Hacking for An Audience

My talk at The Next Hope (my conference writeup and photos here) was called Hacking for An Audience, and gives an overview of entertainment technology for live shows, details some of the ways we have "misused" technology in our industry, and also details some reliability strategies that we use to make sure that the show goes on. The conference organizers have now released free audio recordings of all the talks (I've downloaded many of the talks I missed for an upcoming road trip), and you can also buy videos of any of the talks here for a ridiculously low $5, with proceeds going towards conference expenses. I took the audio from my talk, edited the Powerpoint slides in, added a few bonus photos, and a bunch of links. 

You can watch it here, it's just under an hour:

Or download the audio here (clicking that link will download the mp3 file).  I really enjoyed giving this talk and can't wait for the next Hope (2012).

ACN Protocol Revision Up for Public Review

A revision of ESTA's BSR E1.17, the amazing "Architecture for Control Networks" protocol (ACN) developed by the live entertainment industry for control of pretty much anything, is up for a public review here until August 24.

As I've written about extensively, ACN is an amazing control protocol that has some really cool potential applications far beyond entertainment lighting control.  I personally think it is a great protocol for makers, hackers, and others, and there is a full open source implementation available and even a Wireshark plugin.

Even if (like me) the details of this protocol are over your head, I'm hoping the whole industry will get behind this, because it could truly revolutionize the way we control entertainment systems.

A Sound/Show Control Guy's Take On the grandMA2

After years of work by my CityTech colleagues Charles Scott and John Robinson, we recently got a brand new MA Lighting grandMA2 system at the school. We got two main consoles: a GrandMA2 Full Size, and a GrandMA2 Light; a VPU Video Processing Unit; and network DMX processors.  I was lucky enough to sit in on the excellent training session, done by Jason Baeri of A.C.T. Lighting, and I'm going to give you a little perspective on the console from a sound/show control guy's perspective. 

I used to know the ETC Expression series pretty well, but the last moving light console I really knew well was the Compulite Animator (for which I actually wrote a user manual when working for Production Arts).  I never learned the Hog, or the original GrandMA, so my notes here are from that perspective.  Also, the GrandMA2 software isn't quite 100% finished, so the training was in the original software, although we did see the system 2 software (some photos are system 1, some 2).

The consoles are heavily touch screen oriented, and the 2 even has a multi-touch screen built it:

The system uses an efficient and flexible entry system with a "Please" key for Enter:

Patching the console is very straightforward, with lots of help from the system to make things as easy as possible.  Cues are built into "Sequences", which are then run using "Executors".  "Pallettes" are like a modern version of focus points, allowing Cues to reference a point or state that can be changed globally across the show. 

One interesting thing about the console is that the faders are grouped into groups of five.  This makes perfect sense, but it's also strange to me because so many audio consoles are in groups of eight (consoles are 8, 16, 24, or 48 inputs, outputs are in groups of 8, etc).  There are 30 executor faders on the full console, although multiple faders can be used to run a single sequence (for example, on a chase, one fader might be used for rate, and another for intensity).  There are over a hundred pages of executors, all capable of running simultaneously.  Much like with complex digital audio consoles, the days where you could easily track everything from one screen or layer are gone (but 3D visualization might solve that problem).  Executors all have their own go buttons, or can be assigned to a global "Go+" button.  (There is also a Go-). 

Fixture, parameter, and channel selection is done in a very sophisticated way, with lots of options, layers, and even conditional selection.  Notice above the "Please" (Enter) key, there is an "If" button.  I only saw this used for conditional selection (for example, select every fixture with an intensity larger than 50%), but this is a very encouraging development, meaning that we can easily get more and more conditional kind of operations into lighting.

The console has a number of local hardware DMX outputs (and one input), analog remote input, Ethernet, LTC, audio in, a bunch of USB ports, and a built in keyboard hidden in the armrest (Yamaha, please learn this trick!) 

The time code implementation is very well done.  Basically, you just create a Sequence, and then assign it a time code time. You can have many sequences available for operation simultaneously, and you can either record the cues on the fly, or enter each cue manually (click for larger photos):

Time code can come in locally via LTC or MIDI, or over the network (we weren't clear on what MIDI protocol was used for network transmission, but I will follow up on that).

