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Lighting

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USA - Chauvet's Orbiter RG is a three-channel, DMX-512 barrel laser with red and green 4.9mW laser diodes and laser sky effects. The barrel swivels 180° and rotates continuously clockwise and counterclockwise. The unit is capable of projecting a choice of four green effects, four red effects or six red and green effects. It features a surface-coated mirror to enhance luminosity and has sound-activated programs built-in, which are accessed automatically when the DMX signal is lost. The unit is linkable via Master/Slave, is programmable via any universal DMX-512 controller and cooled by an internal fan. It features a micro-step motor for smoother operation and a digital LCD display. Orbiter RG is an FDA-registered Class 3R laser.

(Sarah Rushton-Read)

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Compulite's Vector lighting control system, which we featured in our coverage of the Australian 'Logies' in July 2003, is doing very well. Currently with 10 Vector units installed worldwide, including two at Channel 9 in Melbourne and another at the Palais du Sport in Paris. With up to 40 due to be in place by the end of the first quarter of 2004, Compulite's managing director Yehuda Shukrun was pleased with the system's progress.
PLASA Show 2025 - Banner - June-Aug 2025

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UK - Creative Technology has marked its relocation to a new 54,000sq.ft facility in Crawley by announcing a 'single brand' service operation, in which the staging services of MCL London, currently operating from within CT's premises, will now be amalgamated and operate under the CT London brand. At the same time, the company has committed to a heavy investment in new inventory and technology.

Managing director Mark Elliott said of the strategic decision to operate as a single entity: "Being able to centralize all our resources into a single building has enabled us to further develop full service capability to provide a wide range of resources. This includes video, lighting, audio, and staging equipment, together with our ever-increasing range of indoor and outdoor LED screens."

A substantial upgrade to CT's hire fleet will see heavy investment, with the company inten

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Vari-Lite's new toy was the Series 3000Q luminaire, an expansion of the powerful 1200W Series 3000 fixtures, but designed with low-noise operation in mind. With its 'Q' for 'quiet', the new fixture claims an audible noise output reduction of 50% from the original Series 3000 series, say VL. This reduction has been achieved by slowing the fixture's seven fans and redesigning some key elements to better handle the increased heat load. A high-performance UV/IR window filters unwanted non-visible wavelengths from the lamp that would otherwise be passed through the optical path; other changes include the use of higher temperature materials and more efficient airflow paths. The Series 3000Q features all operational features currently in the Series 3000 fixtures - the trade-off is strictly thermal, say VL.

Vari-Lite will provide a "Q-kit" which includes everything you need to conver

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UK - Pop shows don't always go hand in hand with musical integrity, but the recent XTina Aguilera tour combined real musical talent with some imaginative, Xellently Xecuted production skills, under the production management of Rob Kern. (She did a Prince on us and changed her name to XTina - maybe setting up the Xmas single - sorry, no more X puns.) We caught up with Kern (and the show) at Wembley Arena on 5 November.

Kern took on the role of production manager for the 'Stripped' tour in March when rehearsals began, leading into production rehearsals in June. Taking on the World 'XTina' style began in earnest with 46 shows in the US before her first Arena tour across Europe and the UK, taking in 29 shows, then three nights in Tokyo, before finishing with seven dates in Australia.

In addition to Aguilera there are five musicians, three backing singers and eight dancers on stag

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Enliten's Exhibition PAR has been a big seller to rental houses serving the auto show market in the US: now its incorporation of Osram's new 150W HSD 7000°K daylight lamp, as demonstrated at LDI, makes this a lighter, whiter proposition than ever before. White Light showed its VSFX range of moving effects projectors

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City Theatrical's latest lighting tools included a line of versatile accessories for use with Color Kinetics' LED-based lighting systems. The first accessories in the line are for use with Color Kinetics' popular ColorBlast, ColorBurst and ColorBlaze units: standard accessories include accessory holders, top hats, half top hats, spread lenses, egg crate louvres, and barndoors. The company showed moving prototype versions of the Color Kinetics ColorBlaze 48 (pictured), while also on display was a moving version of ETC's MultiPAR-3, with Wybron CXI colour mixing scroller; both were motorized in the tilt axis with 180° of movement, 16-bit control, and encoder feedback.

Also from this prolific award-winner was Lightwright 4, which picked up the LDI Product of the Year award in the Software category. V4 is the latest version of Lightwright with a host of new features - among them a 62 DMX

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The 'big' lighting specialist from Texas, Syncrolite showed a prototype of its new fixture, the MX1000 - but the unit is so new that we'll have to wait to tell you about it.

