Hey all– it’s Chris, your always absent author.

Joel’s been doing a kick-ass job with the site, putting up some great links (did you check this out?) and some great posts (sorry Canada). But while he’s been here keeping things clean, I’ve been out in the field playing with toys. One toy in particular took up the past few weeks, and today I’ll be sharing a few pics with you.

Warning: this post is largely a post that relates to theatre tech. I know this blog is about digital media, but who doesn’t love seeing neat gadgets? I’ll try to keep it really simple.

The Marquee MQ-128 by Horizon Control is a lighting console for theaters and auditoriums. A local school I do theater productions at just had a big building project and got a complete overhaul of their lights and sound system, and got one of these as part of that.

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The Marquee is a lighting control console designed basically to do whatever you need it to do. It’s fully computerized, based on Windows XP Embedded (you can see the keyboard toward the bottom - it’s actually a full computer in there). Our set up has 96 physical sliders, but up to 128 control channels available in the software.

The software is amazingly flexible, and we can basically set up the hardware however we want. Right now we like to use only about 72 of the physical sliders, and then use the other 24 as “Look Masters” (essentially, a “Look Master” controls groups of lights instead of just a single light). In the pic below, you can see a button below each slider: that’s called a “Bump Button“. Press it, and the corresponding slider will be immediately “bumped” too 100% intensity (intensity = brightness!).

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The whole underlying architecture of the light system is based on DMX. DMX is the foundation of all modern stage lights and electronics. We use the standard, DMX-512, and have one “universe” installed (meaning we have 512 channels hard wired. The light board software only goes up to 128 though unless we buy more). DMX can control basically anything from conventional static lights, to moving lights, to fog machines, snow machines, or whatever you need basically making the board extremely versatile.

I was originally trained on an analog board (no computers - essentially, this was a glorified set of dimmer switches) so jumping to this digital console is quite a huge leap. Before, we had a pretty frustrating and slow workflow. We only had about 36 available lights, and we could only have two light setups at a time and we had to fade between them. It worked like this:

1. In setup [A], set lights for scene one. Fade to these lights.
2. In setup [B], get lights for scene two.
3. Scene one ends. Crossfade (like in video editing!) to setup [B], lights for scene two.
4. In setup [A], which was previously the lights for scene one, reset all the lights for scene three.
5. Scene two ends. Crossfade back to setup [A].
6. Repeat ad nauseum. This is all live.

As you can tell, this is not efficient at all! So what do we do with the new system?

1. Buy donuts.
2. Show up to tech rehearsal on a weeknight or weekend.
3. Program lights in individual “cues”. Each cue defines a look for your stage.
4. Save cues on built in Hard Drive and Thumb Drive for safety.
5. Go home.
6. Night of show: every time you need a light change, press the “GO” button.

The new system is so easy, it’s pathetic! We come in ahead of time, program the board, and then simply press a single button the night of the show. Heck, that’s so easy, you could invent a robot to do it. Wait, that’s right - you can program the computer to automatically run your cues based on timings.

I’ve just realized I’m rambling so I’m going to cut myself off here, but if this content is interesting let me know and I can keep going. At least though you have an idea of what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks! Be sure to let Joel know what an amazing job he’s doing and we hope you continue to enjoy the site!

// Find this interesting? On Windows? Horizon Control has the software that powers the board available for download. You don’t need a Marquee board (if you have one though, you just plug it in your USB port!) but you’ll be able to see the live number feedback and kind of get an idea of what we work with.