Subject: more Arisia redux
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:10:37 +0000 (GMT)
From: hobbit@avian.org (*Hobbit*)

This first comments/clarifies on some of the stuff people have already
sent in, and then dives into lighting specifics.  I was asleep for some
of Monday afternoon after we finally got all our stuff out of there, so
I didn't get a chance to pipe up until today, and reading everyone
else's stuff first is of course is making mine longer.

First off, *huge* thanks to the core crew, who were always right there
any time I looked around wondering who was going to help with wrangling
lights -- Seph, Brian, Val, Mike, Kevin, those folks whose names I
never caught who were in for chair-shuffling and early build, and all
the others who pitched in even a little bit... y'all are life and
sanity savers.  Yes, I've probably brainfarted on other major players.

Anyways ...

Radios: For some reason, FRS seems to work better in that hotel than
GMRS, even on UHF.  Weird and inexplicable given that FRS is basically
UHF too, but a known factor by now.  Perhaps the newer FRS radios have
better receive sensitivity than our generally older GMRS rigs.  We've
tried repeaters in that building, with dubious results.  Anyways, I was
pleased that even my own FRSes were in use and they *didn't* get stolen
this time...

Audio isolation transformers: I was at storage truck-load, and I *saw*
the crate of those big ol' transformers with the Midnight paint on
them, sort of over behind the lighting gear, and thought seriously
about throwing them into the "Yes A04" pile headed for the truck.  But
since they had not been marked to go or mentioned in mail and I haven't
seen them in use for a while, I figured that issue was being handled
some different way now and didn't bring them.  Now I feel vaguely
stupid since they were obviously needed.  Therefore, some questions:

	Do we have alternate/newer isolation kit these days?

	If not, should those transformers be in the default kit?

	Should someone go through and test/repair them?

Cabling: The "serial installation" problem can be mitigated by having a
good prior concept of what needs to run where, and trying to do most of
it in one shot.  I pretty much had this nailed down for lighting, and
one of the first steps was to simply *label* all the stage-pin and DMX
with white-gaff flags before uncoiling.  For long runs, it would be
nice to form loosely assembled bundles such that there's ONE over-the-
balcony handoff for a given shot instead of having to call people over
to catch four or five separate things.  Dale had obviously thought
about sound power, and spent quite a while running the yellow hose to
all the expected positions for speakers and other things even if the
gear wasn't in place yet.  And all that clearcom, of course.  We didn't
seem to worry about tucking everything in neatly against the balcony
walls, which was good because it was a lot easier to trace things and I
didn't want stuff passing in front of the 918 cases anyways after they
were placed and aligned.  The balconies should always remain tech-only
space, since their sightlines suck for an audience, so a few wires
on the floor isn't a bad thing.

I didn't actually spot the tubs of long lavender video XLR at storage,
but someone's already pointed out where they wound up.  It is clear
that we're a bit light on sound-specific stock of long 3-pin, but we're
starting to need more of it with the increased use of powered speakers
and the need to hook up all the different areas that everyone seems to
think of last [video, films, presenters' computers].  And maybe even
the odd wiggle-light or two, although I'll get to *that* rant later.
We're talking potentially hundreds of feet of power and signal in
general, so we need to account for that in designs and how we delegate
and document cable-running to other people.  As Z sez:

   ++Most people know what goes in to making the show(s) happen.

Sure, but nonetheless documenting it well really helps when it's time
to delegate to those who don't yet, even if it's a quick drawing done
on-site once gear arrives.  And as people bring in different gear,
things change and need to be re-taught.

The other angle of labeling is, as others have pointed out, the *lack*
thereof on a lot of gear these days.  We need another round of folks
making sure *everything* they own is labeled somehow, even down to
small stuff, just to avoid that packup confusion.  I will note that
almost everything I brought has my logo on it, even little crap like
XLR3 and the beefier power cords for lights, and all of my stuff came
back to me.  Refreshing our memories on the TF colors/tags and maybe
even having a chart for reference on-site would probably help the
newbies carry things to the right pile.  Cables specifically should
have some owner identifier *and* a length marked on both ends.  I will
also note that the ALPS gear was a bit deficient in this area too.

