I'm in kind of a pause for my documentary at the moment. On the agenda is an interview with some folks that look at rum a little differently than I've seen so far, and I commissioned an animation (very expensive) to show how fermentation works. I've also got a backlog of things to work on for the forum, and kind of letting that marinate for now. That leaves me thinking about some of my other hobbies.
I'm waffling about seeing a couple of shows in the next few weeks, back to back, but it has me thinking about lighting. Last fall I bought a couple of fixtures to play with, and it turned out to be quite a rabbit hole. But there's only so much you can do with two fixtures.
The lights I bought are LED-based spots, and they use color wheels instead of colored LED's, so there are some limitations in terms of what colors they can produce. The tradeoff is that they can produce really sharp, focused beams, and use rotating gobos and a prism and such for some really awesome effects. For the money, they really do a lot. I still feel pretty good about the research and choice. The intensity of the white beams in particular is impressive.
To expand on that exploration, I probably have to buy some additional wash fixtures. These generally have RGBW LED's at the core, so they can display most any color, and have a series of lenses that can focus in and out to create soft-ish to spot-ish beams. The choices in this category are not as straight forward, because the brand I bought previously (Chauvet DJ) has nothing at a similar price point. No one really does. The stuff that you see at shows, those are often at minimum $5k per fixture, if not twice that. But as you may suspect, there are Chinese brands that do something similar for a fraction of the cost. It often comes down to whether or not you can trust their customer service in the event that you get a dud. It also often depends on their US divisions (see: anything made by DJI).
Aside from the fixtures, there's still the issue of control options. It's crazy how much MA Lighting, based in Germany, seems to dominate the entire industry. When they released the third version of their flagship product a few years ago, the pros generally felt that it was half-baked, but that appears to have been largely rectified. For example, this year's Eurovision contest, one of the most insane lighting rigs I've seen year after year, adopted their MA3 product. They make these elegant consoles that cost mid-five-figures, which is obviously not something I would spend money on. But they have a PC-driven product that varies in cost. You can buy a DMX interface for about $1,500 and run the rest on any touch screen computer, or even a "real" control surface to pair with a touch screen for around $7k. As much as this sounds insane, relative to what "pro" video gear costs, it's not unreasonable. It's just not in the range that I would want to spend, unless I started booking lighting director gigs, which I am absolutely not qualified for. There are people who make a living that way, bringing their console to plug into a network provided by the venue/tour/promoter. For fun thus far, I've been using a $20 USB-DMX interface and MA's legacy free, PC-based product that's somewhat limited in functionality.
This is all academic though. With our big summer trip, I can't really afford to even think about this on a cash basis for the moment. (Sort of... really that was paid for months ago, including the airfare.) This is even more the case as I look at ways to tighten up the movie. As much as I've been able to produce parts on my own, there are bits (like animation and music) that I can't do myself, and they're not free.
But I still have the lighting bug. It hasn't gone away.
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