USA - CAST Software will be bringing the Innovation Award winning BlackTrax to Las Vegas for LDI at the Las Vegas Convention Centre.

BlackTrax -- First Phase is a realtime tracking system for monitoring people and objects. BlackTrax precisely monitors dynamic and spatial positioning using a proprietary sensor device placed on the moving object / person and tracked by a camera for one or many people/objects, each moving object or person is an individual measurable set of data. First Phase is tracked in 3 Degrees of Freedom - X, Y, and Z coordinates (adding six -- roll, pitch, and yaw angles in the future).

BlackTrax combines multiple existing technologies into one intelligent active tracking beacon. In other words, BlackTrax delivers at super-fast speed and with pinpoint accuracy realtime, live with 6 Degrees of Freedom information using one LED source vs. what motion capture,

UK - ETC has released dates of training sessions for the Congo, Eos, Ion and Element control desks at its innovative training theatre - The Playhouse at Gypsy Corner in west London. Only six or eight places are available for each course, with a maximum of two people per desk, so each student will get plenty of hands on use. All the courses are free and include lunch.

For full details of the courses, contact Kumiko Swash at uk@etcconnect.com or phone 020 8896 1000, or www.etcconnect.com/support.education.aspx.

Outside the UK, ETC's dealers and distributors all offer free training for users, with trained staff offering hands-on training at all levels. At the offices of Lights International in Greece, groups of four to five people were invited to a number of Eos training sessions and presentations over the course of three days. Sales and marketing manager Stefanos Kotatis says, &

Mexico - Clay Paky's Alpha Beam 1500 was specifically requested for the recent Eros Ramazotti concert at the Teatro Telmex in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. Supporting his new album, Ali e Radici (Wings and Roots), Ramazotti performed to a sold out crowd of over 11,000. Italian singer-songwriter Eros Ramazotti is an international superstar, with huge fan bases in Europe and most of the Spanish-speaking world, as he releases his albums in both Italian and Spanish.

Mexican rental company Luzmila supplied 30 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 1500 fixtures for the show - the first time they were used in Mexico and South America. Luzmila Lighting Technician Federico Figueroa explained, "When the lighting design team from Eros Ramazotti heard that Luzmila had the first Alpha Beam 1500s in Mexico, they called us right away. The fixtures did a phenomenal job. The beams are intensely bright

USA - Daktronics has been a long-standing exhibitor at the LDI tradeshow and 2010 marks the eighth consecutive year on the show floor. With more than 41 years in the business, Daktronics believes the involvement at the professional association and tradeshow level provides a good understanding of customer needs and enables the company to better serve clients.

"The live design industry is filled with pioneering, influential professionals with visions and it is our goal here at Daktronics, to help turn those creative visions into reality," said Myron Linde, Daktronics mobile and modular video group manager. "We are looking forward to supporting this year's tradeshow and surrounding events."

In addition to having two booths on the show floor, the company is sponsoring the Parnelli Awards, the related Parnelli Celebrity Golf Classic and the ESTA Lounge.

"

USA - LumenRadio will be showing the multi-award winning CRMX products at LDI. CRMX Nova and CRMX Nova Flex won PLASA Innovation Awards in 2009 and

2010 for technology that took reliability and functionality in wireless lighting controls to the next level.

LumenRadio will demonstrate wireless DMX, RDM, Ethernet, and interoperability with other manufacturers at this year's ESTA Connectivity Pavilion.

"We are experiencing rapid growth in our OEM business now that CRMX has

proven itself in numerous prestigious projects as the most reliable wireless technology on the market. Many of the largest companies in our industry are expressing enthusiastic interest in our CRMX products and we have already entered into exciting new OEM relationships that will significantly expand the size and reach of our sales", says Hans Lau director of Americas and responsible for entertain

UK - Manchester-based lighting rental specialists DBN were once again asked to design and supply lighting equipment for the BBC's Proms in the Park event in Salford.

The lightshow was designed by DBN's Nick Walton. It's the fourth year that the company has been involved with the north west region's prom event, staged for the second year in Buile Hill Park. DBN was working for production company Ear To The Ground for end clients, Salford City Council.

The line-up featured appearances by entertainer and musicals star John Barrowman, mezzo soprano Juliet Pochin and local opera sensation Jon Christos, alongside the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

Says Walton, "It's always a big challenge to design and light a large orchestra appropriately without being too distracting, providing just enough razzmatazz to highlight the soloists, plenty of and sufficient well balanced white light

UK - Take 2 Film Services, The UK's largest independent supplier of motion picture and digital camera equipment, has announced that it has acquired £400,000 worth of lighting equipment from Elstree Light and Power (ELP) through media and broadcast finance company Azule Finance. The acquisition has seen Take 2 Lighting increase its share of the rental market offering its customers a complete production solution from cameras to grip and lighting, fulfilling the requirements of a broad range of programmes.

Take 2 Lighting has provided solutions for a number of high profile broadcast productions such as Lewis, New Tricks and Midsomer Murders, acquired the assets from ELP to scale up its operations and boost the lighting division of their business.

The rental company already has a number of lighting assets to complement its production portfolio, but neede

Europe - Cirque Du Soleil's Varekai show - currently touring Europe - has transferred its lighting control to a grandMA2 system, with a grandMA2 light as the main show console and another grandMA2 light running in full tracking backup.

The decision to change was made by head of lighting, Karl Jenkins. He says: "I think MA offers the best current solution for this type of show which is run live and changes every night". They also needed to change the consoles they were using, which had been onboard since the show first started touring seven years ago, so it was high time for an update and an upgrade. "The grandMA2 is an international control standard," confirms Jenkins, "And the idea is to introduce this platform across other Cirque shows".

Much of the show had to be re-programmed and re-built from scratch on the grandMA2 light. It was trans

USA - In 2002, right after 9/11, eight-year-old Veronica Granite from New Jersey began a petition drive to illuminate her hometown bridge with red, white and blue lights. She had recently seen tricolour lighting atop the Empire State Building during a visit to Liberty State Park and thought the Bayonne Bridge should be similarly decorated in patriotic lights.

Her lobbying efforts inspired the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which maintains the Bayonne Bridge - the fourth longest steel arch bridge in the world.

After seven years, the historic span that connects Bayonne, New Jersey, with Staten Island, New York, was decorated with red, white and blue LED lights custom designed by LEDtronics, Inc. of Torrance, California.

"When we initially showed the bridge maintenance group the LEDtronics 180-degree fixture that is used on the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Ange

USA - GDS is exhibiting alongside its US distributor ACT at this year's LDI show in Las Vegas. It will showcase a host of new and existing products and will introduce CueSystemNet and SM Console to the US market.

The Las Vegas show will see GDS introduce CueSystem NET a networked cue light system which launched at ProLight + Sound earlier in the year. The CueSystem NET allows for complete flexibility within stage management environments, says the company.

GDS will also introduce its SM Console, a bespoke stage manager's console for the international theatre and event industry. Since launching the product in 2006, GDS has designed and manufactured numerous bespoke SM Consoles for prestigious venues around the world including, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, LAMDA, Hong Kong Performing Arts Centre, Theatre Chatelet Paris and many more.

Other products at LDI include the

USA - The Philips MSD Platinum Reflector lamp - being introduced at LDI 2010 - is a powerful and innovative tool to create in sense lighting, generating a short arc for sparkling, bright light that eliminates shadows and reproduces outstanding colours, says the company. Philips MSD Platinum Reflector lamps are claimed to between two and three times more efficient than previous-generation MSR lamps.

Philips is also set to launch the StagePainter family of LED stage lighting solutions at LDI. The StagePainter range provides "superior control over colour consistentency and brightness, creating drama and spectacle with simplicity and ease". The Philips StagePainter D60 1000 system enables lighting designers to 'paint' the scene they want with rich, bright and powerful LED illumination. This enables them to recreate the same scene flawlessly, fixture after fixture, night af

USA - Lighting designer and programmer Scott Chmielewski of Digital Media Designs (DMD) turned to Martin Professional's new MAC 101 LED moving head as his main wash light fixture at the recent 2010 Virgin Mobile FreeFest.

"Throughout the whole design process, I wanted to create an upstage grid of fixtures but I found myself having to choose between quality or quantity," Chmielewski explains. "As with most festivals, we had a limited budget and we had some weight restrictions on the stage. The 101s were the perfect match of both quality and quantity. They only weigh 8lbs each so weight was not an issue and they were really bright.

"Every part of the fixture helped create an interesting effect from the beam angles to the exceptionally fast colors, and we were able to hit effects at 180BPM on the pan/tilt. The best part is that they were very inexpensive so I

UK - The 2010 Mark Knopfler Get Lucky World Tour continued a long relationship between Bandit Lites and the superstar. Designer Simon Tutchener once again called on Bandit UK CE Lester Cobrin to handle the global needs for Knopfler and his entourage.