Let's try to work on some of these issues for NEFFA, and possibly
even for Lunacon.  Go buy a pack of Brady or Panduit labels or white
gaff or paint and get crazy -- even down to things like punch cables,
just so there's less confusion!

Sound: I agree that manually pulling out the ringing would have helped,
but the ringing wasn't all that bad and didn't get out of control.  My
real question is: Did having the delay stacks up that high up work, or
would they have done better on floor-mounted sticks?  Someone commented
that the sound toward the back of the room was rather muddy.  Delay is
fine along a linear path, but when you introduce a radical downward
angle toward the ears but a lot of the sound is still headed for the
back wall, that might have some weird effects on propagation path...

Doesn't anyone make stick adapters that balance particular brands
of speakers at some [possibly selectable] downward angle?  It
would make so much sense... maybe a simple welding project.

Again, these days we should probably assume common use of computers as
an input source, both for sound and video, and kit accordingly.  Those
1/8" to RCA stereo widgets are idiotically common these days, and I
even had one in my stuff *and* a pair of 1/4" TR adapters, had someone
merely poked me in the process of swapping DJs.  And we should remember
that laptop power supplies generally don't ground at all, so the
reference ground winds up coming from the sleeve and must have a
firm connection.  Maybe a conceptual laptop ground adapter is needed,
such as a DB25 or DB9 or USB with the shell or ground pin connected
to an Edison plug ground?  My Stinkpad's supply *does* ground the case,
which is one thing IBM got right...

Oh, and if sound or whatever needs sandbags, PLEASE inform whoever's
doing lighting rental!  Sandbags are a safety item, and casually
swiping them from under heavy lighting trees isn't really a good idea.
I had ordered just enough sandbags to do what *I* needed, with no
extras because they are actually somewhat expensive to rent, and was
a little disturbed to see them vanishing from the goalpost and tree
bases and showing up on speaker sticks and fastfolds.

Control placement: I thought the Lx-and-caller position under the HR
goalpost worked really well.  We wired the table in a way that allowed
it to easily float in and out, and other than getting straight which
clearcom channel was which and preserving the labeling thereof, there
was no problem with this.  [It was excellent that all the comm was
labeled all around the house; really helped.]  Having the table in bay
2 instead of 1 gave a *much* better view of the stage, even with a
camera-person vaguely in the way up front.  The only drawback with
this specific arrangement was that it left *me* plugged into the
clearcom power rack with access to all the channels, which was sort
of fun since I could Carnivore everyone's chatter, but Marc should
probably have had it instead so he could talk to Green Room without
relaying.  But placing the rack at the other end of the table would
have impeded his view.  We should work out a sensible arrangement of
this, that could even involve setting up lighting control elsewhere
since they only need to be on channel A anyways.  In the other bay 2,
perhaps??  Rack on the floor under the table but near show-caller
seat?  I would still say that leaving an extra 10 or 15 feet of
clearcom feed cable near where the box is intended to go, even if it's
not placed yet, is prudent since there may be a decision later to
shuffle it around some and work all of that table's wiring into a
nice moveable harness.

Balcony power: It turns out that the hotel has two types of twistlock
stringers available.  The old ones only bring out one leg to a pair of
duplexes, and chain the next two legs onward to another TL socket.
The newer ones have two boxes with a total of three duplexes and no
continuation socket, and guess what?  Those break out all three
circuits just like the adapters I built do.  I installed mine anyways,
since I could only find one of the newer ones and mine have the extra
ground lead, and there was beaucoups power to be had for wiggles and
the like.

Concert: I agree with Z about getting a pre-listen to the music, which
is one reason I was in contact with the Dolls prior to the con trying
to get info and samples.  The one or two MP3s they hang out on their
website wasn't really doing it.  They promised to mail me a CD, but it
didn't arrive before I was out of the house for the weekend, so I never
really got a chance to listen.  So Val and I basically just winged it
[more later].  MZ had a little more stuff available online so I could
get her basic aura, so to speak.

And what is *with* that worklight-in-the-crotch thing?  I found that
aesthetically jarring, especially being continually on.

Dance and the DJ coup: The word "priceless" seemed to be used a lot
over the weekend, and it definitely applies to the seamless execution
of crossfading DJs.  In hindsight, shooting that mastercard logo from
the masq entrant over the first DJ's head while he was confusedly
punching buttons on his decks and getting it all on video would have
been, well, ... I chatted with him a bit as he was packing up -- he
didn't seem to take it hard, it was just a different working definition
of what someone would call goth/industrial.  For reference, his name
is Andrew Spano aka DJK, in case there are any other world-shrinking
connections between some people out there.  All the email he and I
exchanged seemed to portend a good show from him, so I do take a small
amount of blame for the mismatch.  I don't really know the genres or
exactly the right terms to use.  Still, we all agree that he should
have been reading his floor way better and listening when people told
him something was not right.

Dance video and stage layout: Changing from the little RP screen to
the cyc was an improvement, even if the cyc was farther away.  Janet's
projector has enough punch to go that big.  My *original* concept, in
fact, was a larger RP screen located just to the DJ's right and
beginning very close to the deck, to put it at or slightly above dancer
eye level. There's plenty of throw from upstage to get a big picture.
I agree that bigger and closer to the dancers would be good, and two
screens might be even better but I wasn't going to try an complexify
changeover that much unless people were willing to go with it.  Janet
has frequently done multi-screen switching for Pink Voyd gigs and
could easily handle multiple screens at this if there was sufficient
technical and hardware [i.e. financial] support for setting it up.

I wanted the DJ up on the stage again because it seemed to work well
last year, and it does provide a safety barrier against some of the
more enthusiastic [read "drunk"] dancers that I've seen thrashing and
falling all over the place in that general area.  I also wanted to
backlight him with slowly-changing color washes from the stage trees.
I got a much better, i.e. symmetric view of the floor, which would help
if I needed to tweak some alighment.  I vote for keeping the basic
arrangement, although the wash level could probably be lowered a bit
to not compete with nearby video.  Maybe the DJ could go more SR and
lights/video control at SL with the screen in the middle, and then
only one tree half-ass refocused and used to gently backlight the DJ.
The DJ should also be back a bit from the lip of the stage just so
people can safely pass by in front, which they tend to do when coming
up for requests.

Teardown: Sorry we were late getting up, but we were kinda up late the
previous night.  I'm totally tickled that people tore right in and
started.  At the end of inventorying, nothing was missing from either
the ALPS order or my pile. The only damage I seem to have sustained
is a few mangled gobos, and I sort of expected that.

Okay, now lighting specific stuff:

Setup: Relatively few people knew it, but I was up till like 4am
Thursday night doing position-presets for the wiggles and testing
things.  Getting positions right is one of those boring, time-consuming
processes just like regular focus, and there were quite a few of them.
With traditional focus, one light points at one place and remains.  But
with movers, ALL the lights could potentially point at EACH assigned
place and have to be accounted for, so the problem multiplies.  I had
thirteen or so basic dancefloor positions, about five shots across the
stage for the "spotlight thing" to work, and some other general washes
and support Part of the programming while I was on vacay included
macros to help update this stuff more quickly, but on-site alignment
still takes a bit of fiddling.  This is just one of those things about
using wiggles that always needs to be accounted for.  [I'm still trying
to teach the Voyders this lesson, at the same time as improving my own
speed in the process...]

