Student Design Competition Resource – On Stage Lighting’s Spotlight Tutorials

Hey Students, Looking for some help on your design project for the Student Design Competition? A good friend, educator, designer and fellow blogger, Rob Sayer from On Stage Lighting has put together a great series of screen cast to help guide you through the design process with Vectorworks Spotlight.  Albeit 2010, many of the examples and tutorials still hold true in Vectorworks 2011.

Head over to Rob’s website www.onstagelighting.co.uk.  Forgive his stuffy voice on the screen cast, he had a slight cold when recording them.  Either way, thank you Rob for putting together such an informative and helpful guide to Vectorworks Spotlight! Pip Pip!!!

If you need Vectorworks to work on your project… as a student, you are in luck! Vectorworks offers a FREE… yes  F-R-E-E version of their software to learn and work with.  To get the software, visit students.vectorworks.net. Some limitations and restrictions do apply for the student version of the software.  See the student page on Vectorworks website.

Now, after you have the software, watch all of Rob’s great tutorials, head over to the Student Design Competition page to learn more about the competition, the rules and requirements.

Fixture Personality Files and Lighting Control

This past week, Rob Sayer, the editor of OnStageLight.co.uk put out a great article about lighting fixture personality files and how the function with lighting consoles.

With lighting fixtures getting jam packed with more and more features, the arrival of media servers and digital projection, fixture channel requirements grow and grow. But how does the lighting console know how to control each individual fixture and parameter for each unique type of fixture?

In step the fixture personality, template or what ever a board may call it.  The personality file is a road map tell the lighting console how each fixture type is controlled.

Rob has gone more in depth and describes how the console and the personality file come together to give us control.  Here is just a sample of Rob’s article.

Using a simple DMX preset style desk, knowing the personality of a certain fixture tells us which faders the different attributes. So, we know that fader 1 will control Intensity, for example. But who wants to control complex lighting fixtures using a preset desk? Not me.

Every intelligent lighting control needs personality data to function properly. At it’s simplest, the console needs to know how to assign control channels to the different parts of the desk – Intensity to faders, Pan and Tilt to the position controls etc. When you select Gobo control, it’s no good finding the encoders are adjusting Prism.

So, the console needs to know the personality of the fixture types and these are commonly stored in a library of Fixture Personality files and set during the desk patching process. Currently, fixture personality file formats are proprietary to the specific console manufacturer. This bugs me but more about that later.

To read the entire article, visit OnStageLighting.co.uk.