At the Royal Albert Hall, White Light was tasked with providing reliable DMX distribution to the dimmer room and lighting trusses to make life easier for the Hall's staff and for visiting companies. White Light's Roger Hennigan notes that: "the Hall has a Jands Vista console which outputs lighting data as ArtNet. We therefore designed a system that used Ethernet to distribute ArtNet around the building, and then ArtNet to DMX nodes to convert the ArtNet back to standard DMX locally wherever it was required."
The final system uses products from network specialists ELC: truss-mount dmXLAN Node 1 power-over-Ethernet ArtNet nodes for each of the six main lighting trusses, a dmXLAN node 4 in the dimmer room for dimmer DMX output, dmXLAN Node 2s for DMX output on the stage gallery or in other locations as required by particular shows, and a dmXLAN Node 8 in the control room allowing non-ArtNet visiting consoles to inject DMX into the system.
The new system was up and running by mid-September 2008 and has been running reliably since then. "The Royal Albert Hall crew have commented on the ease of use and 'it just works' nature of their new network," Hennigan notes.
Optical fibre is a core feature of the upgrade work carried out at the Royal Opera House where White Light has installed a fibre optic backbone to augment the theatre's existing Cat 5e network and to prepare the theatre for its switchover to ETC's Eos control system, which White Light is supplying to replace the Obsession consoles which have been running the Royal Opera House's lighting since the theatre's 1999 refurbishment.
At the Guildhall School, it is again a console change which has prompted a network upgrade. The school has replaced its Strand 500-series console with an ETC Eos. Here, White Light has upgraded the existing Cat 5 network to Ethercon connectors and added new network switches, while at the same time switching the network from Strand's Shownet to ETC's Net3.
"Lighting installations used to just be about dimmers, power and simple control," says Roger Hennigan, "but now even the simplest installations can include quite complex Ethernet network infrastructures."
(Jim Evans)
