ChurchProduction.com: Working with Wahlberg Motion Design, Rose Brand Inc. looks to cut the cost and time involved with automating the movement of lightweight scenic pieces. The new products are designed to operate using the light board for control enabling a more practical workflow.
3 comments:
Winches are a very power item in theater and uses can vary from basic to very complex implementation. I recently set in on a class that barely skimmed the surface of just how powerful some of these tools can be. One of the biggest problems with using these tools is how complicated a setup can be. Although, I don’t think anyone will be using this winch for anything more than just your basic up and down motion. Here at CMU we just finished an install of one of the biggest pieces of moving scene this school has ever seen and the amount of complicated programming that went into the project took a lot of trial and error because each application is different the last. So although the DMX winches discussed in this article could not handle anything near what this project was, I do think that having a winch that is easy to control and doesn’t take complex programming could be a useful tool in any show we do here.
I have mixed feelings on this innovation. On one hand, small DMX automation gear seems like a handy way to automate small items and make automation easier, since it can just be added to a normal DMX chain. But even though RoseBrand says that the small applications of this make the risk of DMX failure is low, I still worry about using that protocol for this application. Considering how many issues the protocol has even with handling lighting equipment, with no error checking and frequent issues with long runs, I can't imagine that it would be the best for moving things up and down. And in addition, I can't imagine that the lighting department would want to deal with adding scenery automation to their responsibilities. Overall, it's a good idea, and it would definitely be useful for small shows, but for anything large and complex, I see no place for this technology.
These winches why on the surface are interesting solution for small theaters to be able to do some basic forms of automation, they do leave me with a few questions regarding their practicality. The first of these questions is it really going to be a simpler solution for smaller theaters to run automation through their lighting console? This seems to me that it would be rather difficult to program because I have not really seen automation run through a LX console before, and while the notion of of being able to run both lighting and automation of is one console is rather tempting it just seems like the programming would be rather difficult and probably hard to convince your lighting department to take over something that is generally a scenic departments job. Another question I would have is how reliable would the DMX control be even thought it relatively light loads I'm skeptical that it would function in a highly reliable fashion. That last question of reliable also leads into safety, what if you need to E-stop would the automation stop separate from the lights or are the two slaved together? If they are separate how easy would it be to resume a automation cue while still running light cues? I while I could see these winches being useful if they were autonomously run on a computer using simple automation software such as SpikeMark that I could see being useful for small theaters. Also lastly what the hell is with the thought to decide to produce a winche that only pulls 5lbs, like come on we're is the real use it that?
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