LDI show in Florida... 1st impressions
Colleen and I spent a VERY productive week at LDI this year, connecting and reconnecting with the vendors, manufacturers, other designers, and producers who make our lives increasingly interesting year to year.
The overwhelming trend this year was media serving solutions for live applications, in almost every case based around leading lighting desks. High End systems rolled out it's Catalyst 3 Media Server, which works with any DMX based desk, but which is tied most closely to the Whole Hog consoles. The new Cat3 software featured quadruple active layers being sent out. Color correction, image shape manipulation, and numerous effects were available in realt time thru the lighting console controls. All parameters fell where you would expect; color correction of media was achieved using the same pots you would dial up your colors on an automated light. Likewise for beam shaping. Clips could be called up at the touch of a button by storing them in beam palletes. This revision was a ground up rewrite, and we found it to be quite intuitive. Obviously High End is fully committed to this convergence of video and lighting, showing this further through the rollout of the DL-1 fixture. The DL-1 is a 5500 lumen LCD projector with the pan and tilt capabilities found on other High End Systems automated lights. A nice feature on this unit was the hardware dimming iris, allowing for the elimination of video black in black out conditions. This fixture is a revolution in our opinion. Arguments can be made that it was perhaps not bright enough, but it was apparent from the enormous crowds waiting to get up close with it, that this product has been eagerly awaited by the end users, and it is certainly the first of what will be many options. Vari*Lite and Martin Professional indicated that the rollout of similiar fixtures in their product lines will be coming sooner rather than later. The mergin of automated lighting and projection has begun in earnest.
Vari*Lite Production Systems rolled out their DX Media Server, based on the Virtuoso DX console. This solution, superficially similiar to Catalyst, took full advantage of the power and flexibility found in this 'cadillac' of lighting desks. The additional capability for users to import 3D objects into the server environment and map video on to them set it apart.
4th Phase Lighting / LSD were showing the M-Box media server, originally designed by LSD to serve up to their 'near miss' fixture the M light several years ago. The software has now been made independent of the light fixture, and seemed roughly equivalent in capability to the Catalyst server.
ANother GREAT serving solution was being offered up by David Hersey Associates (DHA), famous for their many fabulous gobos. The DHA server was called the 'Hippotizer' and came in several shockingly low priced configurations. The middle and top end solutions were DMX control based, and the server was quite robust. It comes preloaded with the entire DHA gobo catalog in digital format, as well as thousands of great motion based clips from various stock sources.
Various LED based innovations also ruled the day, led by Barco's COMPLETELY innovative M-Pix imaging product. Colleen and I decided to term these ULR or ultra low resolution imaging. The M-Pix are a larger LED based pixel system that can be used for video or lighting applications. The effect is wonderful, bright, and textural, and it comes at a CONSIDERABLE lower coats than most LED video panel solutions. Best of all, the Mi-Pix modules can be constructed into three dimensional shapes that can then be 'screens' cheaply and easily. BARCO has constructed a 6' by 4' by 3' version of the BARCO 'eye' symbol and wast streaming it with video that wrapped around it. It was truly stunning to look at.
Other notable products that 'came out' at the show were ETC's new Revolution Moving Light. Based on the superior optics and light selivery of the Source 4, the Revolution has been built to be affordable in tighter budgets, and to feature totally silent operation. Different modules were easily added or subtracted from the base chassis to extend the capabilities of the fixture. In the "oh my god, it's soo simple, yet SO cool' department was ACT enterprices/City Theatricals indexing cheesborough. We all know how much we've wished we had easily locking off angle rigging hardware, and this was it. Operating like any normal Cheeseborough, the clamp could be set in a total of 32 different locking configurations for those oddly shaped staging requirements. Mmm good.
As more of the myriad things we saw rise to the top of my brain, I'll post more here. Suffice to say the enormous combination of automated lighting and video has taken hold firmly, and LED sources will be showing up in more and more of our work very soon...
Oh, did I mention we were named Projection Designers of the Year ? hee, hee
3:28:27 PM 
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