Illuminating Big Daddy Weave: A Review of the Gear
As the lighting designer for Big Daddy Weave, I get to use a lot of different products, and in particular our last tour was one that used some newer gear from Martin and Elation, so I wanted to finally sit down and talk about what I liked about this last tour’s gear, and what I didn’t, and offer suggestions that will never be read by anybody from Martin Professional or Elation. So let’s start with the top of the set, where the upstage truss lives, and talk about the…
Elation Professional Platinum Spot 5Rs
One of the side effects of the figurative explosion in our industry of LED technology is a corresponding strong advancement of other forms of lighting – traditional arc-lamp technology, OLEDs, even incandescents have made amazing strides forward. Companies are striving for (and achieving) prodigious amounts of efficiency and output from laughably small amounts of voltage. One of the newer lights to do this was introduced by Elation lighting – they release new fixtures around three times per day, and this is one of the first on the market to use the new ultra-short arc of the MSD Platinum series from Phillips.
This lamp has a very small 1mm arc gap inside an unjacketed arc tube, and the whole assembly is supplied pre-aligned in a glass dichroic-coated ellipsoidal reflector. This eliminates the need for a “bench focus” after installing a new lamp to align the arc gap within the reflector, which is nice. As I never had to replace one of the lamps on the road, I never got around to seeing what it was like to replace a lamp (they’re also rated for around 2000 hours, so you shouldn’t have to do it often) so I can’t comment on that.
So first, the good: for its size the 190 watts of power it consumes, this light is bright. Very bright. In open white, it’s very close (to my eyes) to a 575 discharge lamp. The units are very small – around the size of a MAC 250 Entour – and very light, which makes handling them (and volunteers handling them) an easy affair. The fixture has two gobo wheels – a fixed one with 14 static gobos plus open, and a rotatable one with 8 plus open. They’re all very usable gobos, though they do bear a…bit of a resemblance to another manufacturer’s gobos. A little too much, if you ask me. The gobos are tiny – really tiny – but I suppose current printing techniques are good enough because I didn’t see any problems in the beams. A tiny annoyance is because the gobos are so small, the space between them on the wheels is quite large, so you get big blackouts in between changing gobos. The inclusion of the iris is nice, and unexpected in such a small fixture, but a fundamental design choice in the light prevented me from using it much. More on that later.
Now, the bad. Oh my my my. The bad.
To be fair, the item I’m going to pick on isn’t exactly Elation’s fault…kinda. But it is an error that I, were I a moving light maker, would have prevented me from shipping the light until it had been corrected. I’m talking about the judder in the pan and tilt channels. Oh dear lord, the judder. It was like there was a monkey jumping up and down on the lights while doing anything longer than a 10-second P/T fade. The amount of shaking these lights did while moving was almost 8-bit in its look – it was so bad that first night I thought the truss towers hadn’t been secured properly and were wiggling back and forth. It is particularly noticeable on the pan channel. I was eventually able to get an E-loader and upload a new version of the software to correct most of the bounce, but it certainly didn’t cure it. This honestly might be because it’s a $1,600 light and you’re not paying for a fixture with theatrical grade pan and tilt movement – Flash ‘n’ Trash doesn’t demand exacting precision. That said, I feel that it was unfortunate for Elation’s reputation that they shipped a light with such obvious pan and tilt bounce in the first place.
This brings me to my other main beef with this fixture: the optical system. It is a very fast system, but inaccuracy is extremely noticeable with such a small space, and with such a short depth of field was inescapable. Any misalignment of the optical system is instantly noticeable when gobos are in the optical chain, and unfortunately due to the motors (or software, or sensors, or whatever) Elation chose to use, the focus palette I set up for the gobos needed updating throughout the shows as the lenses moved back and forth to keep things in focus. I’d focus them before the show, then halfway through the gobos would get thrown in again, and they’d be fuzzy, forcing me to update the focus palettes, which got old. The extremely short depth of field is also the source of my frustration with the iris – you can’t iris in on the gobos. If you’re focused on a gobo and close the iris, you just a fuzzy, dimmer beam. You can focus on the iris itself and get some interesting effects in open colors, but no using them at the same time, which was a bit of a disappointment.
A few other things caught my attention: the dimmer curve is decent, but not perfect, and starts exhibiting artifacts under about 25% of full. It also has a tendency to frequently “forget” how to close smoothly, and often would simply snap shut or open at around 30%, forcing me to reset the light during the show. In fact, quite a few things about the light regularly messed up during the shows, forcing resets – the colors and gobos would get out of step, the dimmer would start acting weird, a gobo would get stuck, and I’d have to black out and reset the fixture. I specifically mention that I had to black out the fixture before resetting it, because these lights do not behave well when reset – they open their shutters before they’re in position, leading to the light wildly spinning across the stage with its shutter wide open to find its position. The colors are another weak point: they are very saturated, cutting down the light output considerably in colors like green and red. The UV color slot is particularly useless – it allows a whopping 2% of the total light through, and it’s nearly impossible to see. The limited color selection was also disappointing – comparable units have at least 12 colors; Elation expects you to get by with 8, and one of those is almost unusable unless every other light in your rig is blacked out.
Conclusions for the 5Rs – okay if you need to sacrifice quality for price, but it’s not a tour-grade light, in my opinion. I like the brightness and the extremely flat field, but the instability of the fixture software and need to constantly re-do the focus was annoying, and not something I’d be willing to put up with on a daily basis again. The shakiness of the pan and tilt was absolutely freaking unbearable, and the software update to 1.2 made it only tolerable…barely. Most of the colors sucked and a bunch of the gobos are ripoffs of other manufacturers. (I recognized gobos bearing striking resemblances to those belonging to High End Systems and Martin, and probably others.)
Yuck.
Which brings us to:
Martin Light’s MAC 301 Washes
A product of the aforementioned explosion of LED lights, Martin has taken LED washlights from a fun toy to a serious workhorse light with the 301s. There’s not much to them – the fixtures use 108 Luxeon emitters split evenly, with 36 each of red, green, and blue. They’re mounted on the familiar very shallow frying-pan-looking moving head, which serves a dual purpose as a gigantic heat sink and a mount for the motor that moves the zoom motor. For me, the zoom function is really what takes this light to the next level – and Martin did a good job making it a very usable zoom. The LEDs have a fixed lens mounted directly above them, with a second lens sitting above this one, attached to a linear actuator. As the motor turns, the second lens element increases (or decreases) the size of the gap between the two lens elements. The distance is only about 10mm, so it’s very fast, and has a respectable zoom range of about 3:1. and I was able to get some very interesting effects by applying effects to the zoom parameter. The speed of that function really shone on this light. Movement on the pan and tilt axises was also excellent and, if you want, amazingly fast, and I didn’t notice steppiness at any speed.
The 301s are also really bright – in saturated colors, I’ve seen 700-watt arc lights that weren’t as bright. They’re not nearly as punchy as a 700-watt arc source in open white (due to the different ways a CMY and RGB system work, they wouldn’t be) but that’s the price you pay for the power savings and beam control. (The 2-lens system cuts down on the output a bit) Martin also did an outstanding job making open white actually look pretty white. In a lot of LED systems, the open white has a very pinkish tinge as the green emitters get overpowered by the red and blue emitters. (Green is almost always the weak link in any RGB system – they’re just not as bright yet.) Martin, however, made the white very balanced, with a white that appeared to have a very high color temperature, almost blueish, which matched the other lights in my rig quite nicely. The color was also extremely stable during fades, something that is very hard to do, especially in paler colors, and Martin did a fantastic job in getting that right. The fades are fantastic and smooth, and I didn’t notice any artifacts except at the very last 1 or 2 steps to blackout. One thing I did notice about the color-mixing: mixed yellow with 100% red and 100% green looks very green, almost lime, and I had to turn the green emitters closer to 70% to get the nice Martin yellow that I know and love.
I did have a few minor issues with the 301s. A loose power cord on one went un-repaired because of the difficulty of getting into the base. (It was the fault of a volunteer picking up the light by the cord.) It would be nice it were possible to get to the PCB without taking the entire base apart. (I also was on a tight schedule, and I didn’t have a manual in front of me, so it’s possible there is a simple way to get in, and I just didn’t know about it.) The PWM frequency also makes for some flickery-ness when on cameras when something moved fast (think waving your hand in front of a CRT monitor), but Big Daddy Weave doesn’t travel with IMAG (And I don’t see us ever traveling with IMAG) so I don’t see this being an issue. Martin almost certainly traded the lower PWM frequency to get smoother dimming – a good choice, in my view.
One other small issue with the 301s – the pan and tilt has a tendency to loose its tracking if you use 0-second fades for your pan / tilt times. This is easily fixable by programming around it, but it is a minor annoyance.
Conclusions for the 301s – a bit of a trade off in brightness of open white for great saturated colors and beam control, in a nearly weightless package. What more could you want?
And to wrap things up, the…
Martin Light’s Stagebar 54Ss
I want to say this is the first LED-based fixture that Martin came out with, but I could be wrong. If it wasn’t, whatever came before it was for architectural applications so I probably didn’t pay much attention to it. Anyway.
These lights are now a few years old, and they show their age a bit. The fixture itself is nicely built, with the exception of a few annoyances that I’ll talk about later. They use 54 RGBAW LED elements arranged in a six-pixel configuration, with two emitters for each color and one white in the middle. Again, there’s not much to them – they’re a fairly solid chunk of aluminum for heat control purposes with the familiar omega-connectors for attaching the mounting hardware. I used them as lights pointing directly into the audience for pixel and bitmap effects, and they are quite nice in this role. They’re very bright, and fairly light and easy to handle. Martin also included a battery for addressing and changing the fixture settings without having them plugged in, which is very handy. Martin also tried not putting DMX inputs on this fixture, opting instead for Ethercon connectors, which required us to carry separate cords for the Stagebars. Martin has changed this on the new Stagebar2s, giving them industry-standard 5-pin DMX inputs.
The RGBAW system as I used it was a bit tricky. Because lighting consoles generally consider white and amber as separate from their standard “color mix” systems, I chose to run the Stagebars in a mode where the fixture software picked some of the LED brightnesses for me. For instance, when I mixed green and red on the console to create yellow, the fixture put amber in as well. This usually worked well, but it did lead a few extremely minor issues, and then only because I had the fixtures in a “direct viewing” application. The issue happened when I was running a green and yellow bitmap effect from the MA console. The fixtures, as I expected them to, turned on their amber LEDs when the yellow hit them, but as they cross-faded to green, the amber was a little noticeable. (To me. I am certain that nobody in the audience noticed this at all, ever. It’s so minor as to be a non-issue, but it was something I noticed.) I’m not really sure how I’d get around it, either, short of having a setting where I can tell the fixture “Don’t turn on the amber LED for now.” Anyway. Very, very minor issue.
The dimming had some noticeable artifacts as well. The individual LEDs had a bad habit of dimming at different rates, which I found confusing. The LEDs can turn off all at once (they do it just fine with the “highlight” function) but they tended not to when fading. I’m not sure why that would be, but it was noticeable, especially on the red emitters. A software update before we left cut down the different fade times considerably, but didn’t fix it entirely. I have a feeling that this issue has probably been solved with the new Stagebar2, as it represents several years advancement in the state of the art.
My only other annoyance with the Stagebars was with certain parts of the construction. The adjusting mechanism of the mounting hardware (to change the angle) is plasticy-feeling and prone to breaking – which several of the Stagebars did. Local crews are rough on equipment, and that may be something worth looking into changing. The other hardware problem was with the swinging side doors that allow access to the interior of the fixtures: they’re held shut with naught but two little Torx-20 screws, and they fall open all the time. I ended up putting preventative gaffer’s tape on all the lights to keep them from swinging open while being handled.
Conclusions for the Stagebars – awesome little workhorse lights. Bright, easy to set up and handle, and they look awesome. I can’t really complain about the issues I noticed, as the original Stagebars represent a second-generation LED fixture, and I’m sure most of the (minor) problems I noticed have been corrected on the new version Martin just released.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks