[Music] thank you everyone for joining us for this webinar on the history and evolution of automated lighting presented by craig rutherford and brad schiller my name is mallory ms narcic and i'm the project manager here at harman a few things before we get started everyone on the call is muted to keep down noise levels during this webinar however there is a q a function where you can submit questions to the presenter and they'll try to answer as many as possible at the end this webinar is also recorded and a link will be made available a few days after this presentation we do have a number of other webinars taking place over the next few months for audio lighting video and control we encourage you to take a look at the different webinars in our learning sessions workshop series on pro.harmon.com as well as visiting harman professional training to see our many on-demand and certification courses that are available to you for free and now i'd like to introduce you to craig rutherford and brad schiller the presenters for today's webinar craig is a lighting designer based in minneapolis where he lives with his partner and five children having had an interest in production since childhood he's worked as a technical director a touring lighting director and a full-fledged production and lighting designer brad has been involved in automated lighting for over 30 years and is currently a business development manager martin professional he's the author of the automated lighting programmer's handbook and a regular columnist on plsn a self-described lighting geek brad enjoys sharing his knowledge with others and i'll pass it over to you guys thank you mallory for that wonderful introduction and i'd like to thank each of you for joining us today or for viewing this pre-recorded presentation yeah and thank you again mallory um we're really excited to take you on a historical journey through our little industry we have lots to share so fire up your time machine as we look back through the years there are many many products moments and Overview times and places that have had an impact on the history of automated lighting and throughout this presentation we plan to address those that have the most significant industry impact given the constraints of time we had to pick which ones we thought were the most important or the most relevant to the evolution of automated lighting we're going to really focus on the evolution those products that really contributed greatly to the industry in the course of our research we learned a lot and a lot of is really really interesting so before you ask a question about hey you didn't mention my favorite light the the super bright mega 5000 from super company five just understand that we probably looked at it we probably considered it but we just didn't mention it here but because you know we want to be respective of your time and the time of this webinar also we don't want to info dump to the point that your collective eyes plays over like so many loading donuts load in donuts the last 40 years have seen incredible growth and hundreds if not thousands of of different moving light products from around the globe so today we're going to highlight key industry moments and products that define the evolution of our industry now we have to admit upfront that we are somewhat biased upon focusing on the major brands uh and our geographic location which is north america the united states um there are of course other products in different regions that may have had significant importance but they didn't take off globally and so we probably won't talk about them uh you're also going to see lists of products here on the screen with release dates that information is is and can be really hard to pin down perfectly so there might be some minor inconsistencies with other information that you can find online but we have made a really strong attempt to be accurate and there are far too many products to fit on these pages so we have shown as many as we could find um but know that before we begin there are hundreds more than appear on just these slides right and before we begin we want to give a big shout out to our friend paul peltier Shoutout because he's generously allowed us to use this great library he has of its of uh historical lighting equipment photos as we researched we found that photos are kind of hard to find of a lot of products or if they are out there there were some concerns over copyright and whatnot but paul graciously allowed us to use any of the images from his website please take some time and check out his website later today or tomorrow or whenever he has a really great wealth of photos of really exciting and classic lighting products uh also we reached out to other friends in the industry uh to receive photos and information and for all those that we reached out to we want to say thank you yeah so uh put on your seat belts because we are going to travel First Moving Lights through 40 plus years in the next somewhere around 90 minutes so our journey begins very first moving lights to see the um light of day so in 1906 we see the very first moving light patent uh which used cords to adjust pan and tilt and zoom and an electromechanical color changer so it seems as though the inventor intended this device to be used as a sort of remote follow spot uh because the patent application mentions with my invention an operator concealed on the stage may cause the rays of light to be projected upon and moved to and fro with any figure moving about the stage end quote moving on to 1925 we see the first electric motor First Repositionable Lights controlled repositionable lights which looks like some kind of mad scientist machine that you can see here on the slide and around this time we start to see some incremental steps toward what would become automated lighting in the sense that we all think of it today we also saw the development of lights that could be repositioned it's important to remember that these event advancements uh tended to happen with the goals of theatrical productions in mind right so early theater drove a lot of automated lighting advancement because theatrical productions were the sort of preeminent large-scale performative event uh that most people would have been familiar with and would have attended yeah and theater shows at this time were not preoccupied with questions of moving lights around during a performance Remote Focus although when they used follow spots of course from the perspective of the individual lighting designer and electrician what was more important to them was focusing specials and banks of wash lights that was more important because that's what was time consuming for their jobs the need for a system to remotely focus a fixture instead of physically laying hands on it was a prime factor in these early lighting developments in addition a remotely flexible light allowed for it to serve more than one function in a scene repositioning itself between hues they found it was very useful they could reposition between cues this also allowed for fewer lights to be used in production saving on everything from electricity to the number of instruments required for production starting around the 1950s george George Eisenhower eisenhower who's a pioneer in the field of stage lighting he began began many experiments with moving light fixtures again for that repositionable type purpose several these concepts led to his work uh his future work with century lighting where he created motorized ellipsoidals and fresnels eisenhower also invented some of the earliest dimming systems for stage lighting and he held over 27 patents for various technologies that are precursors to technology that we still use all the time including automated fly rails and lots of lighting elements he also held a patent on lighting control circuits and that patent is the basis for all modern moving light consoles that we still use today he's truly an innovator that we all owe a lot of gratitude too yeah and so starting in the late 60s Ellipsoidals uh we began to see ellipsoidals with mirrors and pars with pan and tilt and some color changing uh and gobo changing concert fixtures now there seems to have been a lot of do-it-yourself spirit in the early lighting engineering folks so peter nguyen wilson many others were also developing mixing up colored oils and waters to use with large format projections during this time as well and they also had some gobos and iris and color wheels implemented in slide projectors which saw a lot of use in the early pink floyd concerts and then towards the Mac Spot end of the decade around 1969 lightning designer jules fisher developed a movable parking system that had pan tilt and zoom and this light actually went on to be used all the way into the early 1990s now he coincidentally he called this the mack spot it had no relation to martin at the time but it was called maxbot back in 1969. this fixture his concept was he wanted to represent tinkerbell in a production of peter pan and it actually marks this is what's really important here with this original mac spot from jules fisher was his idea was to represent the moving light of tinkerbell so it's actually one of the first purpose-designed moving lights with the intention of actually seeing the light move as part of the show then in the 1970s we saw further innovation in the early 70s with Cyclops a lot of different type of custom fixtures including what was called the cyclops the cyclops was created by lighting designer stefan graf and his production electrician named jim fecker and they both worked at fantasy lighting and on the this tour for grand funk railroad they decided they wanted to have remote controlled follow spots because they weren't happy with the local fall spot operators they were finding on tour so they developed this mirror-based moving light that actually used bicycle chains and various motors to move the mirror from a simple joystick controller as well as using colored glass moving in and out of the beam interestingly enough it was while on tour with grand funk railroad that some guys in dallas texas went to that tour and saw the cyclops and got inspired but we'll get back to that in a little bit yeah so we'll move on now to 1978 sort of the Moving Lights late 70s and 1980s so as many advancements in the world of lighting for music first came from the world of theater a lot of early emphasis was placed on the concept of remote focusability as we said the idea of moving beams of light uh through haze as an effect for concerts wasn't really something that most people were thinking about yet so prior to moving lights concert lighting was a lot and lots of pars with gels maybe with some specials thrown in think uh think about the pizza oven design from queen that you can see here and you've got the idea these banks of light required tremendous unbelievable amounts of power and they generated consummate amounts of waste heat and gel waste so somewhere during this time we as an industry made the jump from lights that can move and change color as a way to sort of get more than one use out of the fixture to banks of lights that move in sync with each other and change color together looks really cool so it's it's hard to overstate just how big of a shift that was and that brings us to the first of our products that we think really exemplify the history of automated lighting and as you can probably suspect we Verilight cannot of course talk about the evolution of automated lighting without discussing verilight the rock band genesis and shoko shoko was the place to go for tours back in the 70s and it was an engineering team from shoko that attended that grand funk railroad concert and saw the cyclops on tour and subsequently invented the very first movement the vl-0 was the prototype although the naming technologies apparently not exactly it wasn't called VL0 Prototype the 0 at the time it was simply known as the prototype there's a little echo there that's kind of hopefully you're not out here at any rate it was simply known as the prototype or just the vl that didn't have any numbers assigned to it that came later these this first these first prototypes that they made they were never used for anything other than basically testing uh showing to the band genesis and resolving future patent issues furthermore these initial prototype vls they were only initially planned to be color changing fixtures that could simply reposition it wasn't until they actually got the first international community saw the power of unmatched moves yeah and another time or another revolution was also taking place around this time in nightclubs and discos around the world this is of course the invention of the scanner the moving mirror light so early nightclubs and disco techs were hotbeds of lighting technology advancement many early motorized lights were aimed at the disco and nightclub scene to add excitement to the evening we've all seen the sort of iconic motorized lights of this era the the death star looking motorized balls that have the colored glass dots on them spin around you might remember those from your days going with susan and david down to the roller skating rink and buying the nickels you got for christmas Chameleon Telescan perhaps the biggest moment of evolution came with the development of the moving near scanner hey craig can you try just commuting honestly if that helps thank you yeah i think that does okay so the first professional model of the moving mirror scanner was the chameleon telescan and this was designed in 1979 and eventually made available in 1981. the telescan was hugely inventive it was hugely innovative for the time integrating for the first time ever a moving mirror with positionable repeatability the first model offered five colors well if you count white it had two color wheels each with two colors plus open by 1985 chameleon had developed the telescan mark ii which is created as having the very first cmy color mixing system in a moving light and it used this using three plastic led leigh brand filters it also had a frost filter and a six position gobo wheel the telescan fixtures went on to become the go-to for really big arena style rock shows of the time with designers such as mark brickman calling it the best fixture on the market yeah and then finally in 1981 uh the very first production vl units Veralite VL1 were ready to go and the company known as vera light was founded so the first workable vl ones were used of course on the genesis abacab tour in barcelona spain so it became clear then at that show that shoko veralite had a marketable product that would help change the concert lighting world forever now the vl1 used dichroic filters which would become the standard for changing the lights color as they offered orders of magnitude more color stability than gels did right so they resist the effects of heat diminishing that color over time and they came with three color wheels of seven filters each plus open the original vl1 also came with a grand total of two gobos um why they gave us 21 colors and two gobos can't seem to find any definitive information on but it just it seems as though patterns weren't really important yeah and the design of the fixture the the upper enclosure or the base in which the moving head is mounted it contained a power supply for the lamp and the lamp was known as the aps-250 and also in this this upper enclosure was a data receiver card it was a printed circuit board that translated the cue information that came from the console into low voltages and then send it on to the rest of the fixture this data receiver card also translated the lamp start and douse commands from the console and fed them to the fixture and that allowed lamps to be struck and dashed remotely by the operator which was a pretty cool new concept yeah and another important distinction to make about vera light products is that you could only lease them until 2000 uh and that's when they started selling the vl2000 series they were extremely protective of the technology i've been told stories about vltecs taking lights to be fixed into a vl employees only tent on productions to be worked on in seclusion this is fairly notable when you think about it the technology now has become so mature that there aren't really many secrets left to hide we all basically know how moving lights do all of their tricks these days yeah i remember those tents interestingly about six months after the launch of the vl1 a company called morpheus lights created and released what was called the panaspot and they started gaining traction in the concert touring world as well in 1986 we saw the development of the Komar Robot komar robot this was the first professional moving mirror for general sale which also gets credit for the explosion of scanner popularity following its release now kind of uniquely and interesting here uh in the u.s it was sold through a distribution company that was named high-end systems and this was before high-end systems was making their own products so they were distributing the komar robot and they decided it was good but it wasn't quite what they wanted so they actually made improvements to the light and sold a modified version that was brighter and more reliable than the original from komar plus the komar distributor in the uk was called wb lighting and they hired a gentleman that you may have heard of in our industry named mike wood and at that time to write custom software to allow for individual control of multiple fixtures from a computer system and this system is credited as being the very first ever moving light controller to use a mouse and icons with visual display yeah and speaking of controlling moving fixtures another DMX milestone in the development of modern stage lighting came with the development and release of of course dmx 512 standard in 1986. so much of the era prior to this was was this is all preview mx um just about every major manufacturer had their own proprietary control scheme there weren't any standards uh regarding control schemes or connectors cables dmx finally became a finalized standard in 1986 and it specified the now default five pins uh and an xll xlr style connector as well as a data scheme and the concept of universes of 512 8-bit control channels also in 1986 we see the release of the summa hti this was an early moving headlight and it was the first to use dmx as its control scheme so think about that that suma light which is almost as old as i am would probably be compatible with any modern lighting console because of this standard that we as the industry have adopted and have started to use industry yeah unfortunately sumo was a really cool light but unfortunately they uh they ended up being sued out of existence due to some patent violations in their systems so that's why we don't know about sumo much these days in 1987 we saw further development with Golden Scan clay packy's golden scan fixture and this was one was the first light to use stepper motors instead of servo motors most of the early moving lights at the time were making use of servo motors which had a sort of built-in smoothness that looked really really nice in a moving light application and they also knew where they were because they have built-in positional feedback but stepper motors conversely are simpler and more reliable they're easier to make tolerant of high temperatures and probably most significantly they're also also much less expensive than servo motors and that's why now you see most moving lights these days are making use of stepper motors instead of servo motors Martin Starlight and that's right more moving hands actually started appearing around this time in 1988 the martin starlight which was martin's first moving head fixture appeared uh together with tasco starlight mark ii uh many other products were being developed around this time because the demand just kept building the demand for moving life was being driven by this desire that shows had to use all this new technology that was being developed and then in 1989 just a year later we see martin's robo skin 1004 that was martin's first scanner RoboSkin with a grant full of four colors red yellow green and blue five i suppose if you count open uh and three gobos and they use a grand total of five dmx channels wow five dmx channels well during the eighties there were two big advancements uh in automated lighting that really had their genesis during the 80s yes i know pun intended there um the invention of popularization of the scanner and the invention of the moving head those were the two defining things really of the 1980s there's many great stories from the 80s about lighting professionals and audiences alike going crazy upon seeing lights uh moving around on stage and seeing the beams during this era because it was something that just was unprecedented not seen before it truly was a spectacular effect that just wasn't possible before the 80s when we had moving heads and scanners so the 80s were a great time yeah and the decade of the 90s moving The 1990s into that year that's this was a period of tremendous growth for our lighting industry manufacturers were embracing new technologies they were refining and improving their previous designs and simultaneously there was a new wave of lighting controllers using the now common dmx protocol to control lights and moving away from the sort of proprietary controllers and protocols of yesteryear and then in 1990 high-end systems introduced their intellibean fixture which was a more mature version of the then ubiquitous scanner found all over the world the intellibean represented more than just technological advancement it was notable in that it was for sale so rental companies could now buy their own stock of intellibeans and other moving lights and rent them out any productions that wanted them and could afford them and high-end sold tons of the intel beams it became an incredibly successful moving mirror fixture even to the point that the name intel beam became synonymous with moving lights in some ways at the time were just like kleenex is synonymous with the tissue people would see moving lights and say look at those intelli beams even if they were a clay pack e or other brand um and the intel beams were famously first featured on the dire straits on any street tour back in 1991. now it didn't have rotating gobos in it but boy could you ever do a gobo roll with with the intel beam you just spin that gobo wheel and you'd see all the gobos pass by and that was a really stunning effect and interestingly you can still find intel beams in a few clubs here and there and theaters around the world and if they're properly maintained they actually still work well and it was so successful that high-end systems continued producing the intel beams all the way through until 1999. another interesting note is in a brilliant marketing move high-end systems decided to put a t-shirt inside the box of each intel beam and i actually still have my original intellibean t-shirt check it out see that that's what they put in the box of everyone and really got the word out and marketed it now why it wasn't a stage black uh shirt and why it was a white shirt who knows but nowadays of course most swag you'll find is in stage blacks if you have another one of The 1992s those brad you can send it to me so in 1992 we begin to see the rise of the generic console now before this there are a lot of proprietary consoles as we said and dmx converter boxes used to control lights so with the advent of this common control language dmx of course that most or all lights could speak we had the idea that um a lighting controller could be generic right so you can load data to control any light that use the given dmx personality into its memory and then you can use it to control that light any light the joy of standards people and one of the first and one of the most popular consoles for big shows was the whole hog the original great grand pig of them all now originally back when they made the whole hogs there was a really large desk that had an external computer attached to it as well and they were each individually numbered over time they actually produced 24 of the original whole hog consoles and vicki who's the main engineer on it he gave them each unique names in fact the first four were named eenie meenie miney and imagine that so the original whole hog also had one of if one of possibly the very first ever effects engines in the world back then it was called the synth stack and fine pig was the first to apply waveforms to parameters yeah and another interesting find from this era is the scan commander it's one of the first m a lighting moving light consoles so it had the ability to control 16 automated instruments no matter how many channels they need a brochure from the period breathlessly exclaims having never met a fixture from airton um it also uniquely for the time i believe had an external trackball that could adjust the pan and tilt of a light so you could use also x y positional stage data so that once you defined the stage area that you were working with and the placement of your lights you could move groups of them around in a sort of follow mode similar to stage windows uh on modern grand made consoles yeah and what's also interesting with the uh scan commander it was early console that i actually programmed on and in fact it was the first console that i was introduced to the tracking concept now at the time it wasn't actually called tracking uh m.a called it a matrix and they used these odd symbols like x's and slashes and things to identify which parameter types were tracking versus which ones were hard values so i always remember that good old scan commander it's a fun time whoops click the right thing sorry about that automated lighting of course was Verilite VL5 advancing in other areas besides scanners in the in throughout the 80s and 90s it also saw the introduction of the verilite vl5 in 1992 one of the most well traveled and iconic flashlights in the history of broadway theater television and concerts in fact this was one of the very first popular moving yoke wash lights and it had a unique color mixing system that was part of its enduring popularity instead of using flags that moved in out of the beam or having graduated wheels with increasing saturation vl5 had a totally new concept of using radially mounted veins on colored glass and these veins would be on the front of the fixture and could turn different ways and their default state would put the edges straight on into the light so that allowed the white light to pass and then as you adjusted the color they would twist these veins would twist so that the individual veins would then be perpendicular to the beam of light gradually becoming more and more saturated yeah and so additionally that system uh which vl Dikrotune called dikro tune exploited the fact that dichroic glass sort of shifts the frequencies of light that it passes depending on the angle to the source uh magenta tinted glass for instance appears yellow as you angle it toward the light this unique louver system forms a sort of jet engine appearance on the front face of the fixture and it's really attractive and it's attractive enough to be used as a sort of set design element in its own right and a lot of tv guys were really into how that light looked on camera there was also a fourth set of veins on the front that would either do dimming or a frost wash type of effect depending on the lamp source that that particular vl5 used um and the light was popular enough that it's another of the sort of very old lights that still appears out in the wild so to speak you still see them on shows uh to this day and a company Light Sound Design called light and sound design in 1993 they launched in what was called the icon system to compete with both verilight or compete with verite both in terms of making products and also as being a touring provider because back in the 90s most of the manufacturers like verilight light and sound design and morpheus they not only were a manufacturer of light they were also providing all the gear for all the tours and the shows and so icon the light and sound design or lsd they created the icon fixture which had a really bright output for the time it had rotating gobos color mixing and a very very impressive zoom range from a really tight narrow to a very wide zoom range they also had their own console portion and that was integrated to the system with new concepts and new ideas of control and they also were able to control other industry fixtures as well as their own icon fixtures and they did this through a conversion box that i always loved the name of it was called the universal guest luminaire interface or ugly for short so when you connected external non-icon fixtures you had to go through the ugly box kind of a funny joke there but that's what they had at any rate uh many engineering choices of the whole icon system uh they went out of their way to actually avoid conflicting with verily patents including their color mixing system and their data distribution concepts from the console to the fixtures and Cyberlight then in 1994 we see high-end in high-end systems introducing the cyber light now high-end had been producing their own dichroic glass which was unique at the time there weren't any other lighting manufacturers making their own dichroics this time so they began to produce their own glass gobos in the same dichroic chambers their patterns were extremely high quality and later versions of the cyberlight were the very first fixtures to have these rotating litho pattern dichroic glass gobos and while they weren't the first fixture to have rotating gobos it was certainly one of the most popular early fixtures to have high quality glass gogos with fantastic colors in them the cyber light had a lot of output it had cmy color mixing and had new effects all in one package and it was an instant hit so much so that high end later re-released further models such as the cx the sv the turbo and eventually cyber light 2.0 so the cyber lights really marked the beginning of one of the classic and beloved moving mirror fixture designs of the lighting design world and interestingly in the Wysiwyg same year a couple of guys from the canadian broadcasting company or cbc had a great idea really revolutionary idea they decided to use primitive wireframe graphics to represent what lights are doing on stage and to use simple indicators such as f for frost or e for effects and they can display color by changing the color of the lines of the wireframe beams and make it all real time with data coming from a lighting console with this idea we had the birth of the first pre-visualization program which was aptly titled wysiwyg or what you see is what you get before the widespread use of ethernet console data everybody of course was using five pin dmx cables so you had to port that data into the weasley computer system through the use of xlr input boxes or various dongles and this ushered in the concept of programming a show offline with an editor so that you could go back later and update things when you plugged into the real show lots of other visualizers came after this but cass whizzyweight was the first in 1994. in 1995 martin released what was called the pal Martin Pal 1200 1200 and this was really important because this was the first automated light to ever have framing shutters built in motorized framing shutters previously you could only ever adjust framing shutters manually like on an ellipsoidal or conventional lights so this introduced the concept of a fixture that could remotely have framing shutters within it also included many other standard features such as cmy color mixing rotating gobos and variable frost now as we go through this presentation this is going to be the last moving mirror fixture that we're going to discuss in our lineup now it wasn't the last scanner to be made and plenty of come after it in fact some continue to be made to this day but the industry starting around this time started to gradually make a shift to moving head fixtures the technology to make reliable moving head fixtures had improved and signs of a maturing industry began to emerge while scanners have a significant advantage in their ability to move beams of light at speeds that rival most moving heads well the versatility of being able to point the beam of light anywhere you want and not being restricted with that mirror seems to have won over the majority of the world's fighting rigs yeah and then we come to another moment Whole Hog 2 in 1995 another watershed moment and this time in control flying pig systems releases the whole hog 2. now it kept a lot of the original whole hog philosophy but it added what we typically think of today as very standard features an all-in-one design tracking framing multiple timings in a single cube just huge paths and two wow touch screens on the front panel and it made recalling and recording palettes easier than ever before so for these reasons and more including an attractive blue case and integrated palm rest it quickly became a favorite on tours around the world now it continued a paradigm that was completely separate from the old theater consoles of the past the whole hog 2 did not have any direct access faders like you push up a fader and that controls one light instead all of these faders were playbacks and the user accessed control for each fixture by keying in a fixture number on a numeric pad and that fixture number was set in the patch so pallets could be accessed by touching them on the screen and the user could store a really large number of them and that made programming automated lights easier than it had been in the past additionally you had soft keys which appeared at the bottom of the screen and these were context sensitive for instance what we mean by that is say the user selected a group of fixtures that bar would show options for grouping and selection order removing programmer data for those fixtures so in this way the whole hog 2 software really tried to be intelligent about how it presented the user interface to the programmer and it was highly optimized for programming shows with lots and lots of moving lights yes it was and i remember early on when it first came out the earliest software there was no effects engine in the whole hog 2. instead there was what is somewhat famous now it was called the instaq button and it was one of those soft keys and the instaq button you would press it and it would provide random values for the parameters of your selected fixtures a few years would pass before flying systems developed what we all know as the effects engine in the whole hog 2 and in fact they also trademarked the name effects engine at that time now throughout this presentation you've probably noticed that we've made mention of this patent or that intellectual property dispute or somebody suing someone and it's an interesting note that we want to make throughout this moment in time because um when shoko and veralite made the first vl1 back in the day they patented basically every bit of that original system including the concept of a moving head luminaire daisy chaining data and much much more since then various lawsuits and patent infringements have shaped our industry in a myriad of ways from data distribution formats to deciding what patterns and shapes of color mixing glass would be developed manufacturers have become embroiled in patent disputes which have resulted in very cool and innovative fixtures being delayed or possibly never even seen the light of day there are also many unspoken royalty agreements throughout the years that often result in a competitor earning money on the sale of another company's product but you don't hear about these things but they're out there yeah and we're not gonna do deep dives on any of these lawsuits because this is about automated lighting but behind the scenes it's fair to say i think the patent law in the united states and around the world has made an indelible and at times unfortunate mark on our business however if you are interested in learning more about the industry's patents and how they work um have a look at mike woods website um in addition to great articles and reviews uh his site has a searchable database of automated lighting industry patents and around 1995 high-end systems was The Studio Color sued by verilight which actually reduced resulted in major financial drains in time sucks for both companies but it did not stop high-end systems from releasing the studio color in 1996. the studio caller was high in systems first ever moving head luminaire and it became hugely popular due to its high output its color mixing system and the internal effects in fact it was the first moving light to have a pattern class effect to change what was the normally round output of the fresnel lens into a more oval wood oval shaped par style output and you could actually rotate that par bar that par shape and move it around and this actually went on to become a standard effect that high end would use in other fixtures and even other manufacturers would duplicate as well yeah and then we come to the martin mac 1200 so this was not only martin's very first moving head it was the first of the now famous mac moving automated color changer the second c is silent a series of lights and it also strives to be what we would now think of as an hybrid fixture so martin sold it as being able to do both a spot and a wash effect that washability was accomplished with a variable frost filter that would move in and out of the beam so it really further solidified features that we've all come to expect on automated lights like color mixing and rotating gobos and other effects all in a moving head package and bonus it was huge yes it was The VL7 in 1997 verilight introduced the vl7 and what was really interesting about the vl7 is it had a new and interesting color mix system unlike anything seen before or really since then instead of using a set of wheels or flags to move about the system the vlc vl7 had a this concept that the engineers called the cvf color system instead of traditional wheels or flags they used two really large long oblong glass plates and each one had different colors on it one had red green and blue sections that were placed side by side and each of those ranged from fully saturated to fully clear and another plate had cyan magenta and yellow again from fully saturated to fully clear and by moving these two plates over each other and back and forth through the various colors the theory was that this would allow designers to access a wide range of very saturated colors without that unacceptable light loss particularly in the reds greens and blues part of the spectrum which with a traditional cmy system tends to actually eat up a lot of light when you try to mix those those deep red greens and blues so that was the concept but unfortunately the system had this