Audio, Video, and Lighting in Ministry
During last year’s The Show we had a lot of fun putting together a pretty cool drum feature. Just a fun break from the norm during the show. Lots of drums, lots of lights, what’s not to like!?
I had a lot to do with the lighting. Light Converse really allowed us to try out ideas before loading into the room. We also did the bulk of our programming virtually.
We video taped it and some very creative people put together this video, check it out!
Green Hippo has officially released their Hippotizer 3.2 software update. They’ve added a lot of really cool features to their already powerful and easy to use Zookeeper software.
A couple of the features I’m looking forward to are the built in region mapping (for 3D mapping). A crossfade engine that goes way beyond just crossfading media. It creates smooth transitions for anything you can control. So media, FX, color or geometry changes, anything! Lastly they have a nice preset component that makes it really easy to create, store, and load, all kinds of looks. Again it goes way beyond just the clips themselves to include FX, multiple layers, whatever you want.
There’s a lot more than what I’ve listed. Head on over to Green Hippo’s site for the full info on their release.
Personally I thought that the recent Super Bowl had a great lighting show and was well done overall. While I think that Beyonce did a good job for a pop artist, I find myself watching the technical side of things more than anything else. What displays are they using? What lights are those? That was a great idea, that wasn’t, ha ha.
I know that they used Green Hippo media servers to power the two video displays built into the stage. I also know that they had two rows of 80 Clay Paky Sharpys (160 total!). This allowed very simple movement macros to look amazing!
Video content was very good and very creative. At one point thanks to clever camera angles and good content you really thought there were more real people on stage than there really was, pretty cool. Overall I thought it was entertaining and unlike a lot of other high profile lives events lately, I didn’t spot or hear any huge errors. That’s always nice.
A friend of mine sent me a link to an article interviewing the LD for the last three Super Bowls and other high profile events. I always like to know what other people’s thought process is and how they work. There’s almost always at least one little tip or trick you can learn from. Worth checking out!
Our school here at the church, CCA, is putting on its annual dance concert this week. We’ve been busy putting together some cool lighting, video, and audio elements to compliment the dancing on stage. At the same time we’re trying to get the tech kids a chance to get hands on with some of the really cool gear that’s in our theatre.
We leaned on side lighting a lot for this event. That helped keep things isolated from upstage to downstage and keep from washing out the cyc’s and scrims. This was especially important when we were projecting video content. Each row of side lighting consisted of conventional and LED lights so we could fill in with any color we want.
Here are some pictures from the concert. Overall things went very well and the kids did a great job!
Got some cool gadgets being announced at NAMM this year. We’ve been looking at new personal mixing systems to upgrade our Aviom system. The Roland caught our attention with it’s awesome ability to customize what inputs show up on what channel of the mixers. Now Allen and Heath has a cool new system that looks very good and shares some of those features we liked. Check out the video on their site, it’s just 2 minutes and walks through the highlights.
What stands out to me is the nice display for showing EQ and channel labels. Ability to use their mixers on an Aviom network. That would make upgrading easier and incremental if needed. Ability to save to a jump drive is nice as well, no more having your preset recorded over.
Beyond that it’s like the Roland where you can group multiple inputs to one channel on the mixer. This makes handling larger mixes very simple. You can also set up each mixer with it’s own set of inputs custom to what each player needs. Looks very promising!