We all know that stuff breaks at the most inopportune times. Currently, I’m flying solo in the production department and my favorite video switcher decides to go on the fritz. I don’t know if you guys are like me or not, but I just can’t leave well enough alone. Just not smart enough to follow the old “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” saying. I decide that this was a prime time to clean up the video racks, a project that has been on the list for a while. This turned out to be never ending project that ended up eating all of my week and most of my weekend. As of tonight, I’m very happy with the results.
Most of the work that was done had to do with cables routed on the outside of the rack. Yes you know what I’m talking about, the cables that get thrown in last minute with the intent of cleaning them up later. The Video booth just seems to attract these kind of cable runs. Most of the time I consider myself in the middle of the road on cable routing. Definitely not the most anal person that I have ever met, but I do like clean cabling. The cabling in these racks certainly made me understand how detrimental sloppy cabling could be. I think that a root canal might be more fun then debugging issues in these racks.
So it is beautiful now, right? Well not yet, but we made big headway and removed 99.9 of the poorly routed cable. We also removed about 50% of the cables inside the racks. Yes there is still much work to do inside, but we made it 100% easier to find issues in the racks. Next week I think that I’m going to tackle underneath the desk at the front of the booth. May the force be with us.
This week we are installing a couple of new DSP units in the worship center. BSS London Blue 80s are the new brains for our audio system. In the process of testing everything last night we found the the protection circuits are bad in three of our EAW MH-662iA speakers. This has been limiting some of the high frequencies from the main center cluster. Now we have to figure out how to fix them. So again I will be excited to hear what the system is going to sound like after we get this fixed and our system tuner James Young is done with the DSP upgrade and room tuning. Going to be a fun Sunday.
This Sunday I will say goodbye to the first lighting console that I ever programmed on. We have not had too much trouble with the Avolites Pearl console other then floppy drives going out. So why make the change? We have just made a switch in the way that we program. When I started working with the lights it was very manual and not much programming. Over the time that we have gone to the other extreme. Today we program cue to cue for all three services. Avo has a theater stack mode, but it is not the most user friendly to work with and I started looking for something different. I spent much time reviewing products and got as many recommendations as I could. All roads seemed to lead to one place, Jands Vista products.
There is lots to love about the Vista product line. You can start with a PC or Mac based solution with just 128 DMX channels or have a large console with 8 or more DMX universes. We decided that it was a full range solution that we could standardize on campus wide. It also gives us the ability to make changes from our workstations. We had a way to program the Avo on the computer, but it is very slow process. Vista is almost as fast to program on your computer as it is on the console.
So we bit the bullet and purchased a Vista T2 for the worship center and a Vista S1 for both the new gym and the LYF center. Now our lighting operators should be comfortable in all the rooms with lighting on campus. All should be in on Monday and ready to go for next Sunday. Just remember, is it Jands Vista and not Microsoft Windows Vista. Friends don’t let friends use Windows let alone Windows Vista.
This afternoon I spent some time hanging lights we are trying out. I’m looking for some architectural lighting options as well as some added color changers. I’m somewhat new to lighting systems and design, and I have really enjoyed learning what I have so far. The one thing that I have learned the hard way is the value of color mixing fixtures. I spend much of my programming time building transition cues to compensate for lights that don’t color mix. The fixtures that I’m testing this weekend are the 