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Selecon introduced the followspot version of the Pacific luminaire (pictured right, with Philip Sargent), bearing the familiar characteristics of the Pacific's innovative heat management technology. The Pacific followspot offers a wide choice of lamp sources to suit most throw requirements, is silent due to its fanless design, and is built with easy maintenance and ergonomics in mind.

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Strand's new SLD sinewave dimmers received their world debut at LDI. The SLD dimmers feature true sinewave output, making for quiet lamps and accurate control. The SST (Solid State Transformer) dimmer modules can dim a wide range of loads including incandescent, inductive and capacitive devices from a fraction of a watt to full capacity, and produce less than 1% harmonic distortion. The units carry built-in short circuit and overload protection, and SLD status reporting and advanced waveform compensation is standard. The units are available with Single Pole, Double Pole and RCD circuit breakers.

Strand also introduced a new USB Key drive with its Designer Remote software built in. Plug the new drive into the USB port on a PC or Mac notebook with a wired or wireless Ethernet connection and you'll be able to access displays and controls on any Strand 300 or 500 series console.

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Robert Bell was showing the new Marquee ILC (Intelligent Lighting Control) console, which received a good reception on the ET stand. The Marquee line - consisting of the 24/48, 48/96 and now the ILC - brings a theatre-friendly hardware interface to the power of the Horizon lighting control software which has previously found favour in architectural and worship markets. ILC features four attribute encoders, a dedicated level wheel and 14 pageable hardware playbacks. Many visitors made positive comments on the 'Century Array' - a panel of 100 buttons for fixture selection that serves as group and palette select: usually a feature of more expensive consoles, this is an inexpensive add-on option to ILC.

ILC also features what ET call a 'Flat' fixture model, presenting all moving lights (of whatever make or model) to the user in the same way, e.g. strobe values are shown in hertz and gobo r

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ESTA's dedicated Interconnectivity Pavilion was designed to offer an engineering model of how Remote Device Management (RDM) actually works, and an illustration of the benefits it will offer the lighting industry. And the benefits are many: it provides an automatic equipment check, telling the controller exactly what fixtures are connected; it does away with the need for DIP switch/fixture display settings - parameters can now be set directly from the console or RDM controller (good news for manufacturers and for productions with DMX devices in inaccessible places); also, the controller is alerted with status and error messages, including faults and lamp hours. The Pavilion also ably demonstrated how the RDM data packets run through the DMX data stream with no ill-effects on performance, even on non-RDM compatible fixtures.

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Robe Show Lighting displayed their full range of luminaires, including the latest ColorSpot 1200 AT (for Advanced Technology) and the 1200E AT version - which includes an electronic ballast for flicker-free operation, improved light output and lamp life, and power-saving mode.

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Belgium - At this year's ceremony of the International Laser Display Association (ILDA) awards at the Brussels Plaza Theater, German laser specialist Lobo not only won more awards than any other company (for the sixth time running), but with a total of 12 of the 'Laser Oscars' also won more awards than ever before.

With its 12 awards including four first prizes, almost one third of all the ILDA Awards for outstanding creative achievements went to Lobo during the glamorous ceremony. This brings the Aalen-based company's total in just 10 years to 69 ILDA awards, including more than 20 first prizes.

Four of Lobo's 3D beam shows were awarded prizes, including two first prizes. All winning beam shows originate from the Lobo's Software Contract - a show subscription service that offers subscribers one beam show per month.

Key to many of Lobo's achievements is its laser and multi

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Martin Professional picked up the Entertainment Lighting Product of the Year Award for its Maxxyz lighting console and the Staging & Effects Product of the Year for Jem's ZR 24/7 Hazer. On top of this, to satisfy customer demand, they introduced a new moving head laser fixture - the MAC 250 Laser. This high intensity 532nm, 250mW (green) YAG laser offers 540° pan and 257° tilt, plug and play operation and a patented intelligent safety feature. It comes with a range of effects, including radial flowering effects and an upgradeable library of graphics. Other features include full range electronic dimming and a pulsating variable-speed strobe, while a high-speed, rotating, three-facet prism effect extends the effects capability. Martin also showed its Jem and Magnum brand smoke machines, seen in September at PLASA, while the audio branch of the family, Mach, showed the new, low profile SP

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UK - "At first there wasn't going to be any grid, we were asked to rig a system off the king poles." Bryan Grant of audio contractor Britannia Row Productions describing the preliminaries of what is always a big event in the music industry calendar, the MTV Europe Awards (EMA's for short). Unrealistic as that might seem - this is after all Europe's premier music awards show (isn't it?), the initial belief that you could stage a world class event off some tent poles proved a partial blessing.

"The design was very different this year," continued Grant, "they brought in Mark Fisher [creative director was Ray Winkler] and he produced a quite minimalist set design, a big departure from previous years. Plus the show was characterized by multiple performance points, with many presentation areas as well."