Tutchener created his visuals utilising MAC 2000 Profiles, MAC 2000 Spots, Lycian 1290 FOH Spots, ETC Source 4's, a 40 x 30 LED Star Cloth, truss, motors, all controlled by a Grand MA console with an MA Lite as back up.

New this time out, and a centrepiece to Tutchener's concept is the Robe DigitalSpot 7000DT's. The show moves through a progression of digital images, real images and live video from onstage cameras. Tutchener was also able to use the 7000's as pure lighting sources at various points in the show. Technician Ewan Cameron traveled world wide with Tutchener as his 7000 tech.

(Jim Evans)

USA - The custom-designed chandelier in the Winspear Opera House, one of the brand-new theatres in the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, Texas, won the 2010 Rock Our World Award from the Entertainment Services and Technology Association (ESTA).

The Winspear chandelier won in the Project category. The award winners were announced last Thursday evening, October 21, at an awards dinner at the LDI show in Las Vegas.

J. R. Clancy took the leadership role in bringing the chandelier project to fruition, working closely with lighting designer Claude Engle on the concept. The custom-built, 40-foot-high chandelier features 318 cast acrylic rods, each of which vanishes independently as the house lights dim. Clancy engineers did extensive research to determine the materials and methods required to light each rod entirely from end to end. Mike Wood Consulting and Ingham Designs execut

Portugal - ETC's Portuguese dealer Luzeiro has supplied ETC Eos control desks to the country's National Ballet Company for use at the Camões Theatre in Lisbon and on tour.

Vitor Paiva, Luzeiro's sales technician, explains: "The company's previous system failed on a regular basis, and they asked us for information about replacements. We showed them both Congo and Eos and they tried each for a week. While they would have been more comfortable with Congo, since they understood its programming syntax already, they felt they wanted to really push themselves and get the Eos, which proved itself to have the power to do absolutely everything they wanted to do.

"Eos is ETC's biggest control desk and was specifically designed with theatre use in mind. The product developers talked to designers, programmers and electricians in order to design a product that is already familiar

UK - When lighting designer Chris Bushell had his first demo of the Avolites Tiger Touch console, he liked it so much that he bought one. It was his first investment in a lighting console and he had an immediate use for it on the Florence + The Machine world tour on which he's been out since February 2010.

"It gives me all the power and functionality I need in a fabulously neat package that can come on the plane with me . . . so I can always have the desk of my choice," he says.

The new Avolites Tiger Touch is a 'hybrid' console - a combination of the Diamond 4's powerful functionality coupled with the friendly user interface of the Avolites Pearl - an industry favourite. The wide touch screen allows fast access to the 'hands on' control and ever evolving software skin, TITAN, enveloping the high performance and intuitive hardware platform.

Bushell has been an enth

Belgium - Visual Productions are pleased to announce the appointment of Face as their Distributor in Belgium. The intention for this collaboration was confirmed during Prolight+Sound in Germany earlier this year. CEO, Karel de Piere and sales manager Geert Custers visited Visual Productions' stand to place their first order for stock of Cuelux and confirm the deal.

Face is the result of the merger of Ampco Belgium and Candela. Specializing in audio, lighting and video they provide hardware, software and services to the professionals, the project market and their dealer network which are active in the entertainment, communication and architectural markets.

The Face headquarters hosts not only a seminar room but also a try-out theatre: the ideal venue for Cuelux to run Plug&Play alongside the Behringer BFC 2000 MIDI desk also distributed by Face.

Cuelux software lighting contr

Oman - Over 130 Clay Paky fixtures were recently featured during the opening of the 2010 Salalah Kharif Festival in Oman. Held every summer during the Kharif (monsoon) season, the Salalah Kharif Festival is one of the most famous tourism events in this tropical region.

With festivities usually running for six weeks. Attractions include folk music, traditional games, art shows, poetry, children's contests, seminars, awareness campaigns, sports and more. The majority of the celebrations take place at the Lake Amphitheatre, while other performances and activities are held at a number of locations nearby.

The opening ceremony of the festival was held was held on July 15, 2010 at the Wilayats Theatre in the Cultural Village at the Municipality Recreational Centre. It included more than 2,500 performers presenting four operettas under the theme March and Achievement.

To hig

UK - Paperwork is increasingly not 'paperwork' but virtual paperwork carried on laptops - until actually working in the theatre when real paper printouts have often been the most convenient way to access show information while walking around the stage focusing the rig.

