Many theatrical productions from Broadway to the West End have adopted moving light technology into their lighting designs. Yet the incorporation of this technology stops at the control system.
Many of these shows duplicate their control systems by using both a theatre console for the dimmers and a moving light console programmed and operated in tandem.
The Jands Hog family of consoles have been the most prolific all-purpose lighting consoles for rock’n’roll, corporate, TV and film for many years. However when it comes to use in professional theatre, the consoles are usually relegated to the control of moving lights.
Usage of two consoles is neither a backup nor redundancy. If one console dies, the other can keep the show going. At first this seems like a nice side-effect of having two consoles, however the show will look ugly with only half the lights working, so it is not a true backup solution.
Following are some examples of what makes a typical moving light console different to a theatre console:
“The programmer” is an abstract philosophy used in many moving light consoles to determine what data will get stored into a cue when record or update is pressed. It works by only recording the contents of “the programmer” into cues - all manual control of fixtures go into the programmer automatically, but any output from playing cues does not.
Therefore, when users record a cue, they are not necessarily recording everything onstage, unless they add the playback data into the programmer. A theatre console has no “programmer” - recording a cue will include everything seen onstage, unless the user tells it not to record some parts.
“The programmer” usually has the "priority" of all parts of the console, if the user manually changes the level of a light (which goes “into the programmer”), that light will be prevented from playing back further instructions from cues, until it is cleared from the programmer.
In a theatre console, manually changing the level of a fixture usually works on a latest takes precedence basis. If the programmer plays a cue, it automatically regains control of the lights, and they will fade to the correct value for that cue. This means a designer and programmer can mess with as many lights as they want, and when they press play on the next cue, the lights do what they are supposed to do in that cue.
Blind programming is a way to edit programming without seeing the changes onstage. It sounds simple, however blind operation using “the programmer” is different to blind operation in a theatre console.
Moving light consoles achieve blind programming by inhibiting the content of the programmer from the output onstage. This means the programmer cannot be contributing to the live output and operating blind at the same time and so if the programmers are partway through programming something live, and they press the blind key, the programming is taken off stage. Likewise, if they make an edit in blind and switch to live, that blind change will be seen onstage.
Blind is a separate part of a theatre console. In blind, the users get direct access to any cue, to modify it without seeing it onstage. Blind changes to the cues are not seen onstage until the next time the cue is played, and switching between live and blind modes has no effect on the current output onstage, whether from manual controls or programmed cues. This means a theatre programmer can use blind to quickly adjust any cue, at any time, without interrupting their live programming session.
One of the important disciplines that good moving light programmers should know is to constantly monitor and know “what’s in the programmer” at any one time, to avoid making mistakes. This manner of working can be powerful, it requires a good knowledge of how the console thinks, and constant vigilance by the operator.
In a theatre, most shows are plotted with a designer who collaborates with, or instructs, a programmer on what to do. In these circumstances it can be very difficult for the designer, who is usually nowhere near the console, to keep track of what is in “the programmer” at any one time. The simple rules followed by theatre consoles are favoured by theatre designers and programmers, because they are predictable, reliable, and do not require anywhere near as much vigilance on the part of the designer or programmer.
The ETC Eos and Ion consoles available from Jands, integrate well-known and loved moving light controls and functions, into a console with the heritage, functions and method of operation of a specialised theatre console, without the fundamental challenges of using “The Programmer”.
In Eos and Ion the basic principles for recording, editing and playing back a theatre show remain true to Obsession II and other specialised theatre consoles.
Following are what the users gain additionally from the ETC Eos and Ion consoles apart from the tools gained from their favourite moving light console:
- A huge onboard fixture library, with the ability to create your own fixtures right in the console
- Six encoder wheels with a colour touchscreen for controlling moving light parameters, that displays images of the colours and gobos
- Intensity, Focus, Colour and Beam palettes, which allow fast creation and updating of cues
- Automatically created gel picker for CMY & RGB fixtures
- A very cool scroller calibration tool
- Separate timing for every parameter in every cue
- Highlight & fan functions, and much more