How many Dimmer Channels ?
Sun, 22 June 2008, 07:35 pmDon Allen28 posts in thread
How many Dimmer Channels ?
Sun, 22 June 2008, 07:35 pmWith the offer of state funding in WA for amateur theatres, the decisions on what to apply for need researching and some professional advice is required to explain the theatre lighting requirements of amateur theatre groups.
One ideal "Square One" lighting design, (so called because if you put everything back to "square one" you will be able to provide good lighting for any basic production ) is to:
Divide the stage into the nine basic acting areas ie DSL, DSC, DSR, MSL, MSC, MSR, USL, USC, USR.
Allocate two key lights to each area (the McAndless method see lighting links, this takes you to 18 lights from the front. at 45 degrees to the centre of each acting area.
Allocate a back light to each acting area, directly behind the centre of each acting area, this takes another six channels
You now have an ideal lighting design that uses 24 dimmer channels for individual control of each light. In a usual amateur theatre situation, you will have to parallel lights if you have less dimmer channels.
You now need to allow three dimmer channels if you have a cyclorama and additional channels for specials, so the ideal number of channels takes you up to 36, which is three dimmer racks, of 12 channels each, with a channels capacity of 2400 watts.
Any questions ?
It seem that the initial
Thu, 10 July 2008, 03:08 pmIt seem that the initial question of lighting a basic "square rig" has gone off on some sort of tangent about dimming lamps.
Returning to basics: the traditional three-by-three areas can be well illuminated as described early in the post. To re-cap:
FRONT (from profiles)
from 45 out and 45 up (stage) right, use Lee 103 "Straw"
from 45 out and 45 up (stage) left, use Lee 117 "Steel Blue"
TOP (from Fresnels)
from behind and 75 up, use Lee 136 "Pale Lavender"
I'd augment that with
SIDES (from Fresnels)
from 30 up (stage) right, use Lee 159 "No Color Straw"
from 30 up (stage) left, use Lee 202 "1/2 CT Blue"
Which gives five lights per area.
On a small stage (say, 8m wide X 6m deep) and using 300W PAR56's, and allocating all five lights (1500W max) to a single area, only nine dimmer channels are required. If you then used three dimmer channels for the cyc (a collection of 300W floods) with
Lee 106 "Primary Red";
Lee 124 "Dark Green" ; and
Lee 363 "Special Medium Blue"
for the usual R-G-B color mix,
you've only used 12 channels. So if you had a 24 channel board and one channel was assigned to the follow-spot, that leaves 11 channels for 'specials'.
Last thing, most dimmer racks require a three-phase, 40A per phase supply which gives 12, 240V 10A outlets; so, you'd need two dimmer racks as well as the 24-channel board.
I reckon this might get would out of trouble in a lot of situations.
Cheers,
Russell