CMU School of Drama


Thursday, November 07, 2013

Building A New Lighting Rig

Pro Sound Web: It’s been a long time coming, but we finally did it. For years I’ve wanted to update our stage lighting rig, but the funds have not been there.

A few years ago, we managed to score some used High End Studio Color 575s which gave us some additional color backlight, but it wasn’t what we really wanted. But this year, our End Of Life savings plan starts paying off.

3 comments:

Luke Foco said...

I applaud the thrift of some of the ideas that they outline but the one that bothers me is the idea of purchasing discontinued items. Yes you can get them at a discount but that discount comes at the price of the amount of service that you can get as well as replacement parts. For the short term the cost savings are great but I do not think that it is worth it on capital investments. You need to make sure that capital investments have a service plan with them and that there will be manufacturer assurances that the technology will work as advertised for at least twice the intended time frame.

rmarkowi said...

This is really interesting. A lot of theatres get retrofitted every year, but when you get the chance to truly design a system, and design it to your specs, things turn out amazing. Of course,many of us (most) do not have the budget, but once in a while someone does, and their rigs are gorgeous. The important thing though, especially for lighting, is to stretch what money you have. So when you want to go on an overhaul like this, you want to get the most for your dollar. I am impressed by the creativity and the ingenious uses of materials. I want to have a chance to really design a rig from scratch at one point, because I know a solid knowledge of lighting equipment and savviness can lead to an overhauled rig like this.

Unknown said...

These people had good intentions, but personally I feel they kinda blew it as far as getting good gear for there money. Basically what they did was find the cheapest brand of LED/Moving lighting gear out there and then buy it used/ discontinued! This is pretty much the worst thing you can do! There stage may look decent now but given some time all of the gear they bought will start breaking down on them. Given this is cheapo gear, there wont be any service available and very little if any replaceable parts. In the article they mention having a 15,000 dollar budget. This is not much to work with for getting movers and LEDS BUT this a great budget to work with for getting a solid conventional rig. What they should have done was pickup new ETC source 4's. These fixtures work great for just about any lighting position and would have served them very well. If they were looking for any type of spectacle and color changing capabilities they could have purchased some color scrollers. The gear I just speced would have lasted them WAY longer, and most likely given there needs as a church, would have served them better anyways.