Lighting

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USA - Bandit Lites recently donated lighting to support Waltz for Wishes, an East Tennessee Make-A-Wish Foundation Fundraiser. Held at the Knoxville Convention Center, the annual event raised over $143,000, of which all proceeds benefited the Make-A-Wish Foundation in East, Tennessee.

Lighting designer, Jason Workman, primarily chose to use Martin MAC 2000 Performances, High End Systems Studio Colors and ETC Source 4 Lekos to light the event. Lighting was controlled by an AVO Diamond IV. The High End Systems Studio Colors were used to provide saturated colour for the room. Workman added Martin MAC 2000 Profiles with custom Make-A-Wish gobos to create texture on the walls.

The event's chairperson Ken Shull said that the lighting played a significant role in the event's overall success. "Bandit makes the gala," Shull commented. "It's incredible the differen

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UK An Avolites Diamond 4 Vision console is rocking its way around the world with maverick heavy metal band Def Leppard on their current Songs From The Sparkle Lounge tour. They have just finished a two month UK and European section.

Tokyo based lighting designer Kenji Ohashi has worked with Def Leppard for the last six years, and has used Avolites control since the start of his professional career at Japanese rental company, Lighting Big 1.

Ohashi works closely with lighting crew chief Seth Conlin from Nashville based US rental company, Premier Global Productions. All kit for the UK section of the tour was supplied by west London based Entec Sound & Light.

It's exactly the same rig as they are using in the US, arranged across a master grid of trussing with gently sloping down side wings.

The D4 is controlling a total of 88 Martin Professional MAC 2K luminaires - 56

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USA - With the introduction of the Opti 16-4 WW and Opti 16-4 CW, Elation Professional now offers a compact yet powerful LED plug-and-play par can in both "warm white" and "cool white" LED versions. A power-saving alternative to traditional Par 16 cans, both versions of the Opti 16-4 produce a bright output that's equivalent to a 50W halogen MR lamp, yet draw only 7W at full use, making them especially well-suited for today's era of rapidly rising energy costs, says the company.

The key to this efficiency is in the Opti 16-4 WW/CW's four high-output 1W LEDs, which are bright enough to flood any stage, production set or exhibit in warm or cool white light, whichever the mood calls for. The Opti 16-4 WW (3000K) or "warm white" version measures 229 LUX at a distance of 6.6ft, while the Opti 16-4 CW (6000K) or "cool white" model measures 359 L

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UK - The London Studios - home of ITV - have invested in an ETC Congo and Congo jr for each of their three studios, plus another Congo jr with fader wing for each studio floor.

Project engineer at ITV Steve Usher says: "In the TV lighting world, operators are only interested in the lighting, and not the technology. The old desks needed increasingly frequent repairs, and it was becoming harder to get spares. We looked at lots of different options, but it was difficult to find one which all the operators were confident about using. We were looking for a desk which was sophisticated, capable and flexible."

To change the desks over, the studios needed to be taken out of use for a few days - and with the studios as busy as they are, finding a slot was difficult. Usher continues: "The previous desks worked on DMX, so we needed to completely recable for Ethernet. In fr

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USA - Designed to perform for more than 50,000 hours (5.7 years of continuous operation), the new GE LED Cove Lighting System from GE Consumer & Industrial & mdash, the first GE LED system marketed through GE's electrical distributor sales channel & mdash significantly lowers system operating costs for commercial and residential end-users wanting to curb their impact on the environment.

At 25 times the life of halogen, the GE LED Cove Lighting System provides 280 useable lumens per foot and consumes just 6.5W of energy, providing significant energy savings and superior brightness. "End-user, specifier and distributor customers have come to rely on GE for its innovation and technology leadership," says Norm Sowards, general manager of commercial and industrial marketing, GE Consumer & Industrial. "Our new GE LED Cove Lighting System is emblematic of GE's innovative

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Hong Kong - Hong Kong's Special Administrative Region Establishment Day on 1 July 2008 marked, not only 11 years since its transfer back to China, but also the official launch of Artistic Licence Asia.

The new company, founded as an evolution of the successful relationship between Artistic Licence UK and the Hong Kong based Ptarmigan Consulting, will, like its UK counterpart, take an active role in both product and project based activities in the Far and Middle East.

"We have been working together on a less formal basis for the past two years," explains Artistic Licence managing director, Wayne Howell. "This has proved to be a great, and continuing, success allowing us to explore the market thoroughly and establish ourselves within it. We have decided the time is now right to formalise the relationship by forming an independent company, Artistic Licence Asia.&qu

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Australia - The SoBar Nightclub at Sydney's lower north shore Cremorne Hotel has recently been transformed and reinvented with a AUD $2M fit out by design innovators SJB.

DJW Projects were contracted to undertake the sophisticated audio and lighting install, emphasising their own philosophy of "total integration of all systems." Dave Croxon, DJW's MD, commented: "One of the key issues we had to undertake was selecting a dimming and control system that was easy to use, provide enough useful features and was rock solid and reliable. After evaluating a number of commercially available systems, we chose the LSC EKO wall mount dimmers and e-PLATE wall controllers."

Croxon continued: "I was attracted to the EKO dimmer by the immediate support provided through the integrated touch screen on the front panel. No matter what else was happening in a commercial in

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Italy - Ask any Italian who Vasco Rossi is and they will know the answer. Try to buy a ticket to one of his concerts and you'd better get to the box office early - his live concerts are some of the biggest events held in the country, this year attracting more than 80,000 fans on successive days.

For years, lighting designer Giovanni Pinna has been responsible for ensuring that Vasco Rossi's summer tours are even more exciting.

Set design is by Giò Forma Studio of Milan, who chose to decorate the stage with a background of round mirrors (the same ones you find used as traffic signals). Pinna incorporated a huge number of Martin fixtures: 63 MAC 700 Profiles, 50 MAC 700 Washes, 55 Atomic 3000 strobes, 78 Stagebar 54 L and 22 Stagebar 54 S LED bars, plus two Jem Roadie Compact fog and haze effect generators. The Martin gear was provided by Limelite of Rome.

Pinna turned to LED

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UK - Avolites consoles and dimmers were used site wide at the 2008 Latitude Festival by lighting rental company Siyan, who supplied four stages with equipment and crew. These were the main Obelisk stage and Lake, Uncut and Sunrise stages, dotted around the historic site in Henham Park, Southwold Suffolk

Colour Sound Experiment, who supplied the Comedy, Cabaret, Music & Film, Book Club, Poetry, In The Woods and Saddlers Wells in The Lake stages, also deployed six Avolites Pearls around the site.

Lighting for the four Siyan stages was designed by Steve Finch, who worked with their crew chief Ieystn Thomas and 10 others. It was based on creating something practical for all the incoming LDs, including moving lights and a selection generics, and he studied all their specs as a starting point.

There was also plenty of latitude (no pun intended!) in the designs for the Siyan FOH li

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UK - The recent refurbishment of two news studios at Television Centre in London has seen the installation of X-Chip and X-Bar LED products, supplied by distributors, LED-Lites.

The fixtures were incorporated into the new-look N6 and TC7 studios by set designers Jago Design as part of a consolidation of the news studios. When the studios came up for refurbishment the aim was to create continuity - enabling any news strand to be dropped into any studio via the video projection walls - but to create greater control flexibility and find a better way to light the presenters.

But the limitations of the smaller N6, home to the BBC News channel, created a major challenge. "Apart from the studios' physical size, it already has a low ceiling height and a massive air-conditioning duct brings it down lower still," said BBC lighting designer Dave Weighell, who oversees the news

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USA - Clair Showco of Lititz, PA, recently provided the audio system for country music star Keith Urban's US-based tour. The multi-city tour featured Studer Vista 5 SR digital audio consoles in use for both FOH and monitor mixing applications.

Taking both the Australian and US country music scenes by storm, the New Zealand born Urban heavily relies on the sound quality of the Vista 5 SR while on tour. The Studer Vista 5 SR was chosen by his mixing engineers who went through a vigorous evaluation process prior to the selection of the console but chose the Studer after it met all required criteria: Sound quality, flexibility/ease-of-use and reliability.

FOH Engineer Steve Law and monitor mixing engineer Jason Spence evaluated numerous brands of sound consoles before the tour. Spence noted he had never felt as comfortable with a new desk as he did during the week he was trying ou

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Israel - More than 25 of Israel's most popular musicians performed cover versions of well-loved songs at the Avoda Ivrit (Hebrew Labour) concert. The show, a tribute to 60 years of original Israeli music, was one of the events celebrating Israel's 60 years of Independence. The thousands of people who attended the concert in the Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park enjoyed one of the biggest light show ever seen in Israel.

The Vector Red controlled a massive lighting rig included 24 Martin MAC 2000 profile, 24 Robe colorSpot 1200, 12 Robe ColorWash 1200, 24 Martin MAC 550, 40 Martin Mac 600, 26 Xenon 4K, 10 Atomic strobe, four Unique smoke machines and more than 200 dimmer channels.

"The lighting rig was huge and impressive and I really enjoyed programming the show with Vector consoles"; commented David Winnik, the operator of the show. "Programming is very intuitive an

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UK - The lighting for Radiohead's current tour is based totally on LED, is designed by Andi Watson, and is controlled via two grandMA full-size and four MA NSPs.

"I wanted to create a physical space of lighting within the performance area", explains Watson. He planned a three-dimensional array of 548 x Element Labs Versa Tubes HD that frame the band and act like a virtual stage forming a low resolution 3D video 'screen'. The Versa Tube HDs form curtains of six and nine meter long vertical strips from the back to the front of stage. The entire array is controlled from a custom 3D version of Catalyst, specially written by Richard Bleasdale for the tour.

Additional audience and band lighting comes from 48 x i-Pix BB4 and 48 x i-Pix BB7 LED fixtures. Floor lighting is from seven Color Kinetics iW Blasts, seven Pulsar ChromaFlood 200 TriColour and 12 i-Pix Satellites. A 2

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UK - Weston-Super-Mare's beach once again played host to T4 on the Beach on Sunday 20th July, 2008. This year the event attracted it's largest live audience of 45,000 and a total of 30 artists including Kelly Roland, McFly, The Hoosiers, Scouting for Girls, Basehunter, Sam Sparro, Neo, Duffy and the Ting Tings.

Done and Dusted managed the event for Channel 4, bringing in production manager Tony Wheeler of Nine Yards to look after all aspects of the live production. Wheeler comments: "This year's event grew most significantly. We like to keep our team consistent and once again entrusted Power Logistics to ensure there was uninterrupted power, particularly important for an event driven by its live television show. As ever they have been exemplary and taken all of the late changes an event of this nature throws up in their stride."

Tony Harpur led the Power Logistics te

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Japan - Barco reports that Japanese rock band B'z has chosen its LED module MiSTRIP for their Action 2008 tour. The high brightness modules form a gigantic carpet-like LED screen, which moves up and down above the band during their show giving the impression of a flying carpet.

The B'z is Japan's best selling rock band. They have sold over 75m records and they were the first Asian artists to have their handprints and signatures put up in Hollywood's Rock Walk. For their Action 2008 tour, they worked together with renowned set designer Mark Fisher from Stufish. The mastermind behind stages for U2 and The Rolling Stones designed a 'magic carpet', a grand carpet-like LED screen, flying over the band.

The Stufish team worked closely together with Barco's Innovative Designs to turn their vision into reality. A total of 1,152 MiSTRIPs were used to create the experience

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Australia - Over 100 Robe moving lights were supplied by Clifton Productions for Australia's 2008 Future Music Festival, which was headlined by The Chemical Brothers, along with a line up of top international DJs.

Clifton supplied lighting for all the festival's auxiliary stages, all of which featured Robe at the core of their rigs. The event was project managed for them by Michael Parsons, who states, "Reliability was the key factor we looked for here, and that's why we chose Robe for this event."

For the Sydney and Brisbane legs of the tour, lighting for the main Future Music Stage was also operated by Parsons during the afternoon. He chose Robe ColorWash 2500 fixtures fitted with PC lenses, which were hung on side trusses and positioned so as not to impede on the Chemical Brothers' rig.

These were used to wash the stage and audience. "Their brightnes

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Serbia - Clay Paky was on stage with the 136 Alpha Sport HPE 1200, with which LD Per Sundin created and achieved pyrotechnic lighting effects for this year's Eurovision Song Contest at the Belgrade Arena.

The Alphas created custom lighting for each artist so that each performance was characterised by a studied play of effects and colours. The light show was made attractive to both the large audience in the Arena and home viewers by the attentive layout of the numerous and different light sources including 120sq.m of Barco OLite 510, 24 sq.m of Barco 10 and about 400 sq.m of M LEDs LC2140. As in 2007 and 2006 the event was again controlled by a grandMA system.

PROCON Event Engineering Germany, was the general technical supplier and provided lighting, sound, video, stage building, rigging and power. Production designer was Goran Joksimovic. Sven Stojanovic worked as art director

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UK - Avolites consoles were specified extensively for lighting control in the majority of arenas at Global Gathering 2008, one of the UK's leading dance festivals, staged at Long Marston Airfield near Stratford on Avon, Warwickshire.

The visual design that united lighting, digital and video sources into one seamless atmospheric experience for all fivearenas and three terraces, was created by Nick Jevons and Phil Winward of Electric Fly Productions. Site wide lighting equipment was supplied by Blackburn-based HSL, and crew from both companies collaborated closely to ensure that it was one of the most visually memorable Global events to date.

