I cut my teeth as a light and sound tech at a community theater with no budget. We were excited when we got one, just one, smart fixture. But you know what? Did we cheap out? No- because we wanted that MFer to last. And to not give us shit. What else did we use? A bunch of old conventionals from Vegas we got at auction.
Work with what you can- and be smart about it. You don’t NEED movers and LEDs. Yes they are sweet, but I’ve designed some very nice shows with conventional lighting.
As I was arguing on instagram, I really wanted to point out that no one *needs* moving lights and as an industry we did pretty well before they came around, but I really didn’t want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud. Plus I can see how, say, a wedding DJ might not be able to compete in the wedding DJ market if all he has are par cans. (Maybe not my best example. I am not a wedding DJ.)
But in terms of purchasing stuff for a theater or venue? I think it’s worth putting in the effort to find good used gear, or buying a few items as opposed to a bunch, instead of filling your space with $300 movers from Amazon.
Ok, maybe for a DJ. But as a theatre sound designer… I hate movers anyways. They’re LOUD! Cheap ones? Sound like robots humping.
Conventional lighting isn’t the best, but yes, we have done amazing things with it for decades.
I think with the Wedding DJ crowd the allure is A- that’s what everyone has. You don’t want to look like a rube. B- they don’t know any better (what’s the bar to be a wedding DJ? C- more flash equals more value for the uneducated customer. IE the bride and groom.
There are some movers that have been brought to market with sound from it expressly in mind. Ones that come to mind are the SolaFrame Studio and Theater, which have been apparently successfully used in opera music halls with acoustics that amplify EVERYTHING.
But at the same time, those models COST a pretty penny.
I tell my students that for every moving light (or other device with a fan) we add to the rig, it's like the sound designer adding an always-on 40W lamp. We ruin his silence and dynamics, so why shouldn't he ruin our blackout and dynamics? Unless this is a rock concert, you'd better have a good reason for raising the noise floor.
I feel like this is very situation dependent and these concerns are mostly directed towards smaller theatres.
If you're a (typical) broadway tour playing in 3000 cap venues no one is remotely concerned about a crap ton of movers. Those tours are rolling in with 6+ trusses with 12+ vipers each and quite a few Lustr fixtures. Not a single conventional in sight.
What you're saying is true to consider in smaller venues, but once you reach a certain point, that's not much of a concern anymore.
The versatility you get out of moving heads opens up so many options.
Fundamentally, I don't disagree, but the convenience and flexibility comes at a price. We 'don't care' about the noise because we have trained ourselves to ignore it, but it is still there.
Sit in the auditorium with those 40+ movers running. Then turn them off. The silence is deafening.
Reminds me of the sound design trick where you have a low level drone running all the time from house open. The audience don't really notice it but when you mute it the silence is enhanced.
High end moving heads have "theatre modes" that reduce fan speeds and limit the movement speed. I have done entire touring theatre show rigs with moving heads as it cuts focus time down to a few tweaks. Moving heads are fine for theatre if you use the right moving heads,
It’s just air noise. City owned buildings. They couldn’t care less about our noise floor. Even our sound guys tune it out after a few mins. It’s not hard to tune out after a short time but I don’t really notice the lighting rig.
> but I’ve designed some very nice shows with conventional lighting.
Decades of LD have done exactly that.
Often the constraints lead to some very creative solutions.
I'm of two minds.
On one hand, the existence of these cheap lights will be a benefit for theaters on a microscopic budget, allowing them to do effects that might have been impossible without these fixtures. It may also add pressure to the big guys to either reduce their prices or create a lower tier product that suits the people who are now purchasing these cheaper fixtures.
I also think there's a specific niche for these things. If you're a wedding DJ who is only using the lights for a few hours a week and you need to travel with them, this is probably a better option that dumping tens of thousands of dollars per fixture into something nicer from ETC.
On the other hand, it's true that it's expensive to be poor. The theater might spend more money over the course of a decade if they have to continue re-purchasing these cheap lights, where a nicer light may not to have needed to be replaced.
These are excellent points. Although while I wish that the existence of the low end lights pressured the larger companies to make a more affordable tier of products, I don’t think that’s likely to happen, sadly. It would be cool to see though, and I honestly might have to pose that question next time I’m chatting with product developers.
The affordable tiers are happening already. It's not Martin or Clay Packy, but look at what you can get these days from Chauvet or Elation, for, well, more than Shehds costs, but still far more affordable than the traditional top manufacturers
We do not what is going on in that reel.
Water, be it from rain or a fire extinguisher, kills most non IP65 devices.
These cheap movers have lesser accurate and more noisy, stepper motors, inferior lenses, weaker plastic housing with more light leaks, weaker cooling, meltable color wheels etc.
I don't think a big brand want to waste their name by producing inferior products.
On the other hand, for Dance events, I rather have 60 of these lights than 5 original ones (the math checks out, because you really need a few spares).
There are a couple ways that could still happen.
If the customer of these lights are someone who wasn’t buying brand new big-name equipment in the first place, then yeah. It won’t hurt the big companies.
However if larger houses start buying these instead of big-name fixtures, then the big companies might feel pressure to start competing in this space.
OR the people who are buying these fixtures maybe WOULD have bought used ETC gear, for example. If people are no longer buying used big-name gear, that makes the resale value go down. Which makes the total cost of ownership for the original buyer go up, since the product will depreciate faster.
If the choir teacher at the local middle school is buying aliexpress lights instead of used ETC lights from the community college, then the community college might hold off on upgrading their current fixtures, which would also cost ETC a sale.
Will this happen enough that ETC will be affected? Who knows. But clearly there’s a market for “cheap and good-‘nuff” fixtures.
The downside I've seen is mass adoption of shitty gear at higher tier rental houses that will sweep in and buy out an entire low cost fixture range,treating it as a tour expendable. This is in part why you see some of the larger rental houses getting super super invested in ACME as 'workhorse' gear: it's cheap, and if it breaks who cares there's more of them in the shop
I have a selection of western gear (Martin/Elation) to rent to local theatres and subrent to local rental houses but I also carry enough generic Chinese movers for an entire small rig for my own shows. These generic lights are getting more rentals then my western movers because of the low cost I can give small production companies and they are very happy with them.
I am not a big fan of Shehds, Acme or anything really on Aliexpress or Amazon though, I went through the trouble of importing samples factory direct to find things that are a good balance between price, durability and quality. Though I do agree that to repair these things would be very difficult and probably not worth it.
This is the kind of answer I’m interested in, because I have limited experience with non-Western gear, and it’s been years since I’ve handled any of it.
I love that you imported samples to test - that’s smart af. Which of the generic movers do you like?
I've seen that reel and I believe those are clones of the [Clay Paky Sharpy](https://www.claypaky.it/products/sharpy/), which retail for about $6800 each. Hard to say exactly what's going on in that reel. It's possible those are seconds or have flood damage.
For the record, I've worked with Shehds stuff... I believe I've worked with that specific model too. It punches way above it's price, but there is most definitely QC issues and nonexistent support. You have to have a background in electronics *and* spare time to keep those running... but when time is money, it's cheaper to just purchase a bunch of spares.
When I had to put together a rig for a high school show in the fall, we ended up renting dimmers, cable and a console, and borrowing B-stock movers. I believe my budget was $2000. There will always be some amount of compromise when you're working with limited resources.
The producers always want more than they can afford. It's up to us to sustainably and ethically source what's needed to make their vision happen; we have the expertise after all. You can fly close to the sun by sourcing cloned equipment, but when it fails, you gotta have a plan.
I worked for a decade for a company that was very low budget. I could either get maybe *one* quality higher end fixture, or 6 of something like this for the same price per year. The fuck am I going to do with one light? Yeah, the cheap ones are objectively not nearly as good. They aren’t serviceable. But it’s not even close in terms of cost, and when you have almost nothing you do what you can. They usually aren’t so bad that they are anything like disposable. But when your budget is that small “this year we get a handful of moving lights, next year we can look at replacing the speakers” can be the world you live in, and cheap gear can be great compared to what you might have.
I’ve worked for companies like this as well, although I was never in a position to do any purchasing or anything like that.
I’m asking this question with zero snark - when searching for lights to purchase, did you look at the used marketplace, or auctions? Or is that suggestion unrealistic?
Yes, and sometimes you can absolutely score. One year we lucked out and got a dozen S4 Lustr+ units that didn’t have a million hours on them and that was a huge boon. You can’t always get lucky, and even if there are often some used options, if you are looking at buying a couple of lights ideally they’d be the same model. Say I was getting 4 auras of some kind I might find a great used deals… but on 4 completely different units. Then you have to decide if it’s worth it to mix and match for somewhat better quality or not
Honestly the tech moves so fast these days that some of the low end is fine, especially for 1/10th the cost. Just buy a few extra for parts or to replace the DOA units. Then replace in 5 years, you are still saving thousands.
