JSHAA News

I’ve been so busy the last couple months that I haven’t spread any news!

Here’s what I’m covering, just skip to what looks interesting!

1. ETC Discontinues Emphasis Control System
2. ETC Retires Expression & Express line of consoles
3. ETC Now shipping Unison DRd with SmartLink
4. Lots of lighting applications for the iPhone
5. Wybron’s Infotrace
6. New products at LDI 2008
7. Holiday Gobos from Rosco and Apollo

ETC announces the discontinuance of the Emphasis® Control System. We will no longer accept new orders or provide quotations for future sales of Emphasis 2D and 3D.

ETC Controls Product Manager Sarah Clausen states, “Emphasis provided a great bridge from our older conventional control systems to our next generation of lighting control offered in the SmartFade®, Congo™ and Eos® control systems. With the launch of the Ion® and Congo jr consoles, we believe we are now offering our customers a choice of flexible lighting controls ready for 21st century lighting technology.”

As always, ETC will continue to provide technical support and repair services for Emphasis Control Systems in the field.

Effective on July 18, 2008, ETC stopped accepting orders for the Expression® and Express™ line of control consoles. This includes the Expression 3, Insight™ 3, Express 250, Express 125, Express 72/144, Express 48/96, Express 24/48 and all Expression, Insight and Express Lighting Playback Controllers. As with all ETC products, they have reserved parts to service the units in the field for years to come.

ETC Marketing Manager David Lincecum comments: “The Expression family of consoles has had an incredible 22-year run, and thousands of these desks are running shows around the world. It should go without saying that ETC will offer the same high level of support we have always provided for these products for many years to come. We look forward to the continued success and growth of our incredible array of new consoles in the SmartFade®, Congo™ and Eos®/Ion® lines and we are already seeing that they will enjoy the same kind of success.”

Following a successful launch at Lightfair in May, we are now accepting orders for the newest SmartLink® product: the Unison® DRd!

The all-new Unison DRd dimming enclosure offers a large number of new features, while maintaining the quality and value you’ve come to expect from the Unison DR. The new DRd uses the same Sensor®-style dimming and switching modules you are familiar with, combined with an all-new dimming processor, to offer your projects the best dimming performance ever in a Unison product.

And now, with the new SmartLink Architectural Control Processor (S-ACP) becoming a part of the Unison family in DRd, you have access to plug-and-play architectural lighting controls and superior dimming in one package. Simply add a SmartLink Station Power Module, and you can use the 5- and 10-button SmartLink stations on budget-oriented projects, getting cost-effective preset and sequence control with powerful dimming capabilities and increased capacity.

Also available, the new SmartLink Timeclock brings low-cost, easy-to-use time-of-day control to ETC Unison®, Sensor®, and SmartPack® dimming, as well as to SmartSwitch™ relay systems.

With the increasing popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, and the opening of their iTunes App Store, it was only a matter of time before apps were being written for our industry. Here’s a round-up of the ones that I’m familiar with along with a link to a recent article in Live Design.

Leading the way is Wybron with their LDI award winning Gel Swatch Library. I’ve got this one on my iPhone and use it frequently. It’s a great way to do a basic color comparison between manufacturer’s gels before pulling out the "analog" swatchbooks. Hopefully Wybron will add the Apollo gel catalog to the app soon….

Also from Wybron is the CXI Color Calculator and Infogate for the iPhone/iPod Touch. If you use the Wybron CXI unit, the CXI Color Calculator app is definitely a must-have, especially if you’re programming off-line. If you’re using Wybron’s Infotrace, then you’ll definitely want the Infogate for the iPhone app.

D!HV Productions has introduced two apps, the full-featured Light Calc and the free Light Calc Lite. With the free version, you enter some basic info about your fixture and calculate the beam spread. With the full-featured version, you can pick from a library of fixtures, beam spreads and lamps.

Still working with gear that uses dispswitches to calculate DMX addresses? Try the free app, appropriately named, Dipswitch. It does the math for you!

Gel Swatch Library		Light Calc Lite		Dipswitch

For more apps, check out the recent Live Design article.

Now that the ACN and RDM protocols are being implemented by equipment manufacturers, Wybron’s Infotrace looks like it should be implemented in any new facility design.

It’s a lot easier for you to read about it on Wybron’s site than for me to try to explain it. Take a look. It’s an amazing system.