Costumers: yes, they often have no clue.  That's why we like
rehearsals, even if they're sometimes grueling.  Think Arisia was
bad?  Wait till Worldcon.  But getting inexperienced costumers up
there and then working with them to create their scenario, suggest
improvements/corrections, etc is valuable both to them and the end
result, and is generally worthwhile.  We sort of wing it on the fly
at most cons, so there's little or no time to do a more visually
pleasing composition.  Carving out some scheduling for that aspect
of a TFU-ish like session or two, possibly at some cons that are
less, ah, busy, would be worthwhile.  [Lunacon??]

The bands: speaking of winging it ... as mentioned before we went
into the concerts with relatively little information, other than some
discussion of moods.  MZ's hippy-dippy bassist came up to the lighting
table at one point and insisted that the whole thing was supposed to
have an underwater or ocean theme, and most things should be in the
green-blue area which I tried to mostly adhere to.  This limited me in
a way since I'd banged in a bunch of generally fun color *combinations*
for the wiggles.  But even with DD's energy later I was having to
hold back a bit from the all-out blast for the next night's dance
programming... well, it worked out ok.  Val really held it together
while "busking" the main board, and either she'd call for something
specific from me or we would work independently for a while.  The moods
and timing were acceptably maintained.  There were plenty of klunky
parts but consider that we were basically hearing a lot of this stuff
for the first time ever with our hands on the knobs.

Stage: I'm really glad we had a cyc this year.  High kudos to the
costumer [I forget offhand who she was] who came in and sewed up the
big *rip* it came with.  [Followup note duly sent on to ALPS.]  It made
a big difference, especially with the scary Egyptian gods entry and the
like.  Apologies to anyone else who had to pick irritant hemp splinters
out of their fingers too...

It was pulling teeth to get Arisia to spring for the increased budget
to cover the cyc, and I had to skimp in many other areas [such as
multi-cables and number of rented lights] and get competitive bids and
*then* plead the case to Treasury.  It's high time for the Arisia
purse-string holders to realize that owning a few of our own lights
saves *maybe* $200 off a typical rental order, and that most cons
budget over a thousand for lighting to begin with.  I am now looking
for specific examples from prior cons, in fact -- if you have budgetary
awareness on other regionals whose lighting doesn't suck, could you
please tell me what their lighting budgets were, and if that involved
renting some of the more high-dollar items [truss, cyc, bigger dimmer
packs, control boards, etc]?  I want to get a good benchmark here and
maybe reset a few expectations.

I really liked the taller stage trees.  Those gave just the angle I
was hoping for.  The drawback was accessibility with the ladders --
we really needed a 10 or 12 foot for use on the stage.  Only during
loadout did I spot a fiberglass 12-footer or so leaning against the
wall in that back hallway near the freight 'vator, which the hotel
probably would have tried to prevent us from using anyways.  And we
still would have had to use the "20-foot-erection" pole to pass ropes
over the pipes at the ceiling.  The much higher-dollar way to do all of
that would have been a couple of crank-stands and a stick of truss,
which could lift the lights higher up and behind a teaser.  But what
we had worked well visually, I thought, and wasn't nearly as in the
audience's face as I feared.  That design element was one of those
little risks one sometimes takes to learn, as Liz is always careful
to remind us of, and I enjoyed the results.  Evidently the costumers
and audience did too.

Having a "sweet spot" clearly marked on the stage also helps, I think.
It encourages the costumers to come downstage and have more presence,
and gets them the best lighting -- especially since we couldn't cover
the *entire* stage with the nice backlight in this case.  But the pool
was still plenty big enough for most multi-person entries.

Oh, and using the Arisia lekos for the "near" wash shots and rented
19-degrees for the "far" ones worked out just fine.  Field widths
matched almost perfectly at either side.  The "fred" submasters simply
fed slightly less level to the brighter source-4s, and both sides
remained pretty even across fades.