The concept predicated a highly distributed syste

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Pulsar's increasingly evident Chroma range of LED lighting fixtures was on show, including the new 30% brighter ChromaBank batten and the ChromaPanel300 - the half-size version of the ChromaPanel600 (600mm square) colour changing LED tile.

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Italian cable manufacturer Link showed two new cabling options for the Yamaha PM1D digital mixing console, as part of its Eurocable range. Bundling SCSI, video sync and audio cables into one casing and mating it with its proprietary LK connectors, Link's new solution offers offers reduced set-up and get-out times with greater cable connection integrity. The elegantly-named CVS LK YMHSCSI is suitable for connecting the CS1D and DSP1D modules, as well for cascading DSP1D, DSP1D EX and AO8/DIO8 connections. The CVS LK YMHPM1D is composed of a single cable to connect the PM1D control surface to the brain unit. In the US, these products are available from distributor Atlantic Audio, headed up by Craig Beyrooti.

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Among the new architectural lighting fixtures on show from Altman was the SpectraPar (right) - an LED-based colour changing luminaire for indoor or outdoor use. SpectraPar utilizes 36 1W LEDs inside a cast aluminium housing, and offers three interchangeable lenses.

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UK - For the third consecutive year Brighton-based, lighting and power management consultancy, Studio 23, has lit London's premier outdoor ice rink in the beautiful setting of the courtyard at Somerset House. In association with Bryan Leitch of Siyan Lighting - LD for Coldplay and Feeder - Nick Read of Studio 23 - LD for the ice rink - came up with a new concept for the design. Read told L&SI: "This year, we knew we had a lot of corporate and publicity events, including many publicity photo shoots for bands such as The Sugababes and Busted. We therefore wanted to provide a design that was both attractive and flexible; we wanted colour changing facilities and movement of image on the ice."

Read needed a colour changing, water-proof unit that was reliable, punchy and relatively small, as they would have to hang from a 'flambeau' post, in all weathers, for three months, he had s

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ETC was making an impression at LDI on two fronts. Product first, and the US launch of the Source Four Revolution, the moving head version of the industry standard profile luminaire, with improved optical system. Bill Gallinghouse, VP of business development and marketing, told me that the response to the Revolution has been excellent since its launch at PLASA, and the interest shown at LDI had certainly continued the trend.Away from product, ETC was also noted for its LDI Student Sponsorship programme, which again saw six lucky lighting design students from across the US join the company on an all-expenses-paid trip to LDI to 'schmooze' with leading industry practitioners. ETC's Fred Foster semi-joked that this initiative was introduced in an attempt to do something better with ETC's money than simply throwing big parties - and it looks like it'll pay off (although the parties were good

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As its Pixelline LED fixtures become an increasingly common sight on tour and on TV, James Thomas Engineering used LDI to launch PixelDrive for Mac, the Macintosh-based version of its new control concept for driving DMX fixtures, which has been developed alongside IRAD, the developers of the RADlite digital media server. The Mac version is expected to find particular favour in the US market and we can expect further additions to the range next year with the development of a 'value-engineered', streamlined version of RADlite on both platforms.

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Dimming specialist IES showed its iSine dimming technology, which it claims is the world's most advanced sinewave dimming technology. With a number of high profile installations across Europe and a Best Product Award from this year's Showtech exhibition in Berlin, the Dutch manufacturer has some weight to back up its claim. With iSine, IES dispenses with what it calls the 'mature' phase control techniques of conventional dimming systems, which inherently create unwanted noise and harmonic distortion because of the way they 'chop' into the wave form. iSine technology's far greener solution employs an Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). For more on IGBT, sinewave dimming and dimming technology in general, see this month's Technical Focus feature on installed dimming systems.

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Color Kinetics Inc (CKI) had one of the most eye-catching stands, thanks largely to its striking new LED effect, the iColor Tile FX (see picture). Each 2ft by 2ft (600mm by 600mm) panel incorporates 144 individually addressable RGB LED nodes (432 LEDs in total), powered by CKI's Chromasic system, enabling surprisingly high-resolution control of the light output - allowing morphing colour waves, animated objects, logos, emblems and customized patterns.

CKI's Light System Manager is an integrated software/hardware solution engineered to enable large-scale and intricately designed installations that exceed the limitations of today's lighting programming and network protocols. LSM facilitates the management, authoring and control of show effects that span multiple DMX universes and scale to tens of thousands of individually controlled LED-based nodes.

The PDS-60ca is a cost-effective co

  1. Martin Mania DC2 turns up the heat
  2. PRG announces major restructuring in US
  3. Doughty's new pantographs and trolleys
  4. Fabric upgrades with Coemar and PixelPars
  5. DPL in Victory lighting
  6. LSC launches new website
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