Quick roundup of some of my favorite new products shown at LDI:

• Apollo’s MXR Color Mixing Scroller
• Apollo’s DMX Iris (coming soon!)
• Altman’s SPECTRA-CYC 100 LED cyc fixture
• Fun stuff from BlissLights
• City Theatrical’s new DMX Artificial snow hopper (coming soon)
• Rosco’s DMX Iris
• Rosco’s new double rotator, which uses EITHER DMX for control or dimmer power!! (to be released beginning 2009)
• Robe’s new DigitalSpot 3000 DT and DigitalSpot 7000 DT. Digital moving yoke projectors with RGBW LED lights!
• PixelRange’s PixelMax Wash
• Pathway’s Pathport Touring Edition
• ETC not only showed their award winning Unison Paradigm system, but also showed the beta release of SmartSoft v2.0. SmartSoft v2.0 now includes offline editing for the SmartFade line of consoles, not just the SmartFade ML! Download the beta release by joining the ETC user forums.

Now that everyone has recovered from St. Patrick’s Day (our Grand Rapids office is next door to a local bar and right around the corner from an Irish Pub, so there’s plenty of "abandonded" cars in our lot this morning. We’re waiting for the inevitable "walks of shame"!), I’ll start with:

Now through March 31, Leprecon is offering extra discounts on their popular ULD Dimmer series, which, by they way, are now available with wireless DMX! Contact your local Hyatt office for more info!

LeMaitre is now shipping their new G3000 Fogger.

This fantastic new fogger features:

2000 Watt Dual Core Heating Block LSG Compatibility Electronic Low Fluid Detection Continuous Output Fully Functional Digital Backlit Remote RDM Ready Rapid Change Technology Stainless Steel Body Heavy Duty Comfortable Handles One-Gallon Jug Holder

ETC is now shipping the new Net3™ Two Port Gateway.

"Expanding our networking offerings, the new Two Port Gateway is a convenient repackage of our Net3 Four Port Gateway electronics, for two-port wall-mount and portable applications. It is available either with two female XLRs or two male XLRs.

"Tested like no other product on the market, the Net3 Two Port Gateway ensures maximum ETC networking reliability. ETC completes extensive integration testing of all our networked products with nearly 300 network devices working together at a time.

"The new Net3 Two Port Gateway offers an angled connector entry for less cable stress on your DMX cables, and a shared interface with the Four Port Gateways. Both the ETCNet2™ and Net3 software images are now loaded into all our new DMX Gateways for easy transition from ETCNet2 to Net3 powered by ACN communications."

We are also happy to announce that our list of vendors that we are dealers for has expanded to include American DJ, along with Arriba Cases.

American DJ has been a leading manufacturer of low-cost club and DJ equipment for many years, and has been transitioning many of its products to LED technology.

With that in mind, we have added some American DJ Mega Panel LED fixtures to our rental inventory.

These fixtures have pretty decent output. Would I use them to light a cyc in a theatre? No. You can’t get a decent white light out of them and the beam spread isn’t that wide. Would I use them as accent lights to punch up a set piece or an event? Absolutely!

They can run off of as little as 3 DMX channels or as many as 26. Or they can run in different stand-alone modes, including sound activated!! (Perfect for you weekend basement raves! What? Doesn’t everyone do that?)

ETC has published this statement regarding how Daylight Savings Time will affect their product line:

The United States has planned a change to its Daylight Saving Time (DST) observance beginning in 2007. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates that DST will start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. In 2007, the start and stop dates will be March 11 and November 4, respectively. These dates are different from previous DST start and stop dates. In 2006, the dates were the first Sunday in April (April 2, 2006) and the last Sunday in October (October 29, 2006). A listing of dates and a history lesson on DST can be found here: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html

Products that have time capabilities:

• Expression/Insight II/III Family, Express, and Obsession 1 do not auto change for Daylight saving. Please make any changes to time manually as required.
• Congo/jr, Emphasis servers, and Eos use the clock setting in embedded XP. Eos does not have the option to auto adjust for Daylight Saving Time and is already disabled. Once Eos develops real time events it will be a selectable option with user-defined dates. We suggest you disable the DST feature and manually change time as required.
• Obsession II and Unison auto change for Daylight Saving internally in its software. Here again we suggest you disable the DST feature and manually change time as required.
• For Global Time Settings in an ETC Net2 Networked System, please refer to the end of the Unison section.

Click on the following links for instructions to edit times in ETC products:

Congo/Congo jr

Emphasis

Eos

Expression 2/3 and Express Families

Obsession/Obsession II

Unison CME/CMEi and CMEd

For further assistance please contact ETC Technical Services at (800) 775-4382.

As always, for more information and pricing, contact your nearest JSHAA sales office: