A New “Introduction to Show Control” Book In The Works

I’m finally getting underway on the second phase of work I started back in about 2019: extracting the show control information out of my “big” book, Show Networks and Control Systems (details here) into a new, updated, and expanded Introduction to Show Control. Phase 1 was doing the same with the networking information, and culminated with the release of Introduction to Show Networking (details here) in 2020.

Since so much of show control these days is networking, I’m hoping that the new show control book will work together seamlessly with the networking book as a companion volume.

Here’s the a bit of history and more detail from draft from of the new preface of Introduction to Show Control to explain more:

In 1990, I was a Technical Editor at Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines here in New York, and fresh out of grad school, where I had written my thesis on entertainment control systems and show control. It was clear to me, all those decades ago, that digital control communication technologies were increasingly forming the backbone of entertainment systems, and one day, looking for technical references while researching an article, I went to Times Square to visit the Drama Book Shop (the Amazon.com of the day for books on entertainment in that pre-Google era). On the shelves, I found a wide variety of show technology titles that explained scenic construction, lighting design principles, paint techniques, and even sound in those early days of digital audio. But I wasn’t able to find a single book that explained the then widely-used DMX512 digital lighting control standard, and I was even more shocked to find that the majority of the lighting technology books didn’t even mention it. I also didn’t find anything about the details of show control technologies like SMPTE Time Code or MIDI, both of which had been in the market for years by that point. That bookstore visit started a long process that led to the 1994 release of my book Control Systems for Live Entertainment, the earliest ancestor of this Introduction to Show Control, released almost 30 years later.

Focal Press was my publisher for that first edition of Control Systems for Live Entertainment, and released my updates in 2000 and 2007. But by 2011—after thousands of copies sold—they decided they were no longer interested in the book. Additionally, around that time, the live entertainment industry hit a big technological maturity point, and also seemed to be in a similar technical information situation as we had been back in 1990, but this time regarding networks and their ever-increasing use on shows. Searching Amazon and Google for things like “show networking” in those days, I found mostly references back to my own book, along with others that didn’t really give a complete picture of the ways networks were used on shows. I found this to be a bit of surprising déjà vu, since networks increasingly were at the core of entertainment and show control systems. I felt a new edition of the book with an expanded networking focus was warranted, so I completely reorganized the content, added a lot on networking (the first 1994 edition had about fifteen pages on networking; by this edition I was up to three full chapters), and self published the first edition of the re-titled Show Networks and Control Systems in 2012.

As the market continued to mature, I released an update in 2017, where I actually started removing now irrelevant information from the book, as Ethernet became the unified digital data highway for entertainment technology. It became clear that most entertainment technicians needed to know something about networking, but didn’t necessarily need all the information in the 475 page, 175,000 word behemoth that Show Networks and Control Systems had become. Additionally, many of the low-level details (connector pin outs, binary message breakdowns, etc.) covered in hundreds of pages in my original books became packaged into software and products (with details easily found online when needed), and made ever easier to use by the brilliant engineers working for our manufacturers.

So, around 2019, I decided to retire much of the low-level and historical detail from the “big” book, and take the still-relevant material and break it into two smaller books: one on show networking for the broader entertainment technology market, and another on the niche of show control. With some time during the COVID lock down, I completed the first phase of that work, extracting out, updating, reorganizing, and expanding the networking information, and released the first edition of the smaller, more focused, self-published Introduction to Show Networking in 2020. And now, in 2023, I’m completing the process by releasing Introduction to Show Control. With the publication of this book, I’m ending my almost 30 year attempt to comprehensively survey the entertainment control, show control, and networking markets all in a single volume. And going forward, I’m leaving much of the low-level detail to other resources, and have moved historical asides and other original, interesting, but no longer germane topics from the “big book” onto my blog.

I hope to get the new Introduction to Show Control out sometime this year; in the meantime you can download a draft Table of Contents here.