What technical innovations are going to simplify lighting designers and operators tasks? ETC’s controls product manager Sarah Clausen discussed this and the future of stage lighting control in a lively discussion on Sunday at this year’s Theatre Engineering and Architecture Conference in London.
Held just once every four years, the conference, of which ETC is a silver sponsor, is attended by all those involved or interested in the built environment for the performing arts.
Under the chairmanship of lighting designer Richard Pilbrow, Clausen joined fellow control system developers Rob Bell and Eric Cornwell to describe the newest approaches and debate what the latest technology can offer users in the future; how intensity, colour, focus, gobo, position and multimedia devices can be most easily controlled. Lighting director Neil Austin, who won a Tony Award on Sunday night, was also on the panel.
“If you take a video wall,” explained Clausen after the event, “the reason they look good is because each tile is calibrated – each section is able to communicate with the others to figure out which is best colour space. Lighting technology should be extracting that idea and putting it on every fixture on the rig. So each dichroic fixture, for example, can be easily matched to others because it knows its own colour capabilities; the desk needs only to tell a fixture what colour or setting is necessary to achieve, rather than making small adjustments to match it to the rest of the rig. This technology is the promise of the ACN control protocol.
“My position in the seminar was that as lighting rigs get smarter, manufacturers can build on their own products’ strengths, rather than needing to assist LDs in making up for other parts of a rig’s weakness.
“ETC’s Eos lighting control desk is built upon ACN as its foundation, and ETC backed the development of streaming ACN for fixtures which do not need to communicate in both directions. The next step is ratification of DDL – a device description library – which defines every device and its parameters.
“The future is definitely in compatibility and interoperability – and ETC equipment is at the forefront of that.”
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