The last time I did this was 2012, and 2013 represents a new lighting supply company, a new lighting rig, and some brand new fixtures that I can’t wait to review. As always, my opinions don’t represent the opinions of anybody else, neither the artists I work for, my fellow crewmates, the lighting company that supplies the fixtures, or any other person living or dead or undead. I disclaim everything, etc. So let’s get the party started with…
Robe MMX spot
These are my primary spot moving lights, and they’re made by the (lesser known, in the States at least) Czech company Robe. (Pronounced row-bee.) The MMX spot uses the Phillips Platinum 35 lamp, an 800-watt short arc lamp that the company says is close to the output of traditional 1200-watt sources. I think that’s fair if we’re talking about an older light like the MAC 2000, which they are comparable to. However, newer 1200-watt lights like the VL3000 still certainly have a noticeable output edge. But that’s okay, because what these light lack in output, they make up for in features, speed, weight, and size.
The MMX (I have no idea what this initialism stands for, if anything) weighs in at 65 pounds, and is just a touch bigger than a MAC 700. Two of them ride side-by-side in a case which could be a little narrower if they took the silly divider out of the middle and made the case just a few inches taller so that the mounting hardware could be left on while in said case. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with mover cases of any style – attaching and removing mounting hardware to moving lights every day is a real pain in the ass, especially when dealing with lots of fixtures. It’s just another step for local crews to screw up, and requires the attentional time from the road crew that could be better spent doing other things. The mounting hardware is standard omega-style brackets to which you can attach any mounting hardware you prefer – we use half-couplers, sadly.
One of the things that is really nice about this fixture is the settings screen. Not only is it full-color and a touchscreen, Robe added a battery to the unit so you can address and change fixture modes and settings without powering the unit on, which is amazing. The DMX addresser also has an intuitive slider, so gone are the days of holding an up or down button and then overshooting the address you wanted to get to your fixture to – you just take your finger, move the slider close to where you want it and click it once or twice to fine-tune it. It’s a great feature, and I love it. The screen also features full text of all the settings that you’re changing, so you don’t have to consult a manual to figure out what “LdOF” means, like on fixtures with a seven-segment LED display. ::cough::old Martin::couph::
The fixture has a good selection of aerial and breakup gobos, and all the wheels move at a respectable speed. One of the effects that I use in my show is an alternating 0-second swap between adjacent patterns, so being able to switch back and forth between two gobos on the same wheel is critical for me, and the MMX performs very nicely in this area. They’re not quite as fast as the VL2000-style wheel, but close enough. Two of the gobos are a little too close in appearance for my tastes – waves right next to wavy bars – but I understand that those are for projection and not really aerial effects, so I’m not too bothered by it.
The color mix system is interesting. It’s very fast, which is lovely, but the mixing itself is a bit uneven – half-mixed colors result in noticeably unevenly-colored beams. All color-mix systems are, of course, a trade-off between speed, saturation / color, and smoothness of the mix system, so I understand why it is the way it is. The colors are very saturated – mixing green (yellow and cyan flags at full) reduces the light output by an enormous amount. Orange can be mixed, but it’s very dim, so as usual there’s a fixed color wheel with color flags to help fill in the gaps in the mix system – a nice bright orange, congo and primary red, a saturated blue and yellow, and a green. I feel that the shade of green chosen is not what I would have picked. It’s a very light Kelly green, almost sea-foam-y, which is fine – that’s a color that’s hard to mix while getting a nice output, but I would have really appreciated the inclusion of a primary green filter instead to help get that nice deep rock ‘n’ roll green while maintaining better output than can be had with the mix system. It’s not really an oversight so much as a choice made to keep the stock colors in line with the likely wishes of most of Robe’s end users, so I understand it, it just sucks for my situation. As of this writing I haven’t been able to find additional fixed filters on Robe’s website, so I don’t know if it’s possible to change them without having a third-party company custom-make a dichroic for me.
The unit also includes a “dual animation wheel”, two wheels with diamond-shaped patterns that can create some really cool moire-style patterns in the beam, which can create some really cool projections for surfaces. It’s not that interesting as an aerial effect unless you’re trying to do ripple or sparkle effects with a gobo, it’s really meant more as a surface projection tool, which I don’t have much use for in my show (I lack surfaces to really let this feature shine) but I use it a few times to paint the players with some ripple-ly light. Interestingly, the fixture also includes a motorized lamp hot-spot control – so you optimize your lamp when you put it in, but then you can adjust the placement of the lamp within the reflector via DMX – make it peaky or smooth. This is fun when using the iris – you can shoot all the energy of the lamp down the middle. It’s not something I’ve ever seen on any other moving light ever, and it’s a clever idea. Note to rental shops: this does NOT mean that you can just throw lamps in there. They still have to be focused properly the first time you install them.
The zoom is impressively fast, covering its full range in less than a second, it has an equally-snappy iris, and they don’t draw a ton of power. Not bad. Which brings us to another Robe fixture that I use, the…
Robe ROBIN 600 LEDWash
Basically the Robe answer to the Martin MAC 301. It’s the same basic idea – a frying-pan shaped giant heatsink with the LEDs mounted in concentric rings. Where the 600 wash differs from the 301 is that each output lens houses a red, green, blue, and white LED, and each lens has a tiny little micro lenses which serve to homogenize the output colors, with little micro egg-crates and another larger egg-crate over the output lenses to help reduce spill. The homogenization lenses do a good job of eliminating color fringing and banding at normal throw distances.
The dimming is extremely smooth, with just a touch of steppiness at the last few clicks before blackout. I’ve seen better dimming at the low end, but it’s not objectionable. The PWM 300Hz frequency is a little low and makes things look weird on video (we don’t carry IMAG with us, but we’ve had it a few times with local productions) It’s not always noticeable, but 300Hz is a little slow for LED sources these days.
The color, as mentioned previously, is RGBW, and the systems works just fine within the well-understood limitations of RGB systems – nothing really radical happing here. The white is very nice and helps fill in the gaps in the RGB output, while providing nice pastel colors – these lights can mix a very nice, clean-looking 6000K-ish white. They also have a built-in CTC channel, which tries (and fails, as we might expect) to create a passable incandescent amber glow. It’s just not possible with RBGW systems to create a pleasing incandescent look, in my opinion. Dedicated units that use calibrated amber and white sources have recently gotten good enough to fool LDs (The Source4 LED gets amazing reviews, and it will probably manage to fool me when I finally get the chance to see one in real life, when that happens) but the hard fact remains that you cannot convincingly approximate the spectral emission curve of an incandescent lamp with an RGB or RBGW system. It’s silly to even pretend. Amusingly, the 600s, when using the CTC channel, include fake thermal delay and red-shift, just like a “real” incandescent bulb.
The 600 also allows the user to change the three concentric “rings” on the front face of the fixture independently, which is a groovy feature that I use quite a lot in my show. Turning on just the middle element makes all the fixtures look almost like Martin 101s, while turning on just the outside ring gives a very visually-pleasing and unexpected “ring of light” effect, which I’ve never had on any other fixture. This of course takes a crap ton of DMX channels, so in all I end up using 6 universes of DMX for my rig (two controlled over Art-Net)
The unit has the same color touchscreen as the MMX spots do, so all the good things I had to say about that apply equally here. The zoom is snappy – not quite as snappy as a 301, but that’s okay – and the pan and tilt speed are quite respectable. In all, a very nice, very solid bit of lighting engineering.
The Clay-Paky Sharpy
Clay-Paky is one of my favorite lighting companies – they’ve been around for a long time and recently have been coming out with some of the most innovating and interesting moving lights on the market today. They won a ton of awards to their new sort-of-beam fixture, the Sharpy, and it’s quickly become an industry favorite, and it’s easy to see why. Out of the front of the fixture comes an impressively bright, almost solid shaft of light that shoots across arenas, stadiums, and any and all outdoor venues, beam visible with or without haze, and consumes just 189 watts of power. It’s quite small – smaller than a MAC 250 profile – and has a really distinctive gigantic front lens.
The unit is clearly optimized for extremely narrow aerial effects, and in fact, that’s the only thing you really use it for. The dimmer law is awful, and really weird – part of the problem is the peaky-ness of the beam source. (All the power is focused through the middle) These lights do not fade subtly, but it’s an effect light, so I’m not really expecting theatrical-grade dimming here. It has a very nice assortment of colors – all of which are extremely close together on the color wheel, making it easy to sort of “fake color mixing” if you roll the wheel smoothly, it will also do very nice split colors – my personal favorite being a purple / yellow combination. Conversely, you can spin it very quickly, either to get from one color to another, or continuously spin it to create a weird and disorienting color pulse effect.
There’s also an eight (!) facet prism that can zoom in and out, which is a fun effect (though it’s not a particularly huge zoom) and a frost filter, which smooths the beam significantly and makes it like a really narrow wash. The pan and tilt is crazy fast, almost moving-mirror-speed, which makes for some really fun effects, like the super-fast pan-pan (pan with an offset sine wave applied across all fixtures) that I use on the song “Beer Joint Rockin’ “. Which, sadly, he’s only played live once, but hopefully he will again soon.
The Martin Atomic 3000 strobe
They’re strobe lights, and they’re bloody bright. Only thing I wish they’d change is the DIP switches that get “loose” after a ride in the truck and have to be fiddled with to make them stay at the correct address. Other than that, you can’t beat the price or the output with anything close to that wattage.
Linx-18 LED screen
The video panels we use are made by a (Chinese? The company’s physical address is conspicuously absent on their website, probably because of the semi-irrational hatred Americans have for Chinese-made products) company, and are 18mm-pitch and flexible. I haven’t worked with a lot of LED screens in the past, but I find these reasonably easy to put up and configure.
They’re clearly a “budget” solution in terms of build-quality – the flexible nature of the product indicates a certain about of, well, flexibility in the hardware, and lightweight is better than heavy, but the panel joints are extremely thin and easy to bend, and the “clips” that attach the screens to each other are plastic and stupidly easy to break. Again with the PWM frequency – it’s low (I have no direct way to measure, but I’m guessing based on experience that it’s lower than 300Hz) and causes problems when viewed on any camera with a rolling shutter. (So most CMOS sensors) This is a problem mostly confined to consumer and pro-sumer grade video cameras, and wouldn’t be a problem if everybody in the world used proper, professional-grade cameras with global shutters, but alas, they do not, so this is a minor problem on some gigs.
Other than that, there’s not much to say about these. They’re reasonably bright, visible in just about anything less than straight-on no-cloud midday sun, and lightweight enough to 4-person stack them without blowing people’s backs out. For what they are, they’re decent.
The MA Lighting GrandMA console
If it were a chick, I’d marry it. (Sorry, Emily.)
There you have it, my entire rig. Some lesser-known lighting manufacturers there, but a very workable rig. I’m not overly-impressed with the MMX spots, I think the color-mix system lags behind anything Martin or Vari-Lite uses, but other than that, I can’t really complain for the price and the wattage.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks