3rd Party Apps :

inGenius M-Light

Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently opened a division whose goal is to share their IT know-how with other theatres and like-minded organizations. One of the things they have been developing for about 10 years now in pursuit of solutions to their own production problems is a way to control moving lights for the theatrical stage. Programmer Stuart Cotts worked on the same tour of Showboat that I assisted on around the start of this journey, so I know he has a really good grasp on how to track and manipulate moving lights for this kind of application. Check it out here

Around the beginning of the year he let me know that they were planning a commercial release of this software that they'd been honing and field testing all this time, and that the Enttec DMX USB Pro was one of the featured ways it could communicate with the rig. I've tried it, and it's a very powerful and easy to use program. If you work with a handful of movers and do a scripted show with them, this is a viable way for you to control those lights. Check it out, even if you don't do that kind of thing very often, because it's kind of a breath of fresh air in the product genre.          Click to enlarge thumbnails

Luminair 1.5

Luminair 1.5 has also been getting a lot of press attention lately, and we're glad to note that this application for the Applie iPhone (or iPod Touch) relies on a product like our ODE to get the signal to the dimmers or other DMX enabled equipment you would use it to control. The application also works as a sort of DMX tester, reading signal in and analysing it. (Our ODE is able to quickly reconfigure and become input instead of output for this task.)
Check it out here



For further information or to purchase this app, you must go to their website and/or the Apple iTunes.

Dataton Watchout

Finally, a good four or five years ago I programmed lighting for an Off-Broadway production that used a heavy dose of projections and they coordinated the montage of them using a cutting edge hardware/software solution called Watchout, by the company Dataton. I hear about them now and then to this day, when people are planning to do elaborate manipulations of different video sources and delivery systems (projectors, LCD screens, etc.)

I have always thought this was a very high-quality offering, but had no idea we were going to see our gear being used to talk to it. So it was with a great deal of pleasant surprise that I answered a call recently from a theater in Manitoba who wanted something to handle conversion from their DMX console to Art-Net so that the Watchout program could be triggered from the board. Dataton's user manual depicted our DMX Ethergate MkII as a good example of the gear which can do this, and they're right of course, but for this Canadian production I think the ODE will fit their budget more appropriately.
Check it out here

Thanks Dataton, Oregon and Luminair, the-lighting-control-app-for-the-iPhon!!
(Do you think Apple will consider dropping the “e” so I can make that rhyme without taking such liberties?)

Enttec acknowledges that the following trademarks: OSF Solutions; inGenius; MLight; Luminair; SyntheFX; iPhone; iPod Touch; iTunes; Apple; Dataton and Watchout are each the property of their respective owners, and are used herein with journalistic intentions to refer to products Entec believes the reader may be interested in. Nothing further is implied or explicitly claimed.