Up front stuff: my views do NOT reflect the views of the bands I work for, or worked for in the past, or will work for in the past. These are my personal thoughts on gear I use, and I disown everything.
So the last time I did this was 2011. So with a new tour and new lights, it seems appropriate to do it again. Today we’ll be looking at a few new lights, and some old favorites. Starting with:
Martin Professional’s MAC Aura
The Aura is the next generation of LED-based wash lights with a twist. It looks like no other fixture I’ve ever seen, and indeed, I doubt any fixture like this exists. The front of the fixture contains 19 “bubbles” with LEDs behind them, which combine the output of 4 Osram Ostar high-powered emitters – red, green, blue, and white. The bubbles combine the colors coming out of them so you don’t end up with any artifacts like colored shadows on stage. The bubbles are themselves held in place by a sort of big fresnel lens with separate LEDs (on a different channel than the bubbles) lighting the rear surface, which changes the hue of the entire face of the fixture without having any noticeable effect on the beam. Martin calls this the “Aura”, and it’s strictly an eye-candy effect. I played with it for a bit, but because I only had these fixtures for one day, I didn’t program my show around this effect, and instead used them as more or less a 301-like basic RGBW wash light.
So onto the real stuff. The fixture is small – very small – weighing in around 12 pounds and about halfway in size between a 101 and a 301. The base is identical to the 101, in fact, and the 16-bit pan and tilt motors whip the head around at a very respectable speed – close to a moving mirror. One thing I noticed and didn’t really like is that the addressing and fixture function panel is mounted to the head, which means if a light is in your rig and needs something done to it, it can be a real pain to get to the buttons. The fixture will eventually realize that you’re grabbing it and stop trying to self-correct, but I can’t imagine this is something that is good for the motors to experience regularly. I imagine that size constraints prevented Martin from putting the display and buttons in the base, but I would appreciate the addition of a button on the base that instantly disables the pan and tilt motors for easy access to changing the settings of the fixture. [EDIT: I have discovered that the light disables pan and tilt on its head the instant one of the buttons on the back are pressed, so you can simply reach behind, hit one of the four buttons, and you’re good. Didn’t know that at the time I wrote this article.]
The fixture is bright, as I’ve come to expect from Martin LED-based fixtures. The output looks pretty similar to a 301, but without the “fringing” as the multiple sources come together that I experienced with the un-lensed 301 emitters. The zoom is just a touch slower than I would have liked, but it’s still quite usable. As mentioned earlier, it’s very light, which is nice for volunteers. The luminaire uses the (becoming) standard PowerCon connectors, and has five-pin in and out.
One thing I’ll say about DMX connectors – can we all agree that we need to just switch to five-pin, and leave it at that? I’m tired of having to use turnarounds when mixing fixtures types in a truss. It’s stupid.
I didn’t get into the myriad of macros and built-in effects that the Aura offers, but I have no doubt that they’re quite usable. As I said, I sadly only had these fixtures for a day because the production house was waiting for the fixtures that I ended up with a day later to clear customs, the…
PixelFlex CM12
PixelFlex is a company. That’s all I know. Their domain – ledcurtain.com – is (inexplicably) registered through a proxy, so I can’t be for sure who owns the website. You won’t find the CM12 on their website anyway, so don’t bother looking. As far as I can tell, making moving heads is sort of a side project for them. They actually make a pretty decent video wall that we use for the price, it’s the moving head wash light I’m going to comment on here.
I always try to say something good about the lights I use. I’m going to try really hard to say something nice about these lights. But mostly I just want to take the piss out of them.
The Good:
They turn on. Sometimes. The red light is actually red. The translucent front lenses do a halfway-decent job of eliminating color-fringing.
The Bad:
Oh my, my, my. The bad. These lights suck. And here’s why:
The construction:
Cheap. Plastic-y. Two of them already have broken arm covers. The plastic is thin and brittle, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they had proper road cases. But no, in the everlasting quest to cut the already very rounded corners, the road cases provided are nothing more than a box with four divisions. They also have a useless front clear lens which serves no purpose other than to break. It doesn’t focus the light, it just sits there and cracks if you even look at it funny, like a CD jewel case. The three zoom motors are mounted to the back heatsink out in the open, just asking to get broken. More on those zoom motors later.
The mounting system is dumb, consisting of a half-borough clamp with a custom bracket put on it. An annoying problem (and to be fair, one not restricted to this moving light) is that you can’t tighten the nut that holds the borough clamp to the bracket, so you have to just spin the bracket until it’s tight, which probably won’t be anywhere close to the orientation you want the light to hang at. This is not a huge issue for lights that use two clamps because two clamps on a truss can’t move in relation to each other. But on a light that hangs by one clamp, the torque exerted by the pan motors can and will make the base spin if it’s not tightly attached to its bracket. I tried using threadlocker to fix this, but the stuff needs a day of not moving to cure, and I don’t have a day to give them.
