Things Every Console Should Have - Part One
Fixing Focuses In One Go
Rob Halliday
Over the last two years or so, L&SA has run a number of reviews
of lighting consoles written by me. These, along with
Mike Wood’s articles pulling other equipment apart in
scientific detail, started as something of an
experiment. Why articles of this kind had never been run
in the entertainment technology press before is a
mystery: perhaps lack of time (for the reviews to have
value, they have to be done in some depth), perhaps fear
(all magazines are funded by advertising and so little
want to incur the wrath of displeased manufacturers).
While I can only speak about the console reviews,
grumbles have only come from a subset of the
manufacturers, with other readers happy just to read,
rarely to comment. In some cases, the reviews have been
perceived as ‘negative’, with manufacturers questioning
their function. Well, I’m quite clear on that: their
function is to tell you the things that the manufacturer
won’t tell you in their brochure or at their trade show
booth, the flaws or omissions they will leave you to
discover for yourself once they have your money. If that
means the reviews are perceived as negative then fair
enough - the gushing positives in the promotional
material will more than balance that out, and the two
really shouldn’t be read in isolation from each other.
But I have to confess, some of the negativity may also have
come from my nagging sense of disappointment in the
products I’ve got to play with. All are new, all are
interesting, all have some nice new features. But at the
same time, all miss out basic, fundamental tools that we’ve
been using for years and which it’s almost impossible to
function without, whether that be the ability to record the
entire console output as one lighting state in early
versions of the Jands Vista, or the ability to create and
add profiles to dimmers in the early versions of ETC’s Eos.
Moving forward should be about adding features to an
existing feature set, rather than about adding new
functions that give good trade show at the expense of
useful old ones. Imagine if your new car came with a
beautiful graphical dashboard, but no reverse gear since
“you don’t use it that often.”
The disappointment is also at the lack of practical new
tools for solving everyday problems. Perhaps that’s because
the people who make the consoles are now rarely the people
who actually use them, perhaps it’s because the people who
do use them are too busy doing gigs to stop and think about
how their lives might be made easier, instead choosing a
product they know well enough to work around the
limitations without thought. What’s needed is the two
working together: a console manufacturer sitting behind a
programmer watching what they’re doing, figuring out why
they’re having to do it in that cumbersome way, talking
about why, then figuring out a better tool to achieve the
same end.
I suggested this page to our editor as a way of giving
something back; of balancing up the ‘negatives’ of the
console reviews by saying, here’s a problem we have dealing
with moving lights, here’s a possible solution, how about
it? Yes, this is based on my experience, but I’d hope we
could open this forum up to others, too. And of course,
there’s a selfish part to this, too: I’ve already told any
number of console manufacturers any number of ideas. For
every one that’s made it into a console, many have been
rejected: “why would you need that”, “that’s too
complicated”, ”no-one will use that, ”we don’t know how to
implement that”. Yet when I talk to other programmers or
lighting designers a look of shared experiences comes
across their face and they nod agreement, “I’d use that,
why does no console let me do that?” Maybe giving the ideas
a wider airing will lead to more demand for their
implementation. Of course, there may be consoles that do
some of these things already - it’s hard to keep up with
what all of these products do. If so, please let me
know....
So, in the first instance: that standard scenario where the
moving lights don’t quite get hung in the same orientation
as last time. In touring theatre, this is usually a problem
front-of-house, and in particular in the proscenium area -
a great place to use moving lights (because it’s a great
place for lights but there’s usually limited space), but
one where it can be difficult to get a consistent hang from
venue to venue. Worst case, the lights might be ninety
degrees or more out, so the first half of an already
hurried focus touch-up call becomes putting the light to a
focus position, panning it back onto the stage, updating
the focus, repeating for each light in each focus. Ten
lights on the booms, ten positions per light and that’s a
hundred focuses to fix; miss one and you’ll have the
embarrassment of a light shining into the audience at some
point during the show.
Why can’t I do this: take those ten lights, set them to a
known line up focus palette, move the lights back to the
stage so they’re pointing at that known line-up position
once again, then hit ‘update - relative - these lights all
positions’. The console would figure out how many DMX steps
of correction I’d applied to each light, then apply the
same correction to all of the position palettes for each
light, warning me if that takes anything past a pan/tilt
limit so I can decide what to do.
This isn’t a ‘perfect’ solution. It can’t guarantee that a
light rigged in a different position (eg. on a FOH truss
hanging in a different place relative to the stage) would
end up spot on its correct focus; for that the console
really does need an accurate 3D model of the rig, something
that manufacturers have been promising for years but not
really delivered, and you’d need to religiously update that
model for each new venue, if you have time to do that. But
it would be a quick, practical, and often ‘good enough’
solution to a problem encountered on shows every day of
every week. Almost immediately, I’d know that all of the
lights were pointing towards the stage, to about the right
place (and certainly not into the audience!). For a show
opening in a hurry that might be good enough for a first
performance. If it’s not good enough the time I’ve just
saved moving each light back manually is freed up to do a
more detailed focus check.
This cannot be a hard function to implement. But I’d
suggest that the time saving over a reasonable length tour
would probably cover the cost of the console rental, as
well as saving the immense frustration of the person having
to update the focuses each week and letting them
concentrate on doing a better job. Which makes it all the
more mysterious that it hasn’t been a standard console
function for years....
(Note that the Strand Light Palette range now has a
function pretty much as that described....)
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