Rick Hutton and the gang from Inlight Gobos celebrated its fifth year in business.

You might have seen Patrick Dierson and Rodd McLaughlin of Idyll Hands Imagery running from booth to booth; okay maybe sauntering, but they were keeping busy as they provided content for the booths of PRG, Element Labs, Main Light, and Applied Electronics.

Big changes afoot with the PixelRange of LED products in the US. James Thomas Engineering, Ltd in conjunction with James Thomas Engineering, Inc., announced the spin off of the sales and distribution of the PixelRange of LED products in the USA. PixelRange Inc. has been created to deal with the sales, distribution, and support of the complete range of Pixel products throughout the US, Canada, and South America.

The new company will be headed up by industry veterans Dave Thomas and Blaine Engle. “The goal is to provide a framework that will allow us to focus entirely on Pixel products and to build on the level service we offer our customers,” says Thomas. “We have plans to expand our facility here in order to give our customers even better value and shorter lead times in the future.”

Going back to day one of LDI, the floor was busy and everyone you met had a suggestion of something that you just had to see or a booth you must stop at. A few lighting designers that we crossed paths with–or rather aisles with–shared some of their first-day finds with us, and in turn with you. We asked what they thought was cool or interesting to them so far on the show floor.

Dawn Chiang:
You have the Lancelot followspot from Robert Juliat–a 4kW monster unit, but they are also trying new things like putting in gobos; beyond just using this as a traditional followspot. You can also use this as a lighting source in all kinds of applications at 4kW that is very, very bright. Wybron InfoTrace is a whole great idea. As more things come onboard with RDM, you don‘t have to wait for CAN; that is really neat. Eos is very promising. I also saw the Strand Palette in its early form in spring so I also want to go follow-up with that here, see what they have done with that. Screen Goo, of course, came out last year, and that is still a fascinating idea.

Bill Klages:

I visited Jands and their new Vista console. It is a new approach to moving light control, but it could indicate what could happen in the future being a very visually based windows type operation; its very fast.

Jeff Ravitz:

I got a very thorough rundown of the new Compulite console today. It is really intelligent. I am speaking as a designer that doesn‘t do the actual programming but needs the programming done in a quick efficient way for my programmer. This console is really laid out in a user friendly way. I also saw some good LEDs. Can you believe that at this show I saw a few LEDs? Something that I was really interested in and got a very thorough rundown on was all the new tungsten wash lights. Martin, ClayPaky, and Coemar all have great tungsten wash lights. Oh, and the new Vari-Lite VL3500 wash. There are a lot of new great fixtures that kick ass. Year to year, sometimes you can‘t really see what the progression in automated fixtures is, but this year you can really see some interesting new thoughts going into them.

Nic Phillips:

Compulite vector and the Vari-Lite VL3500 wash, best things in the show. Of course, EvenLED, at the A.C.T booth, it is fantastic. Michael Eddy thinks it is one of the great things at the show, and I agree.

Chuck Dillingham:

I think the coolest thing at the show is that Vari-Lite has their whole history of fixtures in their booth, and they are all working. I think that is one of the neatest things to me. Coemar has a beautiful booth this year. They always do a fantastic job. I am really excited about a lot of the new stuff Elation has, and the price point is unbelievable. It will be good to see what Eric Loeder does for them. He brought Martin to where they are in us so we‘ll see what he can do for Elation.

Jamie Burnett:

ETC‘s new Eos board is very cool. It can change color very easily; it has like a color wheel that you can just touch or you can match the color up to a swatchbook; it is for moving lights; it‘s a whole new way of thinking for their boards. You just walk up to it and you say, “Oh, that is obvious.” I don‘t know about the initial programming and how long that takes to do. I would have to spend a day with it, but right now, I think it is very cool.

Solomon Rosenzweig:

There is an overload of LEDs. It seems like a lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon…We are still trying to sort them all out. I am looking forward to the price of LEDs coming down. We aren‘t here to see anything specific; we are just here to see what‘s new, see if we can sort out a trend. We are definitely looking at more video, doing more video as scenery. I was looking at the new High End Systems DL.2 or the revised DL.2; we are looking at using that in some projects, it is a pretty interesting light. There are some good possibilities there.