The console also features a pretty full MIDI Show Control implementation:

However, I won't likely ever use MSC on this console, since the grandMA2 makes everything available via a command line and  telnet interface over the network.  I was a big advocate for MSC, but now I'm an advocating to get rid of it (see my write up here). I plan to use the network interface for the Gravesend Inn in the fall and will write that up when I get there.

A very exciting (to a control geek) feature is streaming ACN! 

This is exciting, and lays the groundwork for some very cool stuff in the future with full ACN.

This is also very cool:

These X/Y/Z positions are used today for the in-console visualizer and other functions, but more excitingly, this lays the ground work for 3D targeting of moving lights, something I've been advocating for since about 1987.

The system has very cool PC-based software:

This software is apparently available free online, and with it you can do everything with this software except output real control data to physical lights (to do that you have to put some grandMA hardware on the network).  However, the GrandMA 3D visualizer software is also free, and you can control that (Charles Scott programmed this virtual version of our light lab):

All in all, the grandMA2 is a very impressive, well thought out, and well designed system.  MA Lighting obviously "gets" the potential and the future potential of sophisticated control. I definitely commend them for that and look forward to really pushing this thing forward.

LDI 2009--The Floor

On Sunday, we spent time finishing covering the floor, and I saw a couple cool things that I really liked.  (Note, this is Part III of my LDI coverage, Part II here). First was Total Fabrications' amazing RSC Lightlock, which previously debuted at PLASA.  The device allows you to hang a moving light on two cables, with the device actively counter-acting the rotational movement of the light itself.  This was very cool.  The units in the photo on the left do not have the device, while the units on the right do, and both are running the same movement program:

Here's a youtube video:

Googling on my return from LDI, it turns out that the RSC above stands for Royal Shakespeare Company, whose Head of Lighting, Vince Herbert, is the device's inventor.

TMB had a cool new product for control geeks--the ProShell, a little clamp that protects a RJ45 connector.


I haven't used these yet, but I want to check them out.  Let me know if you've got any experience with them.

After years of watching LED's infiltrate the floor, this seemed to be the year where there were products really finally integrating them to the point that we can start to see how they could fill all kinds of uses we hadn't imagined.  I saw a few moving lights that had a color temperature that would make them useful for illumination of people rather than just washing backdrops or columns in a special event hall.  On the larger end, at Showman Fabricator's Green pavillion I saw Strong's incredibly bright 600W collimated LED unit:

I also saw this pretty interesting projection film in the Chinese pavillion from Superimaging:

There was no one there to speak to us, but it looked pretty cool, and sort of similar to the Musion Eyeliner stuff.

I also stopped by ESTA's interoperability pavillion:

A special FX company was shooting bubbles over low fog, looks very cool:

 

Finally, in the lobby, we saw this:

 

 

We tried to get it to dispense some bills, but apparently it wasn't working.

 

Stage Technology F:Light

I saw a very interesting item in Live Design for its lighting product of the year, the Stage Technologies F:light. From the F:light website:

F:light is a new product designed to bridge the gap between lighting and automation. Developed by Stage Technologies, arguably the original innovators of automated 3D flying, it allows moving lights to automatically track moving scenery or performers, whilst remaining fully under the lighting designer’s control.

Stage Technologies has long been doing interesting and forward-looking work, and was one of the first to export its positional data for other systems to read.  They did this in a custom way on Cirque du Soleil's Ka, and I have an article which details their approach here.  The F:light data sheet says that the product supports ACN (streaming ACN, I assume) and this is great--in fact, this kind of thing is exactly what I described in my "The ACN Future is Here" article (copy here) back in 2007.

If anyone has any experience with this system (good or bad), please post a comment!

IEEE 802.1 AVB--Audio and Video Sync'd Over Ethernet

One of the very interesting things I saw at Infocomm was a live demonstration of IEEE 802.1 AVB (Audio-Video Bridging).  Ellen Juhlin from Meyer Sound told me about the demo, which is of particular interest to Meyer since they are using the technology as the core of their new D-Mitri product line (basically, the replacement for the Meyer/LCS Matrix 3 system). At the demo, I spoke with Robert Boatright, Director of Research, Harman Corporate Technology Group, who has a great writeup on the system for Embedded Systems Design (ESD) Magazine, which is available online here. 

