms, depending on the platform). However, with the current trends mentioned above, it seems unlikely that some kind of ‘factory default’ busk file would be attractive to a market who are already all ‘doing their own thing’ and integrating into the rigs they encounter.

So, beyond the minimum it would seem the ultimate busk file is basically the one that is optimal for you, with that rig, on that stage, with that performance. It’s helpful to look at the work of others in order to learn. Just be aware that you are probably aiming for your own ‘ultimate’ and that it is unlikely to be the best setup in all situations. The art of creating your own Steinway can probably never be replaced by the ‘ultimate’, which can only be a as a default minimum.

By the way, if you have “no idea what I’m chatting about” (as a student once said) then you might like to know that I have a few places left on the Introduction To Busking Techniques online course starting in September. I also have plans for Intermediate and Advanced courses that follows on from the Intro, plus some free busking related content coming up that is being released on the list.

Join the learn.onstagelighting.co.uk Guest List and you won’t miss any of the busking related stuff coming up.

The post The Elusive Ultimate Busk File Setup first appeared on On Stage Lighting.