habit as you tried to transfer transpose from one color or crossfade from one color to another it would go through these unpleasant green parts of the spectrum or other areas when you're doing those color changes and most people didn't really care for that now with some really advanced programming you can kind of work around it but ultimately it really limited the wide adoption of vl7 The Grand MA and that that color concept and then in 1998 mma lighting introduced the grand ma series of consoles so this lighting desk grew to have some of the most advanced features of any lighting console of the time including an advanced effects generator highly detailed color-coded cue list that showed tracking and hard value information it had a basic built-in visualizer and separately a fully free fully 3d visualizer which was available to attach to the console via the network and motorized faders now the timely rise of the ma1 uh coincided with that of the whole hog 3 which unfortunately uh many whole hog users were sort of driven away from that platform due to some early software issues so going into the 2000s the granite may console became very very popular and it appeared on on just about every festival and tour out there now while it did have a three and a half inch floppy disk drive what most people started to use around this time for saving their shows was of course the usb drive and just about every tech every designer every programmer started walking around with one of these usb drives on their keychain or in their toolbox instead of carrying around a shoebox full of floppy disks plus as a bonus the desk had what is now a famous easter egg was a game called space invaders and this was actually included originally for the engineers of the console that they put it in there to test the encoders but eventually lighting designers and lighting directors and programmers found how to access the game and they wasted many many hours playing the sound the space invaders during sound checks yes they did this year also saw the release of artnet from artistic license which is a dmx over ethernet protocol it may not be the easiest protocol to implement from an operator standpoint but it has significant advantages over physical dmx outputs which is that you can send multiple universes down one cat5 line uh and you can decode that information a lot closer to your source and thereby massively reduce all of your cable runs so there are other ways of connecting consoles and nodes together that existed before this but they mostly used mqtt signals or they were completely proprietary midi show control msc um manet are some good examples artnet is royalty free you stop to give artistic license credit when you use their technology you don't have to pay a royalty to them so this marked a larger shift in the lighting industry towards consoles being more of a control surface with processing handed off to sort of other networked hardware and this uh would simplify the distribution of data and it would prevent the control surface from becoming slow or laggy due to the local hardware needing to perform all of the show math right so with the control surface paradigm the console sort of hands off the show data to networked processing nodes which frees the surface up uh for programming or for show operations tasks and then we're coming to 1999 and back to brad hey sorry about that let me make sure okay i'm unmuted The Icon M get this back going i don't know what happened good old technology too much history all right in 1999 finally for our decade roundup we come to 1999 when lsd who we mentioned earlier they had actually been bought by prgg in 1998 but in 1999 they released the icon m or the codename the medusa the icon m was the first real dmx controllable moving head projector or as we call it today a digital light the idea was tantalizing instead of a mechanical carriage inside the light physically moving bits of glass and metal around to to do things in your light beam why not just use a video engine and some sort of media server to deliver the visuals and with this you could do amazing things that simple gobos could not do yeah if you open up modern digital moving head projectors what you'll probably find is an off-the-shelf uh projector with some physical controls going in for focus and zoom the icon m conversely they built a dlp projector into the moving head housing all custom and an ldi it promised uh in 1999 limitless possibilities now while the possibilities might have been limitless in terms of visuals there were a number of engineering issues that really hampered the widespread adoption of the technology and one of the main ones sadly was brightness so at ldi pre-production units only put out about 7 000 lumens that was quite dim in comparison to comparably powered spots and washes at the time it's about the brightness of a source for ellipsoidal there's also a requirement to use an icon control desk for control there were also some really difficult to get around engineering issues with the micro mirror technology so the cost also was a bit prohibitive nevertheless the idea remained alluring and it would not be the last time that we saw attempts at this sort of digital light technology The Mac 2000 so as we move into 2000 some of you may remember that new year's eve brought fears of the end of the world due to the y2k bug luckily we all survived that and that didn't end the world and in 2000 we saw martin release the mac 2000 and this went on to become one of the most successful lines of fiction lines of fixtures ever released at the time it sold over a hundred thousand units the mac 2000 or mac 2k as it became affectionately known had three main versions a profile of performance and a watch and the quality of the effects on this light upped once again the standards for high powered moving lights it had two wheels of rotating gobos as well as a third fixed wheel high quality color mixing and the output placed this fixture into high demand for many many years now although it was a big success a lot of people actually thought it had very very lackluster gobos and a lot of the patterns that look very similar to each other and lack contrast in the air that didn't slow it down and martin was aware of that and eventually they had an idea and they released a separate gobo package that the lighting companies could purchase and install into the unit and this was designed by the legendary lighting designer patrick wood earth unfortunately that gobo package didn't get much traction in the rental market but it was amazing it was really a wonderful set of gobos i think they i personally think they looked amazing the mac 2000s electronics also came in a few versions so earlier versions had a magnetic ballast the ballast is the part that keeps the lamp the arc limp from burning itself out and ballas of this magnetic sort can be temperamental and hot and a little bit loud so martin released the two version of the mac 2000s which had an updated electronic ballast and that coincided with a general shift in the industry towards electronic ballasts for lamp control programmers and designers might not have noticed as much but electronic ballasts were less prone to flicker issues uh they were lighter and they were more energy efficient and it also marked a shift in the world of lamps toward unjacketed short arc lamps away from bigger jacketed lamps and Verilight VL1000 you know the world of theater had kind of been away from moving lights and in 2001 it was finally a time that there was a light made specifically for them the veril vl 1000 ers came out and this was the first automated ellipsoidal reflector spotlight that was really designed as a moving light to be seen moving around not just be repositionable although it often is used as that and verilight worked really really hard on the evolution of their color mix system to get as smooth a mix as possible previous very lights had very nice color mixing but they weren't quite that theatrical quality so they worked really hard to really improve the color mixing and the fixture came in both arc and tungsten versions and had automated diffusion and framing shutter options interestingly companies had to order the units with the features and gobos they wanted included initially there was not just a standard model you had to order it as you wanted it to be built you can still find vl-1000s or subsequent variants of them on current shows today yeah so then in 2002 we come to Catalyst Orbital Head the evolution of media servers and digital lighting starting again so high-end systems of course had continued their research into digital lighting and again in the late 90s they started collaborating with peter nguyen wilson if you remember that name he was the guy mixing up colored oil and water shows for pink floyd same guy along with richard bleasdale of sam joe control software their collaboration eventually resulted in a project named vertigo in early patent applications now the software portion of that would eventually become a product that you have probably heard of it is of course the catalyst media server and the hardware portion became a product that you might not have heard of and that was the catalyst orbital head now the audible orbital head would attach to the front of a projector and it would provide 360 degree pan by 250 degree tilt so for the first time this moment video control could be patched into a lighting console and controlled via dmx yeah and it's it's hard to overstate the importance of this milestone now the programmer would have the ability to control digital images fed to a projector and they could aim that projected video anywhere around the environment all from a lighting console video finally was established as part of the lighting designer's wheelhouse video control from a lighting desk was simply not possible without with any commonly available system prior to the catalyst system and this really changed what the wide ETC Source 4 Revolution designer's role was as they had control of video and then in 2003 we see electronic theater controls etc you may have heard of them uh they launched their first foray into moving light territory with the release of the etc source four revolution so etc's conventional source for ellipsoidal was rightly iconic by this time right you found it in theaters around the world it was a standard on broadway it was a standard setter for its quality of light and its features but demand for a repositionable source for was very high and there were a few custom solutions uh that would help you do that there was the city theatrical auto yoke which was basically just a yoke an empty yoke that you would put a source for into and then you could reposition it but etc thoughts that they could do better and they attempted to do so with the source for revolution which was a monstrously large automated version of a source four now it was an entirely self-contained unit it shipped with an internal integrated dimmer and it was not just an automated ers it was not just an automated source for it it had an entire plethora of features it had zoom it had a 24 frame capacity integrated gel scroller it had accessory slots and gobo carriages remote focus and a bunch of other features it was unfortunately a little bit slow a little on the slower side it did not really see widespread adoption but it remains a really interesting example of attempts to automate conventional lighting and 2003 is also the year that we see the release of what be went on to become another classic light from virulent the vl 3000 series now they made both spot and watch versions of this fixture but the spot by far became the most popular light and one of the most specified lights on tours and shows around the world the vl 3000 really advanced the state of color mixing with what was probably the best color mix and dimming system of the time vl 3000 had finely etched color and dimmer wheels that gradually transition from clear glass to fully saturated and the dimmer wheel used a graduated mirrored finish that went from fully clear to fully opaque at the other end at the same time other manufacturers were using flags for dimming and this dimming was was phenomenal with the wheel the color mixing and dimming system across the beam was so incredibly smooth the fixture also had three rotating gobo wheels which was a lot at the time and continued vl's tradition of having really excellent optical systems the 3k was around for a long long time and still shows up on shows now and then VL 3000 now during this time high-end systems had not been sitting idly about on this whole digital light idea they had been actively developing developing it and their efforts really culminated with the release of the dl1 this was a digital light that came out a year after catalyst followed by the dl2 a little later on in 2004 so these were moving head projectors which started out with an on the ground a separate media server but ended up with the dl2 with an integrated media server so now designers could pre-load the media clips that they wanted to use onto the light and they could control the light just as they could with any media server Max 700 TW1 2005 saw the release of two new martin products the max 700 and the mac tw1 now this was a time that they scaled down the same technology that had been used in the mac 2000 line and they created the max 700 and in a similar way it had a profile wash and performance versions but this time it was based on 700 watt lamps and these pictures continued martin's trend of high quality optics and the martin was able to squeeze quite a lot of features into a very compact package and the tw1 uh somewhat unusually for the time was a high-powered tungsten automated light with an ellipsoidal optical system it was aimed at a theatrical role so it output a lot of light because it had a 1200 watt incandescent lamp a really large lamp and the position of the effects in the like uh color mixing and dimming in the optical train was such that they were all very out of focus they were very smooth across the beam so they saw some use in theaters but they also saw some work in the touring market because designers really liked that warm 3200 kelvin inviting source and they used that to contrast against the more common cooler color temperature arc sources that were popular at the time in 2006 etc launched a major change well EOS Console for them at least when they launched the eos console and this platform was their first real foray into giving having touch screens and a completely networked solution with their console systems it had new syntax and a comprehensive feature set and what etc did at the time is they redirected their console business to ensure that they would have a solid place in the automated lighting control market previous to this they had several other console lines such as the expression and obsession that worked with moving lights but they were oddly different because they kind of followed along with the conventional mindset of programming conventional lights the eos line was developed from the ground up with a total to be a total control system on par with other leading automated lighting consoles and it continues to be a very popular line for etc to this day yeah i remember when they released that in 2007 vera light introduced the VL 3500 Wash vl 3500 wash and this was one of the first 1500 watt washes and it set new standards in terms of brightness now it competed directly or indirectly with some other higher wattage lights that were made by high-end systems but ultimately it really became more popular than either of those models it offered incredible stunning brightness at a more reasonable wattage especially when equipped with its plano convex lens and it had an internal set of lenses that could hinge open for even greater light output verilite called that the very bright system sort of a fun punny name and that was actually a trick that the mac 2000 wash had pioneered years earlier flipping that lens up to get even more output the vl 3500 through around also an absolutely enormous amount of glass which required really powerful motors but oddly lacked a tilt lock this was also the year that glp released what would become an entirely new class of moving lights the led wash when they launched the impression 90 fixture up to this point leds were starting to take hold on the the lower end disco market or the less expensive fixtures but this was one of the true first professional lights that was a led wash light the impression 90 consisted of a flat shaped moving head and yoke and it almost had nothing else but a small base for the power and mounting the head was really really fast but the new thing here really was the light source it consists of of rgb leds and again before this companies were starting to get into the led world but we weren't really there yet and because leds were new no one had developed zoom lenses for their fixtures yet when using leds so the impression 90 had a fixed beam angle it was also before we had homogenized led packages so there were separate red green and blue pixels all sharing the space on the head and some people ended up calling those the uh the pixel i'm not calling it skittles or or pizza oven lights or something like that at any rate it took a few years for the industry to get away from having the multiple leds on the head still the impression 90 really was a watershed moment as it saw a lot of work on shows and paved the way for led wash lights that came after it yeah and our next step in our journey exploring the evolution of digital lighting specifically is the high-end show picks which was a really fascinating venture into sort of a hybrid space between an automated led wash light and a pixel display so these were quite large units with a built-in media server it could be used just like any digital projector light but instead of utilizing a powerful light source with projection to to blast the image onto some scenery or through haze the show pics and there was a smaller version called the studio pics they were intended as direct view devices something for the audience to look directly at the face of the show picks really anticipated the glut of led video products that were about to appear somewhat ahead of its time it failed to find a niche but it displayed some really cool features different lights could be part of a a larger video canvas which is a feature that we see on a lot of pixel mappable pieces of hardware today there was an explosion in pixel mapping just around the corner both in terms of products intended to be pixel mapped and in terms of highly demanded features within consoles to do a pixel map across fixtures that weren't necessarily intended for that purpose granite may one for instance had a sort of basic uh built-in pixel mapper that they called bitmap effects and high-end would actually add uh that feature to the whole hog series of consoles a little bit later also in 2008 martin mac martin released the mac 3 and this was the culmination of a large and innovative engineering project it had a 1500 watt lamp and martin designed a brand new color system for this light and directly for the light source itself and that was they wanted to emphasize the red parts of the spectrum the color system they would go on to use on future products including the mac viper series this was really important because it emphasized making those really bright reds that have always been a problem with the arcsource products there was also a totally new gobo package with lots of new gobos optimized for aerial and projection effects and it also introduced some new patented features that a lot of spots would go on to duplicate one of them being fall spot mode previous to this a lot of companies or shows would open up a moving light and disconnect the pan and tilt and utilize that light as a kind of follow spot so with the martin mac 3 martin built in a fall spot mode that would manually go in with through the menu and disable the pen and tilt for you this would allow you to use the light as an automated fall spot where an operator could just handle the fixture and move it while the console would still control zoom focus and beam parameters martin even had dedicated handles that attached to the rear of the fixture just for that purpose additionally around this time uh companies including martin were looking at these lights were big and heavy and thinking about people who had to actually lift these and rig them and um so martin had the concept and and patented this idea of putting handles on tops of the yoke and that allowed for easy lifting and easy maneuverability of the fixture another feature in the mach 3 that became a new concept it's been seen since is having a battery-powered menu system that allows anyone to go up and set fixture modes and addresses without the light having to be powered on yeah i remember that that battery-powered menu it was it was the greatest thing in 2009 we have production resource group a long time production and rental development company they began to make their own light and they called this the prg bad boy this was first used on u2's 360 tour that's the one with the claw designed by long time designer willie williams so prg was explicitly trying to make the brightest spot that they possibly could and one of the sacrifices that they made in furtherance of that goal was to forgo color mixing in favor of what they called the quantum color system this was a series of fixed colors so that the light would have minimal glass between the lamp and the output so they performed really well on the 360 tour but demand for a version that could color mix was really high so the company began to work on a new version which they called the best boy and that would come just a few years later and also include full color mixing so as we move out of the early 2000s we're now going to move into the teens the 2010s and no mention of 2010 could be possible without mentioning the sharpie luminaire from clay packy as you probably know this is a really famous feature so fixture so we're going to talk a lot about it but the evolution of this fixture really stems from an earlier fixture the clay packy alpha beam 300 which was released back in 2007 this was one of the probably very first really narrow beam fixtures to hit the market the alpha beam 300 took the old concept of an acl beam which is a really tight narrow beam and made it a moving light and then they added color mixing and a very narrow optical train to channel all the energy of its 300 watt lamp down to the center of the beam unlike the sharpie the alphabeam 300 used a somewhat traditional jacketed short arc lamp excuse me which had to be carefully focused in its reflector to get all the brightness out of the unit yeah and there were a lot of copycat uh fixtures immediately released uh after the alphabet with just about every major manufacturer coming out with their own version it really made 2008 as sort of the year of the beam as my friend put it so following up their success clay continued to evolve their design for the alpha bean 300 they tightened up their optical systems and crucially they made a jump in lamp technology from a traditional arc lamp to ones that looked a lot like the lamps that we used in video projectors very short arc pre-focused in a reflector housing and that completely eliminated the issue of rental houses not focusing their lamps or the lamps getting out of alignment over time so all of this culminated in the release of the sharpie in 2010 and it became one of the best selling lights in automated lighting history yeah and the brightness that the engineers at clay pacquiao were able to achieve with just 189 watt lamp was really astonishing the beam that you would get out of the sharpie would shoot across arenas even if you didn't have haze and with the hot mirror that they had in there to block out the uv the beam still could easily melt plastic items that got too close we saw large arrays of them become a favorite on many many concerts and outdoor shows where it was hard to keep the haze around and of course on many indoor shows as well now the optical characteristics did not allow in the sharpie really nice color mixing as as you saw on the alphabeam 300 because the beam profile was really strange and peaky due to that little lamp and it had inelegant dimming too but this was a light for filling the air with dramatic shafts of light and wow did it ever do that really well yeah and the sharpie and to a lesser extent the alpha beam it represented the beginning of a really big change in how we lit shows going forward because now starting with them it was technologically and economically feasible to have lots of really tight narrow beams that filled arenas and skies and suddenly you saw these lights everywhere they were on every show from the super bowl all the way down to little tiny touring shows they changed the way that we light productions probably forever nope beams for days so around the same time engineers at martin were working on creating a profile led based light because leds were evolving and we were seeing again some early models and tries but martin finally released the martin mac 350 on tour and this was the first professional grade profile led based fixture and it used a white led source behind the um in the optics interestingly the head was designed to to not fully encompass the gobo and color wheels and this led to a bulge on one side of the fixture it was a design choice unique to the 350 on tour uh in martin's lineup and it actually this fixture went out on quite a few tours in 2010 and 2011 2012 including the first tour which was crowded house's world tour which was designed by paul normandale in 2010. click over there looking ahead when we get to 2013 we see the release of the eritomag panel 602 now airten it was a small little company that a few things before this but this is really what brought them a lot of attention it was a real turning point in the history of intelligent lighting as well because of the eye eye candy factor now it wasn't really a wash light although you could use it as one and it wasn't really a pixel mapping light strictly on its own either although you could use it as one as well its strength was in its versatility it served as both almost a hard edge narrow beam with the soft edge of a watch but with each individual pixel element having a narrow enough lens on it that you can get very attractive spikes of light out of it the release of the magic panel started a fascinating trend within the industry of making lights explicitly with the intention of being eye candy so the lights weren't being developed just to be a spot or a watch now they were being developed specifically for eye candy and moving leds and changing things with that almost a callback to the early disco landing days of spinning balls and moving linear battens of the light but now they were professional grade and tour ready products yeah as the decade then progressed what we saw was the release of further professional grade led based profile lights with martin releasing their really successful mac quantum profile hard edge light now somewhat surprisingly uh the quantum as well as most other led-based hard-edged fixtures during this time used white leds with subtractive color mixing there were a few exceptions to this but for the most part it was white leds and subtractive mixing there were two main reasons for this i think uh one is that the vast majority of lighting applications around the world require high quality white light so most of the world's development was and is focused on creating more efficient and more natural looking white light and the second is that it's a hard physical problem to solve it's a hard engineering challenge uh that's involved with creating a viably bright rgbw at a minimum mind you a lighting system that has a narrow enough optical characteristic to be used as a spot fixture yeah and another interesting and patented feature of the quantum profile that we've seen on other fixtures since then is a feature that martin calls animotion and this is a term for controlling various segments of the white led source that makes up the light and what this idea was was in the past we've always had lamps in a fixture and a lamp is either on or off or possibly dimming but now we had an array made up of many different light sources individual leds so animation allows a chasing of those leds which allows the beam to shift or gobos appear to move slightly and its effect that would only ever work with an led array as the main light source so it was a really cool exciting new feature as well that we've seen adapted in many ways on fixtures since then a major advancement also occurred in the world of fall spots in 2016 when prg introduced their innovative ground control system and this essentially separated the operator from the fixture in this new system fall spot operators would use a floor mounted device with an lcd monitor on it to control a bright automated light with a high definition video camera pointing the same direction as the lens so you have a video camera on the light and you've got this really cool thing that's set up like a smaller spot but with a monitor on it and the the light the fall spot operator can pan and tilt their device which causes the light to follow exactly the same motions as what they're moving this device or their remote on the video screen they see exactly the fixtures point of view they see what the fixture is looking at so it gives them the same familiar sense of working a follow spot as if they're standing there looking down the beam of light but from a remote standpoint now this was not the first system ever to allow remote following of of automated lighting in fact back in 1999 martin released what was called the trackpod but ground control will be remembered as the beginning of a very important industry change yeah and those were originally just for rent or lease through prg you can buy them these days but this product kicked off the development of several competitors all of which work in slightly different ways but they all sort of have the same general idea the era of trust mounted follow spot chairs seems to have come to an end for the most part and thank goodness in 2019 clay packy released the i'll say it confusingly pronounced steelos fixture which is the world's first professional spot fixture that uses red green and blue lasers as the source so interestingly the fixture is not a phosphor excited or pumped by a blue laser source like we see with leds white leds are a blue led with a phosphor on top to make white light that's not how this works this is a true additive color mixing product so uh it mixes its laser light just like any other led based product but with a very different and very proprietary optics so it requires currently a laser variance to operate in the united states has not been seen on lots and lots of shows yet but it certainly represents an interesting continuation of the evolution of lighting source design will we see more fixtures using this technology time will tell and as we leave the the teens the 2019s and into where we are today in 2020 this decades already start off with several new product announcements martin launched the mac aura pxl which aims to continue the popularity of the classic aura but with full pixel mapping abilities and not only of the main output but also of the aura effect controlling all the pixels within the aura effect this fixture also goes on to merge lighting and video with the ability to to easily combine control the pixels through both dmx and martin's p3 protocol now where are we going to go through this decade well we expect many more innovations and improvements from lots of different companies within our industry and maybe even some new companies because we're all dedicated to continuing to evolve and providing exciting and creative tools to designers worldwide stay tuned to see what happens and as we come to the end we just want to say that history is fun uh and we suggest these resources to learn more about our industry's past first uh check out lighting and sound international's digital archive of their magazine which goes back through the early 80s you can scroll through the pages and look at advertisements for products that might not even exist anymore you can read about lds and how they developed their shows around these products it's a great way to be not only nostalgic but to learn some of the history of our industry in the process also richard kadena wrote a really really excellent book all about automated lighting and one of the first chapters covers the early history of automated lighting so he includes details and anecdotes from our regarding many of the great moments of our industry's growth and you can find that book on amazon and other retailers we've talked about many key products and moments and we actually listed over 250 unique products as we mentioned at the beginning there are hundreds maybe even thousands more that we did not detail due to time but we do give props to every fixture and every console and every development throughout our industry we love the diversity of automated lighting products and appreciate each and every one the popularity of automated lighting has resulted in many strong companies that have thrived for decades just look at the dates that these comp these companies were created it's amazing how long they've they've lasted and continued to develop new products we expect our industry to continue to prosper for many many more years to come as moving and color changing lights continue to dazzle audiences we're happy to report back to you with in another 40 years with an updated presentation to share that's all that's happened from now until then with that malory we'll kick it back to you and kick it back to everyone thank you and we'll take a question perfect thank you craig and brad we did have some questions come in before the session so the first one is of all the innovations you mentioned today which do you think had the absolute greatest impact on the automated lighting industry wow i think uh great i think i'll jump on that one i think uh probably the biggest impact as of now probably i would have to say of all of them dmx dmx is the heart of how we control moving lights and it doesn't matter these other protocols have been developed sacn artnet they all still are based around dmx and the way a dmx protocol is laid out for products eventually maybe we'll have something different but right now i think dmx probably really solidified that the control paradigms and how we work with moving lines perfect great the next question is is there a particular innovation that you hope we see in the next few decades um particular information that i hope you see in the next few decades i i've actually talked with a couple people who worked on the development of these lights um and they say that the they say that the drive isn't really there they don't think the market's really there but i really like uh the idea of a digital light i think that you can get some really cool looks out of a a either a moving head projector or a projector with a mirror i'm not sure why that look didn't really uh become as popular as all the other lights that we use on concerts these days so i would love to see a high-powered moving digital projector light or even something again like the catalyst or orbital moving head um i think that there's really great opportunity to do some really cool looks with a video source uh in a concert what about you brad i agree digital lighting is the holy grail i think great so we have a couple more questions so the next one is uh thanks for the history lesson um are there any museums that house many of the older products that you had mentioned today yeah actually there are in around the world there's a few colleges that have ranges of products but one of the most well known ones is clay packy in italy they have a really wonderful history of automated lighting and they have lots of different products not just clay packy products they have representations from everyone and it's a beautiful place if you're ever there at their factory you can go through there also the company called golden sea in china has a wonderful history museum of automated lighting that parts of it came from a company in israel that they moved over to china so there are several there's also many online websites that host uh different photos of them but what's really fun is to actually go to these museums and see the products and occasionally at some of the various trade shows you'll see a manufacturer set up their entire history and have models of their products as well throughout the years i've been to that that history or museum in bergamo in italy for clay packing it's really really wonderful if you ever get the chance to visit right so it looks like we have one more question so why do you think that dmx has not yet been replaced by anything newer i think it's just very very easy to use it it's fairly indestructible right it works right up until it doesn't as as protocols go it's it's robust because i think in part of its simplicity um and just the fact that uh most moving lights uh i think from an electromechanical sense they it works for what they're doing um there's no need to add additional layers of complexity some of that is changing i think with a lot of the airtan lights take um a couple of universes if you're using them in like full on mode um so that might represent a force that would sort of force adoption of something a little bit better than dmx512 but i think the vast majority of what a moving light does dmx just works most of the time and uh it's robustness and i would say resistance to failure as popular and enduring uh as it does what do you think brad yeah i agree i think it's very robust and that's why we've seen it continue through these years there was the plan years ago with the original acm spec to have a new protocol but that really never took off and sacn was just an initial subset that really uses dmx in a in a sense do i think we should have a replacement yes at some point i think there should be a replacement maybe our next step when we do this in 40 years we can talk about that because one of the problems with dmx of course is the resolution when you limit things to a certain number of steps it really does cause a lot of deficiencies in what could be possible in terms of resolution and color mixing and steps and all that but as of right now i agree with all you said that it's very robust and that's why we continue with it perfect that looks like all the questions we have i want to thank everyone for joining us today and thank you craig and brad for your time this was a great session thank you and there's uh our email addresses are on the screen so if you have further questions feel free to reach out to myself or to create perfect i hope everyone has a great rest of their day \[Music] you