Here's a little blurb from that article, explaining what the standard is:

A multiyear effort by the IEEE 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) Task Group is nearing completion on a series of enhancements to the legacy Ethernet standards that enable the delivery of time-synchronized, low-latency audio and video over Ethernet networks--with perfect Quality of Service (QoS)--while retaining 100% compatibility with legacy Ethernet networks.

IEEE 1722, the AVB Transport Protocol (AVBTP), has further built on the development of AVB by adapting IEEE 1394's comprehensive suite of media formats, encapsulations, and synchronization mechanisms for use in Ethernet AVB networks. Products using IEEE 802.1 AVB and AVBTP standards are now being introduced that enable the construction of highly interoperable Ethernet networks capable of streaming audio and video with perfect QoS.

To translate this tech-ese and expand on it a bit: 802.1 AVB is offering synchronized transmission of multi-channel audio and video with a 2 millisecond throughput time over open-standards-based Ethernet, with one catch (see below).  And it's working today.

Harman's pro division is obviously interested in this, but I would guess their consumer divisions are very interested too--think about replacing that mess of cables and interconnects in a typical home theater with simple, low-cost Ethernet.  For someone like Meyer, AVB offers a very effective backbone for their new products that is potentially interoperable with other manufacturers.

What's the catch I mentioned above? The network which transports these audio and video streams must use Ethernet switches that are compliant with the standard. These switches are capable of measuring the transport and throughput delay of each bit of data that passes through them, and send that information along with the information.  The receiving device can then properly reconstruct the time reference, synchronize them, and play them back together. Here's a graphic from Mr. Boatright's ESD article (linked above) to explain the concept:

(It's interesting that they chose stage monitors for their example, as these are some of the most time-critical applications in live sound).

Sound expensive?  It doesn't need to be, because major companies like Broadcom, who make the chipsets used by major switch manufacturers, are integrally involved in the standards effort.  In fact, in the small picture at the top of this entry (click for larger image) you can see a BSS (Harman)-branded Netgear switch running the AVB Broadcom switch chip.  I spoke with Yongbum "Yong" Kim from Broadcom at the show, and Broadcom is very much behind this, as are other major players in the field.

This looks like it could be a very cool technology for both consumer and pro audio/video applications. Mr. Boatright said that the group is now looking into the possibilities of including some control in or with the standard, so of course I recommended that he look into ACN right away.

ACN EPI's In Public Review

OK, if you don't understand that title, don't worry.  EPI's are "Profiles for Interoperability" for ACN, the amazing new entertainment control standard.  If that makes sense to you, please head over to: http://www.esta.org/tsp/documents/public_review_docs.php and read these over and comment by the August 26, 2008 deadline.

If you just want to use ACN and get all the new functionality it offers, I'd suggest reading my article and then contacting your favorite manufacturer to tell them you want it NOW.  We've been waiting long enough!

 Here's the EPI's in review, some of which are VERY interesting for show control people:

  • BSR E1.30-1-200x, EPI 23, Device Identification Subdevice EPI 23 specifies a templated device for device identification as typically used for remote hardware and software devices.
  • BSR E1.30-2-200x, EPI 24, Internet Protocol Properties Subdevice EPI 24 specifies two template devices, each describing a block of properties used for supplying information on and configuring the Internet Protocol (IP) configuration of a device, using DMP. These devices may typically be used for remote hardware or software devices to allow configuration over the network.
  • BSR E1.30-3-200x, EPI 25, Time Reference in ACN Systems Using SNTP and NTP EPI 25 specifies restrictions and guidelines for establishment of a common time reference across components within an ACN system using SNTP (Simple Network Time Protocol) and optionally NTP (Network Time Protocol). This EPI does not define a control synchronization model.
  • BSR E1.30-4-200x, EPI 26, Device Description Language (DDL) Extensions for DMX512 and E1.31 Devices
    EPI 26 defines protocol specific extensions to Device Description Language for describing DMX512-type devices.
  • BSR E1.30-5-200x, EPI 27, Operation of SDT on Wireless Networks EPI 27 outlines issues with SDT usage over wireless networks, specifically 802.11g. It proposes changes to EPI 18 constants and speculates on 802.11n.
  • BSR E1.30-6-200x, EPI 28, Independent Device Location Properties EPI 28 specifies a non-templated device for Independent Device Location properties as typically used for remote hardware and software devices.
  • BSR E1.30-7-200x, EPI 29, Allocation of Internet Protocol Version 4 Addresses to ACN Hosts EPI 29 obsoletes ACN EPI 13 (Allocation of Internet Protocol Version 4 Addresses to ACN Hosts). The principle reason for this revision is to allow assignment of static IP addresses and provide guidance for how to manage systems using these methods.
  • BSR E1.30-8-200x, EPI 30, Time Code Properties EPI 30 specifies a non-templated device for Time Code properties as typically used for remote hardware and software devices.
  • BSR E1.30-9-200x, EPI 31, MIDI System Exclusive Properties EPI 31 specifies a non-templated device for MIDI System Exclusive properties as typically used for remote hardware and software devices.
  • BSR E1.30-10-200x, EPI 32, Identification of Draft Device Description Language Modules EPI 32 specifies how draft DDL modules that may be changed frequently during development shall be marked as experimental.

Barco Buying High End--Will This Bring Innovation (in the form of ACN) to the Lighting Industry?

Barco has bought High End Systems.   (Press Release here).  This is an interesting development, as it was rumoured that Jere Harris of PRG had visited the High End factory in recent months to investigate buying the company.

Belgium-based Barco has long been known as an innovative developer of projection and visual display technologies, and they showed their first moving head luminaire off site in a hotel room at LDI last year (called the DML-1200, although I didn't see it).  (Barco has also long had a reputation for terrible customer service, although that's been getting better in recent years). 

High End Systems was for a long time a very innovative company, going back to the Emulator, and through to products like the DL-1, one of the first moving head video projectors in commercial production (after PRG showed their single-chip DLP product, the name of which I am drawing a complete blank, probably because the product never made it to market).  High End also hired my friend Richard Bleasedale to develop the original Catalyst media server to drive the DL-1 (Richard recently re-aquired the product). And then in recent years, with the debacle of the Hog III, and the entry of low-cost, off-shore competitors like Robe, High End seemed to lose their way.  They weren't at LDI this year, for the first time, well, ever.  (And I remember in the 1990's when I worked at Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions they always had one of the biggest booths, and there was always some High End employee in a fight or something during the show.)  After very few product introductions for a long time, they made a really big deal over the introduction of the Showgun, which, well, was REALLY BRIGHT AND VERY LARGE. And it had a ring of LED's around the front.  LED's!!!!

Anyway, where am I going with all this? While I've followed High End for a long time, and I've always thought they "get it" in terms of optics (they were one of the first manufacturers in the US of dichroic filters for the entertainment market, etc), mechanics, and marketing, I have to say that I have almost always been disappointed with the way they approached control of their products.  Why (this is all to the best of my recollection, please post a comment to correct me if I get this wrong)?

  • In the 90's they developed a separate, proprietary protocol to control their products when they could have used DMX.
  • They also are one of the parties responsible for putting DMX onto 3-pin XLRs, which was a stupid idea which led to confusion in the market that continues to this day.
  • Scott Blair of High End was one of the primary developers of RDM, but to my knowledge, until the new Showpix, High End never used it. (And in any case, at best, I think that RDM is just an interim step to ACN (see my ACN articles here). 

So, here's the question.  Barco "gets it" regarding control.  Their "Events Controller" software was developed by my friends at Medialon, and I've been twisting my friends' arms at Medialon for a long time to fully implement ACN.  

Maybe now is the time for Barco/High-End to really get something out of their merger, and put full ACN in a bunch of new products?  This could finally, after many many years, be the crack in the dam of conservatism that might truly lead us to some really, really cool new stuff (again, see my ACN article).

 

The Future of DIY Christmas

I was googling around for ACN, and came across this very interesting forum for people who do those massive Christmas light displays.   In one thread, there was a post with a very interesting signature: "DMX, RDM, ArtNet, and ACN...the future of DIY Christmas."

All I can say is that if the DIY Christmas Light people are talking about ACN, then the professional live entertainment technology industry has no excuse!