Robert Juliat Dalis for LASALLE College
- Details
Ten years after the college moved into its McNally Street campus that houses the theatre, senior technical officers Patrick Wong and Sayuthi Bin Jasmin took delivery of 10 Robert Juliat Dalis 860 Cyclorama LED battens to replace the 10-year old conventional cyclorama and groundrow lighting.
“Prior to the acquisition of our new Dalis units we were using eight tungsten cyclorama lights and a similar number of tungsten groundrows,” explains Patrick. “These have been excellent workhorses, but conventional lighting fixtures come with their problems as well.
“The age and fragility of these fixtures meant lamp replacement was becoming more and more frequent and a bit of a chore. Focusing was cumbersome and limited to the tilt angle provided by the yoke, and the weight of the fixtures made it less attractive to move them around the venues as needed. The number of colours one could use was always limited to four, and we had to fly the bar down between scenes to switch colours.
“Most importantly, each unit within the four-part fixtures drew 1000W of power, meaning all eight fixtures at full power would draw 32,000W (double that, when you include the groundrows), which was simply too much and required quite a number of dimmers to power them.”
Tevin Heng, executive director at Total Solution Marketing Pte Ltd, Robert Juliat’s exclusive Singaporean distributor, brought the Robert Juliat Dalis fixtures to the attention of the team at LASALLE. Patrick and his team established that 10 units would be perfect to backlight the 13m x 7m span of The SIA Theatre’s cyclorama, despite the short throw distance available.
Five RJ Dalis units have now been installed on a truss behind The SIA Theatre’s cyclorama cloth and another five Dalis units placed on the floor at a distance of 1.5m, from where they combine to provide seamless and supremely controllable coverage.
“As with most venues in Singapore, there is always a lack of distance between cyc-cloth and wall for proper cyclorama lighting, with the distances normally ranging from 0.5m to 2.5m,” says LASALLE’s Sayuthi. “The Dalis, however, were able to give an excellent beam coverage even at these short distances. The output is extremely bright and the operation is simple with a very user-friendly interface on the fixture. Add to that the light weight of each unit combined with the good quality manufacture and we are very happy.”
“The Robert Juliat Dalis provided our venue with solutions to all the problems we had with the old lights,” agrees Patrick. “Being LED units, there is no more need to replace lamps, which in turn means we need less storage space for replacement bulbs. The 8-colour LED system provides us with infinite colour possibilities, from dark blues, to bright reds and cool whites.
“What is even more impressive is the warm LED mode that provides a colour temperature similar to a tungsten source: Dalis succeeds where many other LED fixtures have failed in creating exceptionally good warm white (2200k) and cool white (6500k) colours.
“Best of all, because Dalis only draws 300W of power per unit, it is far more cost-efficient to run these units long-term. Ten of these babies would only take 3000W to power, which is less than one single unit of our old conventional fixtures.”
(Jim Evans)
