Collective Marathon for our journalists in the Prolight+Sound Halls 12.0 et 12.1. in Frankfurt, devoted since this year to lighting, special FX and trussing technologies, but turning at dawn into spontaneous festive spots.

Day2 – It’s raining Main

First welcoming stop at Chauvet booth, where the new Maverick MK3 Spot & Mk3 Profile confirm the move upmarket for the Miami brand. With a 800 W LED engine and a lot of features, they were almost leaving the smart Epix Stripled solutions and Colorados into the shade, just joking…

Robert Juliat, specialists in tracking and 3D engineering, are, as always, very impressive with their knowledge and high level of technical assets.
The SpotMe ecosystem evolves even more for complete integration with all kinds of consoles and set-ups, thanks to the Maestro, positioning 3D PosiStageNet server, and their partnership with ZapTrack to automate a good part of the 3D calibration.

After two years of intense R&D efforts, the Probox F-2500 has finally come to life and was launched by Wireless Solutions of Sweden. It’s a big wireless DMX512 4-channel transceiver with no less than 4 inputs and 4 outputs, and Art-Net, sACN et RDM compatibility.

The Arri EB Max clever series allows the user to plug different power heads to its electronic ballasts. The self-recognition patent delivers instant adjustment of the output power and the frequency.

At the back of hall 12.1 we discover a huge colorful truss building. Welcome at SGM and its assembly of LED matrixed bars.

Here stands proudly only one new product, but we will not know its name nor complete tech specs, as it’s unveiled quite confidentially, a kind of old days DCA powerful beam coming out of a quite massive moving head.

Before a short break, let’s talk about motor controllers with the Sonoss guys, showing the latest intelligent motor remotes, clever and full of bells and whistles.

They showed us the whole concept with the dedicated protocol they developed for wireless operation.

The Cameo booth was logically integrated in the Adam Hall stand, as it is their lighting brand, we therefore had to make a detour in hall 8.0, dedicated this year to Pro Audio. This means some hasty visitors, looking for lighting products in Halls 12.0 and 12.1, might have lost a good occasion to attend a clever presentation of the 2 new products here.
First, the mid-range but well-featured Opus S5 Spot moving head, unstripped in a transparent protection, then the Washer B200 color changer, showing its outdoor capabilities, even for very cold winter or countries, as it was inserted in a block of ice, which will melt in two days, they say.

As this unit has a very tightly closed body, it will not suffer from it anyway, the LED component loves low temperatures.

The Moscow-based creators of Sundrax were back on a booth niftly situated close to the Robe extravaganza, driven by Dimitri Louste, with a very complete display of their four ranges of boxes and interfaces, some of them designed for wall insertion by electricians.

Their numerous installations for the Bolchoï or the Kremlin led them to design all kinds of exclusive solutions to transmit the data any possible way: optic fibre, wireless (proprietary system), and piggyback on the mains network.
The latter solution, the PowerGate ARMA, is more and more demanded by installers who cannot add anything to an historic and classified castle or place, while not able ,nor wanting to use a wireless transmission of the DMX512 signal.

Day2 – Before Party

Hallelujah! The long-awaiting prayers of the 3D designers have been answered by the almighty Wysiwyg engineers, as the R43 release was there in pride and majesty.
The changes are not only cosmetic, but the real changes are hidden underneath, with the full 64 bit compatibility available end of June, with a special attention given to maximum use of all the multicore, RAM and graphic cards the modern PC world can provide. The very first feature to benefit from all this is a real-time fully-integrated video recorder.

The two young and enthusiastic founders of Portman were proudly showing their new Mini-P1, a 7-hexagons quite big projector, where halogen lamps glow nicely, embedded in colorized reflectors.

In a different alley, the french manufacturer RVE was launching no less than 6 new units, Fresnels and PC models, all brightly incorporating different sources of various power, with their legendary very precise and smooth dimming, even in the lower values of incoming DMX data.

Whoever likes travelling and exotic names will recognize Ayrton’s favourite game of finding wind names for its new models, presented here in full musical perfectly timed show. It was starring the profile et wash Diablo et Levante Profile and Wash models, and unveiling the first waterproof d’Ayrton mowing head, the Perseo.
The journey finishes with the very impressive and well-named Huracan, a tornado of yet unseen power and combined effects. Its exclusive “double color mixing system”, associating CMY and CTO/CTB/CTP, will be examined in details by SoundLightUp soon.

“And now for something completely different”, the new C24 distro rack from StageSmarts, crammed with intelligent protection on each output and dedicated specialized circuits.

In the same area of products, Zero88 were proposing PSU boxes designed as switchable dimming packs or distro items. The BetaPacks 4 are available with a wide choice of chassis plugs, and complete the self operating ZerOS server, a rack-mounted lighting console.

Silvio Ciben, Swiss representative of ELC was glad to premiere the presentation of two brand new products, very versatile multi-functional boxes to make your network work in any condition.
The SwitchGBx 8T is an itelligent 8 ports switch, and the NodeGBx 4T is a DMX512 4 outputs node + switch dedicated to touring applications. From the same group, the digital Green-Go intercoms was boasting a nice collection of improvements and benefits for their items.

The Talk of the Town for lighting techies was obviously the new 0.92 version of MA Lighting soft3. The functions inventory keeps growing month after month, with, amongst many others, and live-controlled effect generator, the first version of their integrated video server, and up-and-coming Layout and Time Code sections.
At the same period end of summer, and in conjunction with the user-version of soft3, the whole range of standard Node MA standard and OnPC will be available, as well as the Wings OnPC.

Before we run to join our industry friends on their booths packed with DJs and bands, a last presentation of GDTF demonstrates the sheer power of the 3D import and export MVR format. A sketch drawn on Vectorworks with the GDTF libraries of the manufacturer is exported in less than one minute for a GrandMA3.
This includes all the 3D elements, the trusses, et of course all the projectors in the right format, perfectly in the right position, with correct patch and mode all set. The other way around is made possible, showing the ergonomics of the future lighting true standard.

Party on! And stay tuned for Day 3 report…