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.

Check out the Orlando Sentinal story here:

Products Brighten Up Show Venues

Alan Kibbe, national sales manager for Rosco, says that Keystroke, their new DMX/PC interface is sparking great interest at their booth (#602). “Keystroke was developed out of a project with Colorado State University students,” says Kibbe. The interface allows you to operate any PC software application via a DMX link. A good example of this is controlling power point presentations via a lighting console. Other new products at Rosco include the Delta hazer, an addition to the Delta family of fog machines, two new gel colors: Helmsley Blue and half-bastard amber. Sales of Helmsley Blue benefit the Gilbert Helmsley Internship Foundation (similarly Light Relief Yellow benefits the light relief program in the UK. Can “Behind the Scenes” purple be far behind?) Seen in the Rosco booth was Steve Terry of ETC chatting with company helmer Stan Miller, while Walt from Parlights chatting with Stan Schwartz. The rest of the booth was in a fog!