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The Geek Side of Lighting
Saturday didn't start off so well. I was going to ride my pedal bike into town for the day. That was not to be. On getting on my bike, I find that it had flat. Rather than fixing the flat right then, I put it off till Sunday, and drove my car into town. This turned out to be fortuitous, as the theatre was having 'cleaning day', and I was able to pick up a few pieces of furniture to haul home. However on the way back in, I decided to take the 'scenic route' down to Flatts and back. It was such a nice day for a drive. My car didn't think so. It decided to konk out a little ways back from Flatts on Middle Road. I spent an hour or two sitting in the grass waiting for the tow truck to arrive. In waiting, I noticed that there weren't too many, if any, 20 year Toyota's still around. Most of the drivers had spiffy new cars. So being without transportation made it a bit difficult to make it to a party I supposed to go to.
Instead, much belatedly, I made it back to BMDS and worked on finishing up making DMX cables for the four new High End Color Command lights the G&S Society donated. Making up the cables went well. When it was all said and done, I had the following DMX chain:
In an earlier article, I made some misguided remark as to why the Color Command offset appeared to be off by one. Upon reading the instructions, I found that the first channel is assigned to the Color Control box itself. Sets of four channels after that are each assigned to the Color Command lights: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and beam width. The colors turn out to be bright, intense and beautiful.
I found that even though the DMX USB Pro has a DMX in, it doesn't segregate the in-stream from the out-stream, it is simply pass through device. Therefore I couldn't connect up our ETC Express 72/144 Light Board and use it as a physical submaster board input to the software. I've ordered another DMX USB Pro to resolve that little issue: one will be 'in', one will be DMX control 'out'.
My laptop is connected to the internet through a wireless access point. My PDA has 802.11 wireless capbility. The LightFactory software has a remote telnet capability with software that can be loaded on my Windows Mobile 5 PDA. The combination makes for a time saving and vocal chord saving ability to test light focus right from within the grid.
The easy part is done. Now the fun part of doing the lighting design is next. #