Wednesday November 26th - 4:00pm EST

“PLANS CHANGE”

I find myself heading to the Indian Consulate in NY city to collect my approved passport and documents…but it will all probably have been in vain given the current state of Mumbai, India.

All day the city of Mumbai has been under siege by what appears to be an Islamic terrorist group. They have raided multiple five-star hotels in the district of more

Tuesday November 25th - 6am EST

I’m up at ‘em to face the first challenge of international productions. Through a series of communication errors and my needling persistence to make certain that things were in order, I’ve been informed that production never processed a visa for me to enter the country of India despite what I had previously been told. This is a process that normally takes more

LIVE EARTH INDIA

OK, I’ve once again been conned by the editor into a new literary endeavor in starting my first foray of this Blogging thing. For the topic of discussion, I’ve chosen my next project which is Live Earth India.

For those of you that don’t know, Live Earth was a rather massive production held on 07/07/2007. It was seven concert stages in seven cities around the more

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.

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.