The units also have a giant bright blue blinking LED on the front panel that blinks constantly, even when the fixture is just fine and getting valid DMX. We covered all these LEDs with gaff tape, but should I have to? Indicator lights are fine, but one-watt giant blue LEDs are not. Blue LEDs stopped being “cool” a long time ago.
The light:
The red is good, although dimmer than the other two colors. The blue and the green are not. The blue is almost cyan. Think the VL3000 system with the blue flag inserted halfway. There’s no way to get a nice deep blue out of these lights. The green is better, but still a touch on the pale side. Mixing a deep magenta is impossible without turning the blue emitters to around 50% due to the lack of red energy, it looks like dark pink. The yellows are a touch on the pale side, too, because the red emitters get overpowered by the green unless you compensate for that in the color mix. (When I say yellow, I refer to red and green at 100%, which should theoretically give yellow in an RGB additive system. Again, to be fair, this is the exact problem I have with Martin’s 301’s and Aura’s mixed yellow – at 100% red and green, the green emitters overpower the red and you get a very lime-y yellow.) They’re not as bright as a 301, or an Aura.
The zoom:
Loud loud LOUD. So loud. Not really an issue for what I do with them, but when I’m updating focus palettes before the show, I can actually hear the zoom motors clunk into place from my position at FOH. These might not be the best lights for your theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (WHIIiiiiiir ka-CHUNK.) It’s also slow and laggy. It appears to use the same idea as the Martin MAC 301 light, with two hemispherical elements nesting against each other and separating slightly to increase the beam angle. The zoom actually does work, but it doesn’t get as tight as I’d like, and as mentioned earlier it’s slooooow. The motors also don’t work quite in synch with each other, and one side of the lens will stop moving before the other side. Could be a cool effect if that’s what they were going for.
The pan and tilt:
Slow. The speed is comparable to larger arc-source moving heads like MAC 2000s. For the size and weight that these motors are throwing around, the pan and tilt speed could be an order of magnitude faster.
The software:
First off, let me say the lack of a publicly-available DMX profile for these lights is a hindrance. I was only able to get it as a forwarded e-mail, and it was as basic as it gets. The reset command doesn’t work. When addressing, the fixtures don’t wait to get an “enter” command before switching their addresses, they instantly switch to whatever address you happen to be selecting at the moment with the up / down buttons. This means that while addressing, the lights spin around wildly, strobe in your face, and generally make asses out of themselves. This is annoying. The lack of a fixture manual means I have to guess at what the DMX protocol means. (Are they not resetting because I’m doing it wrong? I don’t know!) There is no built-in random strobe function, I had to make one on my console. Which is okay, but it’s the little things. One fixture had a bad DMX decoder right out of the box, and had to be replaced in the air. That was super-fun.
What else can I hate on? The road cases smell horrible, and they’re flimsy. One is already breaking.
So yeah. The PixelFlex CM12. They’ll give you leprosy, then shatter unexpectedly. Which brings us to…
Martin Professional’s MAC 250 Entour
Back to sanity. The Martin MAC 250 Entour is a 250-watt little guy who is brighter than he right to be. 5000 lumen output in open white means it’s brighter than some older 575-watt fixtures. 12 colors plus open, rotating gobo wheel, fixed gobo wheel, prism, fast dimmer, solid construction.
Could they be brighter? Sure, but then they’d be MAC 575s.
Chauvet SlimPAR Pro Tri
It’s an RGB LED PAR. They do the job admirably, and they’re bright. Not much to say about them. The lenses mostly eliminate color fringing. Only bad thing I can say about them is that the power inputs are IEC cables, which I’d like to see manufacturers move away from, because they tend to come unplugged. Even the “locking” variety, which these use, are prone to disconnections. Volunteers are hard on gear, and tend to pick fixtures up by their cables, which I don’t always see in time to prevent. I’d like to have more of them, but then, I’d like my own pony, too.
Flying Pig Systems iPC running the WholeHog III software
Reviewing a WholeHog III is like reviewing The Beatles. It’s been around for so long and so many people are so intimately familiar with it it doesn’t make much sense to pick it apart. You know what you’re getting with a Hog. I have an entire list of wishes for this console to make it more modern – updating the now clunky effects engine, letting users resize windows the way they want (this has always annoyed me), eliminating the stupid animation that plays when you boot it up, but a lot of people have wishes for this console and it’s not looking like Flying Pig is interested in developing the the WholeHog line these days (maybe they have big plans, but since the Barco acquisition, it’s seeming less likely.) or doing much at all with it beyond parts and support. So…it’s a Hog. One knows what one is getting.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks