Strathmore Music CENTRE
This month we paid a visit to Lyle Jaeger, lighting supervisor / head electrician at the Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda, Maryland.
It's about a 4 year old facility, and you'd think it would have been outfitted with a pretty state of the art lighting system that would still be the envy of any electrician,
if it was installed that recently, but the evidence of our backstage tour starts to tell a different story.
The Setup
Strand Lighting was the original supplier of lighting control at the center, and their flagship board the 550i is installed in the booth.
In half of the booth, Strand gear takes up a large table's worth of space. In the other half, a 3 screen set up with 2 Enttec Wings and a small 2-scene preset board to use as submasters dominates.
By way of disclaimer, we're not saying there's anything wrong with Strand's board, or that anything done at Strathmore would be impossible with that equipment.
We're just reporting that in practice, it sits there nearly idle, used only to control houselights now that Lyle has finished his latest round of upgrades and expansions to his Enttec package.
I know it's preaching to the choir, but even so, this is pretty extraordinary, and to get to the bottom of it, we asked Lyle to tell us a bit of his story.
in Conversation with Lyle
JK: My first question would be, how did you hear about Enttec in the first place?
Lyle: I first heard about Enttec products through researching USB to DMX and programs to run moving lights off a laptop.
I did a lot of websurfing and looking at several other products, and LightFactory is the most comparable to a professional board..... I got it,
and a DMX USB Pro first. I eventually bought a playback wing ... which made it easier to run your shows. [Then] I got a touch screen ... and when the Program Wing came out
I got one of those. For a while I had been running two cue stacks: there were conventionals on the theatre's Strand 550i console and I ran the movers with LightFactory,
because I didn't have enough handles. What I have expanded to now is putting on a little 24 channel “wing” (a Scene Setter two-scene preset DMX board) and that has made it so
that I run everything on the one board (LightFactory).
JK: You were one of the early adopters of the Program Wing. Is it fair to say that it comes in pretty handy for you in terms of moving lights?
Lyle: The Programming Wing is more useful in the fact that if you're programming a conventional show, a theatrical show, and you have a designer rattling off
channels at you to bring to a certain level to modify. Any conventional board programmer knows: how fast you are on that number pad -- and knowing where everything is,
and the speed you can get to it -- is crucial. Now you can set it up on a touch screen to touch each channel, but even then it's not as fast as somebody who is good on a keyboard.
JK: You recently bought a Datagate. How will you incorporate that into the facility?
Lyle: The next step for me is that I want to rackmount it into an ATA amp rack case, so I'll have everything, in one place, the monitors, the wings, everything in position.
The facility does not own LightFactory, I do. LighFactory is not owned by Strathmore, it is owned by me. The same thing with the moving lights in the facility,
so if I want to go anywhere else and operate, so that LightFactory can come along, that was the real reason for the Datagate.
Beyond that, if I do start doing more outside work, I'll look at doing a wireless transmission from that rack, since that seems to be becoming more and more reliable.
JK: Can you tell me a little more about the types of shows that 'Strathmore' runs that you think are benefiting from this?
Lyle: Well, Strathmore runs everything from a small folk act to Wednesday night I had Citizen Cope which was run on LightFactory. The night before that I had Ray...
We do everything from opera to .... well of course we're a symphony hall so we have two symphonies which are our primary artists. We do the National Endowment
for the Arts Heritage Awards every year. We do graduations! We do kids' shows. I have Chuck Brown tonight, the Godfather of Go-Go.I have KD Lang at the end of the month,
which is coming in with a road rig, so I won't be running it.
JK: So they won't use LightFactory, they use whatever they bring?
Lyle: No, typically when that kind of show comes in, I just interface them to the dimmers with the Strand Shownet system.
JK: Tell me about Citizen Cope, which you ran with LightFactory?
Lyle: Citizen Cope I was the LD for, using LightFactory, 8 movers, and probably 150 conventionals, We also were running haze on it.
That's a question I have for you: I just did it as standard dimmers the other night, but under patching is there a way to set up a hazer?
JK: I would go to the Fixture Editor and custom design something to coincide with what the hazer has for attributes. And in those custom fixtures you make,
there's now the ability to change the attribute names for most of them. Then there are two ways you could go. You could work with Misc 1 through Misc 6,
and they would only show up when you open the special box, or you could change the names of the more commonly used attributes like Focus, Shutter, Iris,
making them Haze Density, Duration, whatever, and they would be available more obviously.
Lyle: Yeah I kind of figured that, but for a two-channel thing it may be easier to do it with dimmers.
JK: Tell us about another project or two, perhaps the largest and smallest things you've done at Strathmore with this rig?
Lyle: I'd say the largest conventional type show that I've run in there is the National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship Awards which is 8 movers and tons and tons of conventionals,
I'd have to look at my plot to give you real numbers. The smallest show I think I've done is like a piano concerto, and the pop shows range all over the spectrum.
JK: Can I turn now to the data monitors you use? They are very impressive. What do you use and how are they set up?
Lyle: Monitors... right now, I'm actually using my daughter's old game machine, so it's a P-4 based processor, runnning 2 graphic cards both of which are dual processor multi-output cards.
The primary screen is a 20” touch screen which I keep in the center, which you saw. On that I keep my shortcuts, so that I can see them, and from there it depends on the show.
Whether I'm running a cue-stack show or I'm running a show by the seat of my pants I'll keep my Effect Runners there because they also work well with touch screen.
To the right of that I have a 22” wide screen, that I keep my channel list up on, and enough space so that when I select a mover, it comes up on that same screen.
I have 4 different layouts for my rig, one in a pop configuration, one in a symphony configuration, one in a recital configuration, and just the straight up channel list.
To the left of the main screen I have a third screen. I always keep my submaster window open over there because it sits behind my auxiliary board so it lets me have a visual
reference quickly of what subs I have up where. When I put everything into groups and I put the groups into subs it will label them. I'll label them on the board too, but it's
sometimes handy to have that second visual reference.
I'll also put show runners up on that left hand screen too, if I am using them.
My touch screen is tilted at about 15 degrees from the horizontal, so that I can see the stage without it blocking my line of sight.
I started running all this on my laptop, which is where this whole concept started, and I was running dual screens on the laptop,
only the [touchscreen] monitor I have doesn't like Vista for drivers so I went back to the desktop.
JK: What else do you want to tell us about your rig?
Lyle: Things for the future: I'd like to see whether the machine I have can run Capture (Visualizing software) internally while LightFactory is on it at the same time.
I'm going to try to bog down the system by running as many movers and conventionals as I can with a Capture file open too.
I am using DMX INPUT through the Datagate at the moment to bring in DMX from the outboard Scene Setter, and 3 DMX USB Pros up and running as my outputs. Eventually,
the cleanest solution will be to move those to the Datagate once we get that to play nicely with Strand's Shownet to the same degree the DMX USB Pros are doing now.
Other than that I think we've worked out all of our issues.
JK: Great Lyle, thanks for your time!
Lyle: Hopefully I'll see you at LDI.
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