The seven arena/terrace Avolites consoles included two Diamond 4s, two Pearls and three Tigers. Jevons says, "Avolites is the ultimate festival console - nothing else offers the flexibility or ease of use for the hands-on, live operati

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USA - Synthe FX has announced the immediate availability of Luminair 1.0 for iPhone and iPod touch. Luminair allows users to control, view and manage intelligent DMX lighting fixtures and consoles, straight from iPhone or iPod touch. Using Artistic License's Art-Net protocol over the device's built-in Wi-Fi connection, Luminair communicates with other compatible hardware and software nodes on the local network.

The touch-board channel layout view provides quick channel setup of the user's fixtures. A multi-track, touch-enabled mixer, controls with accurate precision. As a DMX data analyzer, data is displayed in realtime as a touch-scrollable overview of all channels in the input universe. Selecting a specific channel shows the current value, as well as the past 24 seconds of data in graph form.

Wireless connectivity allows users to be unchained from the mixer desk or patch-bay

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Australia - With the current trend of outsourcing product manufacture to Asian countries, Australian Lighting Control System manufacturer, LSC Lighting Systems has bucked the trend and invested heavily in expanding manufacturing within its own home market.

LSC's managing director, Gary Pritchard, explains: "Although the perceived financial benefits of manufacturing in Asia are tempting, the stories of inferior quality products and lost Intellectual property experienced by other companies exploring this option, have convinced us to invest here in Australia. We are very protective of our intellectual property (designs) and we pride ourselves on the high quality and enduring products we build. Both of these qualities, we felt, could be at great risk if outsourced to areas that are hard to directly control from Australia."

To show their customer base that LSC products ar

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UK - Entec Lighting helped the Larmer Tree Festival - the UK's original 'boutique' event - celebrate its colourful 18th Birthday at the weekend, supplying lighting to the Main Stage, Garden Stage and several other performance arenas, and also illuminating some of the flora, fauna and foliage around the site.

The Festival, run by J&J Events, is set in the heart of the beautiful Larmer Tree Gardens on the Wiltshire/Dorset borders. The Gardens were created by General Pitt Rivers in 1880 as pleasure grounds for "public enlightenment and entertainment" and are part of the outstanding landscape of Cranbourne Chase.

It's the third year that the west London based rental company has been involved with the event, which is limited to an intimate 5000 capacity and is renowned for it's very chilled vibes, quality international entertainment and amazing surroundings.

Ente

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USA - When the ClearView Baptist Church wanted to ramp up its stage lighting for video production, designer Peter Vaque knew the project would be a challenge. His production company, Springtree Media Group LLC (Franklin, TN), had worked with ClearView just a few years before, and Vaque was aware of the Tennessee church's limited electrical load capacity.

"Several years ago, before video became a factor, ClearView wanted to improve its stage lighting, and they were told there was no way they could do this without spending a fortune on a new transformer," recalled Vaque. "We went in and showed them how they could do it on their existing circuitry, using intelligent lights. We installed several CMY colour-mixing intelligent lights, and the look was phenomenal."

But now with its membership passing 2,000, ClearView was growing into a need for quality video to cr

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Germany - The Procon Group, international leading full-service provider of technical equipment for events and TV productions, has invested in equipment from Barco and High End Systems, representing the biggest single investment in Procon's history.

Procon's order of LED equipment included a significant amount of Barco NX-6, MiTRIX and OLite.

"We always aim to offer our clients the latest products that are available on the market. As well as the increase in MiTRIX and OLite, we have now also decided on a Black Face LED system. The decision was made in favour of the NX-6 from Barco for reasons of its quality and flexibility", stated Morten Carlsson, managing director of Procon Event Engineering.

With this order, Procon has increased its stock of LED walls by more than 1,000 sqm this year. The company has also invested in projection equipment. The stock of Barco XLM H

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The Netherlands - Robe Lighting is collaborating with Netherlands-based Leasing Services to develop a series of financial packages for its clients and business partners. These can either be arranged directly with the client/rental company/end user or via over 40 of Robe's worldwide distributors.

"We have been looking for a suitable and solidly reliable leasing partner for some time, and a lot of careful consideration has gone into our decision to team up with Leasing Services," comments Robe lighting MD Josef Valchar. "This agreement is a major step forward in Robe's evolution, and will greatly benefit a majority of our business partners and clients by facilitating a wide range of accessible, flexible, cost-effective finance options."

Interested parties will be able to fill in the initial inquiry forms on the Robe website www.robe.cz and send these directly

  1. Siyan's i-Pix BB7s on tour with Duffy
  2. Heffernan named Bandit Lites president
  3. PR Lighting joins Warsaw bank party
  4. Engel is Rosco Labs third president
  5. Mediaset commits to Coemar ParLites
  6. The Week in Lighting & Sound
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