Editor’s Note: For more Barbizon Lighting blogging, check out their blog.

Tuesday. October 24

Ahhh…home sweet home. It’s nice to be back in NC and getting all the sand out of my throat. As much as I love Vegas, and I do love me some Vegas, it’s tough after a few days to get my Southern sinuses adjusted to the dry air, and I’m never smart enough to carry lip balm, so that’s another pain. But I’m home with a few final notes, and more photos will be online later today.

But first, go check out David Lincecum’s blog at ETC for his ideas on the site. He had better wifi apparently than I did, so his daily updates were more frequent.

This was a good year for LDI, with some really nice new products coming out. My thoughts are still a bit of a jumble, so pick what you can out of the mess that is my brain for this year.

Phoebus has a new line of tactical flashlights, very affordably priced. They’ve got a neat gift box set with several lights in it that retails for under $100, so I think it’s on my Christmas list. I need more flashlights like a hole in my head, but they’re just so cool.

I-light has a couple of new additions to their product line, including Rob Groff, formerly of ETC and Color Kinetics. Rob will add a history in our industry to their sales force, which is good, especially with the addition of their RGB Plexineon, color-mixing DMX-controllable LED strips. Not flexible right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that happen within a few months.

Robe has a new 700 fixture that looks pretty sexy. They’re really increasing their presence in the US market and getting some positive reviews from end users. I haven’t had much time to put my hands on the fixtures myself, but I’m looking forward to a closer examination of them.

I got some time on the EOS and Congo Jr. desks and they seem to be very powerful new consoles. The EOS is pretty intuitive, and the RPN programming of the Congo worried me a bit, but was really a lot easier to wrap my head around than I thought it would be. I’ll admit that I’m spoiled, I’ve been an Express/Expression user for almost fifteen years now and it’s hard to change my thought processes. But the new desks have a ton of features and with a little training are pretty easy to program.

In an interesting point of industry convergence, the new ETC desk has a “GOTO” button and the new Strand desk has a “Release” button. Nobody’s going to find that funny but me and I’m going to get nasty emails from manufacturers because of it. Oh well, I managed to get all the way through the show blog without offending anyone, and that’s just not right :).

And a big honkin’ congrats to Charles Kirby for winning the Wally Newcomer Award for his Lightbox product. Lightbox is a neat method for lighting models of sets using LEDs, and it’s great for educational institutions. There will be pictures up soon.

No really, leave me alone, they’ll be up soon. Jeez, I’ve eventually gotta go do some work to justify my existence so the nice people will keep paying me to blog for you.

I didn’t win the Harley. That made me a sad panda. But a lot of money was raised for the Behid the Scenes charity, which is a good thing.

More photos to come, I promise, and maybe some more final thoughts once I go through my bag of literature and swag. If you liked this blog thingy, shoot me a comment or an email. I’m attention-starved. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

So between the spotty wifi at the Imperial Palace, the dreadful wifi at the convention center and the vagaries of Blogger, I wasn’t able to get yesterday’s post up until today. But there are a ton of new pictures up on our Flickr page, so go check them out. Some are products, some are people, and some are products that are people. Just kidding. Kinda.

Given the vagaries of trying to get this online, it may be late Monday when I post again, but this has been a fun experiment. If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog, feel free to leave a comment. Bloggers love comments. Really. It’s kinda like shouting into a canyon, and comments are the echo that we occassionally get back.

Gotta go, the iron’s hot.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

So the pizza tastes like cardboard and my feet hurt - must be Day 2!

Pathway Connectivity, the Pantheon of Canadian Cool, are showing the Pathport Uno, a single-gang Pathport Node which required no field terminations and lets you put a Ethernet node in a one-gang box for permanent installations.

That doesn‘t sound nearly as cool in writing as it is when I was holding one. Oh well, some things just don‘t translate, I suppose. The other cool thing is it starts out life as Artnet-resident, Strand ShowNet-resident and Pathport resident, so it can retrofit into multiple existing systems. Is that helping? I think this product is pretty snazzy, and can see a lot of use for it. They also have additional products for their eDin line of devices, which mount on Din rail in standard electrical back boxes, so you can drop a modular DMX merger, splitter, demultiplexer or whatever in a standard box and wire it up with 120V power to the power supply unit. In permanent installations that don‘t require a lot of modifications by the end user, it provides a great solution to the equipment racks I‘m getting tired of building.

