Blog? Who came up with this word anyway. It sounds profane. Blog the blogging bloggers!

Anyway, here’s my update…

Out of nowhere we find a new addition to LDI in the form of Komaden a Tokyo based company who is showing one of the more interesting LED/Video products on the showfloor. They’re Image-Mesh screens are akin to the plastic mesh fencing that you would find on a ski slope when they close off trails. Instead of being a traditional orange these pieces of mesh fencing are black with LEDs mounted on the face at 25mm intervals. This obviously lets you see through the video image somewhat like the G-LEC panels. Their Kapas II product is somewhat similar with the exception that the runs of LEDs are in cluster nodes and mounted to runs of belt making it flexible. The Kapas II is also completely submersible. Pricing for this product is estimated to be 30 days away but they expect it to be competitive with the G-LEC style product lines.

Western Startlight is offering the Fogscreen (www.fogscreen.com). This is exactly what the name implies. A screen of light haze that you can use as a rear projection surface. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie and, if I’m not mistaken, comes in 10′ lengths.

Osram-Sylvania is showing their Colormix-Flex product. A very thin belt-tape style LED strip that can be custom cut to various lengths and is fully RGB controllable. They have a several different coverings for it to frost the emission of the light sources.

Martin Professional is debuting their Maxxyz PC software to the US market. It’s basically the Maxxyz console as an offline editor and playback device. It’s slick and certainly fits the bill nicely since all of their main console competitors also offer this. What’s setting it apart from the rest is another software package that allows you to manage this through custom html interfaces. This basically means that you can have an extremely simply graphical user interface created from webpage building software for custom installations. If you’ve got a client that would be considered dangerous if they started pressing every button on the screen then you can narrow down their choices by only giving them the playback cuelists that they should be accessing by simply making an html page with an appropriate quantity of buttons. They’ve also come up with some interesting ways to interface GPS systems to all of this which is of particular interest to those of you who are working on cruise ships and need to keep track of time-of-day changes in your lighting systems. Of course, once all of this is setup you can also manage this PC based console from the internet anywhere in the world. Pretty hip indeed!

Martin (USA) is also showing the Big-Lites single-arm xenon searchlights which they do not manufacture but have taken on distribution for. Their just what the name implies. Big. Heavy. Bright. Scroller colormixing is plus as well.

Not only is LDI full of the latest innovations in live design technology, but it is also over flowing with free stuff, commonly referred to as swag. Oh sure, there are plenty of key chains, pens, pencils, note pads, cups, mugs, pens combined with flashlights, key rings with LEDs and so forth, but so far my favorite giveaway came from the good people at Littlite (booth 1001). They are giving away the most awesome thing ever: Wacky Package stickers!! Remember those? They were like trading cards but they were take offs on popular consumer products, i.e., Crust Toothpaste instead of Crest, Scorch mouthwash instead of Scope. I used to collect these as a kid and it’s a welcome comeback at the LDI show!

Rumor on the show floor has it that LED technology might be the next big thing.

All sarcasm aside, it looks like we’re truly entering the realm of “usable” LED fixtures. By this I mean fixtures that are bright and savvy enough to start replacing our traditional fixture choices.

Low resolution video elements are abounding as well thanks in no small part to these advancements in LED technology and it appears that almost everyone is jumping into the game with configurable bricks of LEDs that can have video mapped across them in one fashion or another.

Between seminar speaking and meetings yesterday I personally haven’t had a chance to spend time getting all the details of these various products but one that stood out was a product that I saw on the James Thomas Engineering booth. A configurable version of LED cubes that can have various video mapped across it. What set’s it slightly apart from the rest is the fact that they’re actually passing video through one ethernet line to the first cube and then daisy-chaining the rest of the configuration in what will be a tidy little package. It’s completely in it’s beta form at the moment but this looks like it shows real promise in the upcoming year and worth watching out for.

More to come. Stay tuned…

Every year I say I’m turning in early, and every year I turn out to be a liar. The usual Friday night party circuit seemed especially busy last night, and especially boisterous. It all started early for us, as we held a cocktail reception at our booth to offically launch Live Design. The booth was packed with friends, well-wishers, and a wide array of industry types: Luc LaFortune and Nol Van Genuchten, Michael Tait and Winky Fairorth of Tait Towers, legendary tour manager Jake Berry, Peter Wynne Wilson, Seth Jackson, Clifton Taylor, Dawn Beveridge from d&b, Rob Halliday, Vari-Lite’s Bryan Matthews, Rachel Scharff from Scharff Weisberg, Bob Daggers from American Harlequin, and many, many more whose names I am forgetting at the moment (oh where for art thou, lost brain cells). We ate, we drank, we schmoozed. And I managed to make a suitable fool of myself on the mic, and not with my mad rap skills.

That party ended as the show closed at six, and a whole contingent of the Live Design staff and others made our way to the Genlyte/Var-Lite/ET party at the Rosen Centre, where I managed to spill Marian Sandberg’s glass of wine all over her lemon yellow suit, which she managed to turn into a topic of conversation all night long. It was a great crowd, featuring not only Bob Schacherl, George Masek, Heinz Roy, Alan Keene and the rest of the Genlyte posse but an assortment of designers and programmers, including old friend Marsha Stern.

From there we stumbled down to the poolside Rose Brand party, which was packed as usual, and then, despite my best intentions of retiring for the night, I found myself heading over to this club Glo, which was a launch party for yet another new magazine by the folks at Total Production US. Bruce Jordahl and Robert Mokry led a band that rocked the house, and from there it all becomes a bit of a blur I’m afraid. I believe we all had fun, and no one seems to have suffered serious bodily image, and so here we are Saturday morning on the show floor, ready to go at it again another day, and I’m sure another night.

Veteran LD Lee Rose of Design Partners stopped by the Live Design booth to chat about some of his latest projects, one of which is his 20th year lighting the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show. “Back in that first show in the 80s, it was all balloons, Par-Cans and color changes,” Lee says. Now he’s using everything from media servers to LEDs and beyond. My how times have changed.