DMX issues: Yes, it was one long daisy-chain with a single terminator.
I've done enough transmission-line to understand these things,
really...  DMX cable should have a characteristic impedance of 100 -
120 ohms, just like cat5, which is why I was discussing the idea of
using cat5 to build cheap DMX runs a while back in the first place.
I even had a couple of my "experimental" jumpers in the rig, although
I didn't have time to sit down and build a 200-footer to see if I could
get across the room on something like that.  I will note that during
the thrashing these shorter cat5-based lengths were inserted and
removed from the line several times, which made NO difference in the
problem, so I believe that it's still a viable option and the various
test-result PDFs I ran across a while back bear that out.  Remember
that DMX runs at 250 kbits/sec, which is an order of magnitude higher
than audio frequency!  Cable impedance and termination become important
in that neighborhood.

Frankly, I think the problem was some combination of that dimmer pack's
receiver being out of spec WRT levels or timing, and possible reflections
on the line [despite the terminator].  Only *one* of ALPS' 3-pin "DMX"
cables actually said anything about being a low-voltage data cable
anywhere on it, and the rest looked like ordinary mic cables.  Now,
I'll admit that my own small kit of such to date also consists of
ordinary mic cables, as does the rig we use for Voyd, and I've never
had problems of this sort before Saturday.  Given that all other
devices were completely functional and the problem dimmer pack was
rather *early* in the line at house right, it seemed to be something[s]
downstream causing the issue, and I'm proposing that the other
contributing factor was reflections from some of ALPS' mismatched-
impedance cables rather than, say, that 918 on the end having some
buggery in *its* receiver.  Even after Seph and Brian swapped enough
cables to get things working, that dimmer pack still seemed a little
squirrely although it pretty much listened to what I told it for the
rest of the night.  What the eventual fix likely did was move the
reflection point around so that the waveforms interfered less at the
point where the HR pack's receiver sat in the line.  It is possible
that *inserting* a longer piece somewhere downstream might have even
done it, y'know?  We didn't try that.  What we really needed was an
o-scope and quiet time, but that's not a luxury one has with the house
open and gothlings streaming in.  I cannot express enough appreciation
for Seph and Brian crawling all over that mess and getting it working
nonetheless.

The best part of the club-dance, aside from seeing three or more weeks'
worth of programming really come to fruition and whirl around very
nicely on the floor, was the companionship of the other techies being
around during the thing.  In previous years it had basically been me,
driving solo on into the night with nobody "official" in the house
except me and the DJ -- sure, people would sometimes visit and take a
brief gawk over my shoulder, but there was Scotch to be had elsewhere!
I accepted that as an aspect of wanting to keep running things that
late, and haven't regretted it.  But this time, especially around the
time the DJ takeover was being planned and executed, there was all this
swirl of comraderie around my table, much of which happened on clearcom
so I could even participate [that's one reason I laid out so many
headsets down there, to chat with people].  It was great to be part of
the little klatch while still banging various GO buttons, and nice to
be able to hand off to Kevin for a while and pop out for a brief hit of
reality [and Scotch].  Kevin got some really magic moments out of the
Hog that I couldn't even figure out how were being generated.

On the tech side, I've learned a heck of a lot about clubby-style
programming in the Hog environment, and developed several workarounds
for limitations/quirks therein.  The "selectively random" meta-cuelist
structure works really well to bring up properly paced stuff on the
floor, i.e. slow or fast or whatever.  The beat-matching phase lock
loop macro, as sick as it is, works well.  I need to do a little
more fixing-up of which lists should kill off which other lists, but
in general there's a good workable structure in there that allows for
an entire night's worth of overlaid combinations of motion, color,
effects, and speeds.

Thanks also to Ed Council, who galloped in at the last minute with the
piece of blackwrap I'd left at the Holliston Town Hall from that play
last fall and which was just the right thing to block all the
light-leaks from the strips.  Normally that roll is wide enough to
cover standard strip sitting height, but in this case it had to be
taped up because of the odd-size apparently homebuilt floor stands that
ALPS sent.  They looked like they were left over from the DeVeer days.

I'll go to the debrief in a couple of weeks, and maybe learn more.

_H*