Here‘s a couple of things I think I think. Just random stuff from the floor.

1) I think I like the fact that LEDs are getting really bright, but I wish they‘d all point them somewhere else.

2) I think the GE booth is pretty. Nice one, Peter.

3) I heard that there‘s an IP65 video wall on the show floor. Hmmm…Where‘s a fire hose?

4) I think the guy with two turntables and a microphone in the center of the show floor is definitely NOT where it‘s at.

5) I think less than 30 people will get that reference.

6) I think strobes are cool. I think the guy will recover from the seizures eventually.

7) I think the new Kino Flo fluorescent fixture should come with a pair of sunglasses. Monstrously bright. No really, BIG light.
Speaking of big light - Arri‘s 18K is almost big enough to fold someone up and hide them inside. That‘s an amazingly bright fixture, and now they have a DMX-controllable automated yoke for it. That‘s just sick. In a good way. The movement on the yoke if nice and smooth, and can also be controlled by analog if you haven‘t yet joined the rest of us in the late 20th century.

There‘s a bunch of people here, and a lot of folks that I‘ve talked to are either here for the first time or the first time in several years. That speaks well for our business, because there were a few soft years here since 2000, so it‘s nice to see a lot of traffic at almost every booth.

New toys from Rosco, and I don‘t mean Alan Kibbe‘s goatee. They have thing called LightPad, which is super-thin side-illuminated panel which uses white LEDs. It‘s good for under-dash lighting, product photos, or anywhere that you just can‘t get light or can‘t have any heat. Pretty cool stuff.

Gotta go, time for lunch with a designer friend of mine. I‘ll try to get back with all y‘all later today. Bet you didn‘t know that was the correct plural of “y‘all,” did you?

Friday, October 20

LVCC wifi - we’re not just overpriced, we’re slow, too. Looks like a whole lot of info trying to get crammed through a limited number of those tubes that the internet is made up of.

Anyway - halfway through day one is looking like a good show. Foot traffic is pretty high, and it’s always good to see old friends that you only get a chance to see at trade shows.

So I was confused by the SSRC initial press stuff, but Aaron cleared me up. They aren’t making a lift, nor do they have a plan to make a lift, but what they’re making is a pantograph cable management solution, which I think is pretty cool. It can handle up to 36 circuits, depending on length of travel, and that can provide a lot of solutions for small motorized rigging projects where cable management is a huge issue. It’s always a challenge to deal with the multicable, and this looks a lot more elegant than some of the cable reels or pick points that we’ve been using up until now.

More photos on the way, but they may have to wait until this evening. Flickr Uploader is valiantly attempting to send the pictures up the stream, but I’m not holding my breath.

So far the most amusing thing on the show floor has been the Doug Fleenor Cult of Personality. Doug (Dr. DMX) Fleenor has set up 21 life-size cardboard cutouts of himself around various booths and random places around the convention center. If you can find 5 Dougs, you win a T-shirt. It took me about 20 minutes, but I wasn’t really looking that hard.

Spent a little time in the Strand booth, and there’s some interesting things coming out of Genlyte’s acquisition, including a new raceway product that merges some Strand technology with some Intelligent Raceway Technology, IGBT dimmers available in the new A21 architectural dimmer rack (which is really slick), and some portions of the Marquee GUI being put into the new Palette software. I’ll have clearer updates on all that stuff once I give it another fly-by, but they’ve got some nice things going on there.

Stagecraft Industries is showing the biggest Emergency Lighting Transfer Switch I’ve ever seen. Somewhere in the neighborhood of six feet tall by 4 feet wide, the unit has 36 circuits of transfer capacity, which is a TON. They also just shipped 15 of those units to the new addition to the Venetian Hotel & Casino here in Vegas, which had to make for a happy day.

Steve Hoffman is here showing product from his new venture, GoboMan. Steve has a line of gobos, color and a small pattern projector that lists for under $100 and looks like a great little unit for retail applications. It’s 75 watts and comes with 5 patterns. Not a bad toy to come out of the gate with.