Now FocusTrack, the production lighting documentation system, offers Paperwork To Go - allowing you to keep your paperwork in electronic form, and carry it with you on your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

With the purchase of one enabler app ($19.99 for iPhone/iPod, $39.99 for iPad), any of the FocusTrack data files - FocusTrack, containing information about the positions used by the moving lights in the rig, RigTrack, containing all of the information about the rig as a whole and the focus of conventional lights, and Cue List, containing the show cue data from the lighting console, along with all of the focus and c

World - With planning for the merger between ESTA and PLASA now in its final stages, the elections for places on the new Regional Boards, and over-arching Governing Body, are coming to a close.

The month-long ballot, which ends on 31 October, pre-empts the New Year merger date when the Associations formally unite under the PLASA name.

Members of both organizations have been actively voting to elect candidates for the new European and North American Regional Boards which will feature representatives from the following groups of members - Dealer/Retailers, Distributors, Manufacturers, Production Services, Professional Services and Rental Companies, together with a representative from both the Organizational and Individual memberships.

The Governing Body is a new concept for PLASA and is designed to ensure continuity of decision-making and strategic consistency. Whilst the Chai

USA - Lighting designer Seth Jackson created an all green lighting solution for Toby Keith's 2010 tour.

Jackson used Bandit 36 Lamp Pods full of hundreds of GRN PAR 3-36's and Versa Tubes for a very heavy metal look. The pods carry the PARs in the centre and are bordered by Versa Tubes. All trussing is the versatile Tyler Green Truss. GRN 6 Lamp Bars carry all the PARs, eliminating 80% of the cable a standard system would require.

GRN 8 Lite units illuminate the audience while GRN Moving Wash 3-120's and GRN Wash 3-36 provide continuous onstage visual arrays.

Jackson used VL 3000 Spots and Coemar Infinities for his hard edge lights. On the control side of things, he chose the Grand MA with an MA Lite as a backup. Jackson used a Grand MA Media Server to control every individual LED in the rear wall of PARs, treating every LED as a pixel. He then pixel mapped them

The Toby s

The Netherlands - When the management of a new auditorium in the City Concert Hall in Leiden required a visually unobtrusive but versatile lighting system, they turned to Lightco, the Dutch lighting sales and installation division of the Ampco Flashlight Group.

While sister company TM Audio were installing new audio systems in both the Great Hall and the Aalmarkt, Lightco was brought in to design and install a highly-specified but low-profile stage lighting system for the Aalmarkt (the name - 'Eel Market' in English - reflects the building's former use).

Lightco project manager Bas van Schelven says, "We spent a lot of time and energy making or proposed design as unobtrusive as possible. For example, the ETC Source 4 Revolution moving lights are partly hidden in coves in the ceiling." As the ceiling is non load-bearing, this proved a substantial challenge in itself f

Malaysia - Clay Paky fixtures shone on Malaysia's top entertainers as they gathered to celebrate the prestigious 24th Anugerah Juara Lagu (AJL) music awards. Held in Putra Stadium in Bukit Jalil, Kuala Lumpur and organised and produced by local television station, TV3, the show was graced by the presence of celebrities such as Datuk Siti Nurhaliza, Misha Omar, Aleya, Bunkface, Black, Hujan, Aizat Amdan, and Stacy.

Utilizing a theme of Origami, the show successfully catapulted the simplicity of the paper-folding art for its lighting and stage design. For the lighting system, Mr. Siswa Azmi from Mubari Sound Light Sdn. Bhd. picked Clay Paky to illuminate the stage. He said, "For a prestigious and grand event like this, we will usually go for the best brand available. For me, Clay Paky is one of the most flexible and reliable brand out there." In addition to lighting, Mub

UK - White Light has recently helped the Regent's College Conference Centre in central London upgrade its lighting system with some of the latest lighting and control technology.

White Light has supplied the centre with 10 Coemar Parlite LED fixtures in silver. A replacement for the traditional Par Can, the ParLite LED offers three-colour mixing and interchangeable lenses offering beam angles ranging from the standard 12degrees up to a 110degree flood, all in a compact fixture that weighs just 3.5kg. The Regent's College ParLites were supplied with the optional IP65 rear panel kit, which converts the fixture for use outdoors.

The centre also needed a system to control their new fixtures, and opted for LSC's Clarity software-based control system. White Light supplied Regent's College with a single DMX universe system and an Enttec DMX USB Pro interface to output DMX data from t

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