# Ohh funny



## Inaki2 (Dec 8, 2003)

Last year in my school we did a musical play based on A Midsummer's Nigth Dream. Well, the day before the last show, the lightboard goes dead...about 2 hrs before showtime"!!!! So about 1 Hr before, we get a new console. I had 45ch...I got a 24ch one....I put it in wide mode and improvised 144 lighting cues! Well, I get to the theater the next day and re-program the new board. Last show is going on, when suddenly I loose all lights except for a red sidelight and some Pins....not much to do about lighting, so I have the followspot operators open the spots to get the whole stage (yuck..I know) I start pulling the 5pin to 3 pin adapter and the lights come back on...so I leave it as it is...and they go back off. Like this for like 5 minutes. So now I'm thinking...heeeey..maybe it aint the adapter....so I have like 4 people looking for the cause. The head electrician finds an old man who sat down on the DMX cable...and severly damaged. Luck would have it every time Imoved the damn adapter, he would move in his chair...ha! So we change the whole cable (show's still going on, which includes the head electrician on top of a blacony feeding wire to a fary on stage). And the show did finish..Oh I took like 10 more minutes to find the right cue!


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## zac850 (Dec 10, 2003)

sounds like what happines at my school. In room 15, where we have a small stage, we have our share of problems. The first one, which I have said many times ago, is that half of the lights will go into chase mode, and the only way to get them out is to smack them hard. The other problem is that we don't have enough power in the room to power all of the lights, so we get power flucutations. The power will go down to almost off, so no one can see anything, and the only way to deal with tihs is to push up on the master as hard as you can.....

i'm going to be doing that in 3 days for the shows....


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## cruiser (Dec 10, 2003)

I have but one question.... Why was the DMX cable running through the audience? why not run it around the wall...

Don't you guys power your dimmer racks off 3-Phase. In theatre's here we have "green" power which is for sound and is a seperate circuit to everything else. We have GPO's which is the general power for the building, powerpoints, fluro's etc. and 3-Phase for the lights, often the lighting desk will run on the GPO though so if the 3phase trips, which is highly unlikely unless you have no idea what your doing, you wont loose the desk, vice versa.


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## The_Terg (Dec 10, 2003)

I haven't heard anything about a special 'green' rail for the sound, but that sounds interesting enough. Last time we had to rig up our own 3 phase power supply, we had to rent out another box just to get a breaker that would fit.....


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## Inaki2 (Dec 11, 2003)

Well, the school doesn't have an up to date theatre. When it was done there wasn't a lot of power requirements. But when we strated bringing in Parcans and movers and needed to throw 2/0 wiring for the Distro, we took it off the main breaker box. Not the coolest thing to do, but it didn't fail. As for the DMX ire, it was running against a wall in a very long balcony thingie there is, it just kinda moved appart from the wall at some point.


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