And on a sad note, I’m sitting at lunch and notice that the guy next to me is wearing an Applied Electronics shirt, so I ask about Jim, the owner, who I knew from many moons ago. Well, Jim passed away back in March, and I hadn’t heard about it until now. Jim was good people, and he’ll be missed. I remember when their old place was on Monroe Rd. behind the Purple Picket furniture store on Charlotte, and I used to drive the truck over from the rental shop I was working in to pick up our rushed trussing order because we’d booked more stage roofs that we could actually build, and had to get Jim to rush a pile of truss through production for us. They always took care of us, no matter how short the notice, and always at a fair price. Adios, buddy.

I’ll be back with more this evening, but now I’m off to my shift of booth duty.

Post-Show Wrap Up

Top Two Picks On Day 1:

After Day 1 I’m ready to announce my top picks of the show floor so far…

#1: Vari*Lite’s prototype VL3500 Wash. A big fat, 10″ lens, the VL2C like dual color wheels in addition to VL’s 3000 Series color mixing, and an output somewhere between 45-50,000 lumens make this a real winner. It’s a buzz on the floor for sure.

#2: Compulite Vector range of consoles. Only having spent a couple of hours on the desk with Chris Nathan, it’s looking like a real winner. While not exactly a new product, it’s sort of new that Nick Freed is the distributer and the software is getting to something special. Get this Broadway/touring–Vector can store both pictures, notes (like focus notes dude), audio and video by cue. It’s neato as you could record the spot cues and the audio stored in the console would playback by cue.

Thoughts On Day 2:

Day two of the show and my new product of the day is OSRAM’s AluPAR 56 lamp. While they have been touting this lamp for over a year now, it wasn’t until their intimate luncheon today that we actually saw one turned on–the first public showing in the US! The demo showed us the existing 300w PAR56 next to the AluPAR and the reaction in the room was an resounding “Oooo ahhh.” Really–it’s significantly brighter and the color temperature is beautiful more closely resembling that of the HPL type lamps. On top of this amazing new PAR light quality, it weighs 66% less. Think of how much weight that will save in our old PAR56 strips! That’s hot.. It’s also eco-friendly being fully recyclable as the aluminum reflector separates from the glass lens. Hopefully next year we’ll see the beginnings of the PAR64 AluPAR; when that comes OSRAM will really have this next gen PAR lamp in the bag.

They have a great looking booth that not only has a glass water wall, but the real draw is one of their actual OSCAR’s is on hand for photo op’s. Word from the keeper of OSCAR day and night during the show is it’s not quite the date magnet you would think it would be. One is never enough….

Wow! It’s over. I wish I could say that it just flew by, but it was so many months in the making for us at Live Design, that I can’t even remember what day it is at the moment.

Anyway, a few folks I meant to mention during the show, but if you’ve been on here, you might have noticed that my onsite blogging time equaled zero, what with our time spent on putting out the first ever LDI Show Daily each day.

So here are some folks worth mentioning, and more will follow in the pages of Live Design in our monthly product news…

Special Mine Services manufactures electrical connectors with ampacities from milliamps up to 500 amps. This year, they introduced the Boot Entertainment Cam Style Connector for cable sizes #6 up to 4/0 W cable.

A.C. Lighting Ltd held a major online competition to win a Jands Vista S3 lighting control system and bonus Vista prize draw at the tradeshow. The competition coincided with the launch of the new Vista S3 and Vista App hardware and software solutions. In addition, there was a bonus prize draw to win a 512-channel Vista control system. I was not present for the drawing, so I’ll have to get back to you all on the winners.

Ribbonlift Acquisition Inc., designer and manufacturer of the patented Ribbonlift positioning system, announced that it has changed its name to Actua Systems Inc. Ribbonlift Acquisition, a subsidiary of Imagility Inc., had purchased the assets of the Ribbonlift business in May of 2006. The company introduced a new DMX-compatible Ribbonlift at LDI. The proprietary technology utilizes three steel ribbons that “zip” together to form a column. The design gives Ribbonlift products the maximum extension possible from an extremely compact form factor. The result is a lift that offers unprecedented portability and versatility for positioning lights, cameras, projectors, screens, set elements, and other live-event applications. The Ribbonlift‘s unique look and functionality make it ideal for stage use.

ETC showed off two new consoles (Eos and Congo jr.). I was lucky enough to get a preview when I visited ETC‘s headquarters in Madison, WI just a few week ago, but check them out for yourselves firsthand. The Eos console also won an LDI Best Debuting Product Award in the lighting category (along with Wybron’s new InfoTrace system). ETC also exhibited the new Pharos AVC.

Creative Stage Lighting currently has equipment out on tour with Third Day and moe. The company is also on tour with Celtic Woman in Japan and has provided lighting equipment for Garth Fagan Dance, TransWorld Entertainment‘s annual conference, The Disco Biscuits‘ Camp Bisco V Festival, and Yellowcard. In addition, the company has also added the following gear to its rental inventory: Sanyo 10k Projectors, High End Systems Color Pro FXs, Martin MAC 2000 Profile II Electronics, LeMaitre Low Smoke Generator Fogger,
8′x33′ Soft LED High Resolution Curtain Panels with Fiber Optics, High End Catalyst Pro V4, Tomcat 10′ Black Swingwing Trusses, MA Lighting grandMA Light console, 25′x30′ Encore Backdrops, and High End Systems Color Commands.

Digidesign was outside at ET Live showing off D-Show Profile. It‘s a compact version of the D-Show flagship console/controller in its VENUE line of live mixers. D-Show Profile is compatible with all existing VENUE hardware and software, including existing stage and FOH racks for connecting to Pro Tools HD and Pro Tools LE systems via a hardware option–allowing seamless recording and/or playback of sound effects, pre-recorded tracks, music beds, etc. It also offers expanded show control options with the new General Purpose Interface (GPI). Its eight GPI inputs/outputs allow D-Show Profile to send or respond to external equipment via simple switch closures for automation cues, etc. With the new Event List feature in D-Show 2.5, users can build and customize macros that enable the console to perform multiple functions with a single button push, footswitch press or fader movement.

Professional Wireless Systems, who received an LDI Product of the Year Award in the sound category, also introduced the PWS Intermodulation Analysis System (IAS). The system was designed by leading RF expert/software developer Jason Eskew to quickly resolve frequency coordination issues for concert, corporate, sports and broadcast event installs. PWS general manager Carl Cordes reports that the recently completed IAS 4.4 system enables RF technicians to save valuable setup time by combining a database of wireless performance equipment from any manufacturer.

Well, that’s all for now. You’ll be hearing more about the great products from the show in the pages of Live Design in the coming months in our product news. Thanks to everyone for what seems to have been the best LDI show to date! Now, get some rest and start all that follow-up!

I can only assume that this is a record attendance year for LDI. I happened to be standing on the show floor when the doors opened on day one and haven’t seen a crowd barrel through doors like that since The Who tickets went on sale. It was quite impressive.?

There are definitely some notable products being shown this year. Coemar’s showing their new Infinity Wash XL fixture. It’s nice to see that we haven’t run out of pieces of glass to stick in front of a light beam. They’ve used a prism system in the optical train that allows for splitting the beam into three with rotation. The effect is similar to an array of ACLs, and it’s pretty cool. It’s also got a new type of color mixing system that produces some truly rich hues and a red that’s closer to what most LDs desire.

The chaps at Green Hippo are showing Hippotizer V3, which is a drastic upgrade to an already great product. Talk about listening to a market! These guys are all about implementation. They’ve listened to what their users wanted and made it a reality. V3 has full network capability that allows for remote control of any number of machines on a network. One of the most notable features is the introduction of onboard video encoding. You no longer have to toil over video codecs. You can basically give the thing any content that you want and Hippo will re-encode it to the format that works best.

Element Labs has their new Versa® Tube HD, Cirrus, and Stealth products on display. Stealth gained some serious notoriety on Madonna’s latest tour and is an absolutely beautiful, low-resolution video display. Cirrus is along the same lines but the LEDs are on a wider pitch and mounted to a translucent web of vinyl-like curtain. The curtain allows for viewing objects behind it as well as taking light beautifully.