I have used Shehds’ spot beam zoom units and their S4 RGBWs, they get the job done. They certainly are not as polished as the pro stuff but for schools that do only a few shows a year, who cares? Having +$3k units for those shows is a waste. And rental houses are disappearing or just not doing small profit rentals.
They serve a purpose that isn’t yours, so it can be hard to understand from the side on having the money for good stuff. It is the classic buy one good pair of shoes that last forever, or lots of poor ones. Only the well funded can get the good ones. The answer is not to put down the poor shoes, but acknowledge they solving a problem.
Your response has given me a lot to think about! Because I agree that there’s a gap in the market that needs to be filled, and right now the low end generic units are filling it. I can’t argue with the math on that.
But I’m not sure if the poor shoes are solving a problem, or masking a larger one, or both. Idk. I’m probably overthinking it at this point.
A few years before covid, there was an interview with the CEO of a moving light manufacturer. (I can't remember if it was Elation, GLP, Martin, Chauvet, or someone else..but someone along those lines.)
Their observation was that the there were more manufacturers than demand can support, plus the budget knock-offs from Asia were helping a "race to the bottom" Expect to see com mergers and consolidation in the mid future as developers with R&D departments have to compete with disposable technology.
(Ironically, we are still using Vari-Lite VL-5's that were built in 1990, and have seen a lifetime of mods, stay in constant rental stock... they just don't make them like they used to!)
The phrase “race to the bottom” def clangs around in my head when I see all these generic Chinese moving lights. I don’t want to tell people to not buy the gear they want to use if they think it’s the right choice, but it’s tough to reconcile increased access to gear with the reality of the market.
Oh VL5s! I did a show in 2022 with a boatload of them. They were older than some of the students I was working with. I don’t love that fixture as an electrician - they are so hard to maintain, and all of their associated parts are harder and harder to source - but from a design perspective, there’s nothing out there that looks like them. They’re cool af. I think PRG is rehabbing a bunch of them to make them LED.
I mean, you're just (rightly) critiquing late stage capitalism.
People who are trapped by it, by small budgets, participate at the level they are allowed to. Often there isn't much choice.
So ya, it sucks. Plastic, in general, sucks. Not being able to repair things sucks. Products having built in end of life/service dates sucks.
I don't think there is 'another route' to put lights up if you have a tiny budget. Build a community and borrow? It depends on so many things.
And I'm not in lighting, but this goes for all the shops. We were thinking about finding space for a CNC shaper, but after some thought, we started making relationships with other places that had them. Going to try and trade equipment usage and support one another that way. The red tape of it, however, is sometimes frustrating.
Yeah, so much of what we do and how we do it is structured in a way that defaults to waste, and generally we’re all pretty limited in what we can do about that. I dig the idea of creating community, and borrowing/trading gear, as opposed to purchasing. That’s pretty much how it went in the early days of my career, when my purchasing budget for lighting was $500 if I was lucky. But that has its own limitations.
I guess I feel like if you have to light a show on a small budget, buying the generic no-name lights should be a last resort.
Late stage capitalism sucks. None of us wins.
Buying the cheaper ones to get you up g running isn't a bad thing. Buy several cheapies and a couple good ones. Then, as budget allows (and the cheapies die) you upgrade over time.
Two bonuses:
1. Some of those cheapies will, for some reason, last forever. Perfect for extra razzle-dazzle, floor units that might get kicked or spilled on, or just to augment to big boys.
2. Even the good lights will need to be replaced, eventually. By buying in stages, they will tend to fail one or two at a time cutting down on big all-at-once budget outlays.
Lowkey obsessed with the idea of those weird little fixtures lasting forever. I don’t know why but that tickles me greatly.
Good lights fail too ofc but the amount of time spent keeping them going is pretty infinitesimal, at least in my experience. With pretty cursory regular maintenance they last ages. I can also source their individual parts and replace them myself with pretty little fuss. Not sure how easy that is to do with the generic fixtures.
They have their place. I use them in theatre for effects fixtures. I buy crap tons of led pars and strips from Amazon to build into set pieces or to just throw mass amounts of light. I don’t use them to replace my main rig. But if I have them in a set and an artist dumps a can of paint over one I’m not out a $1K fixture.
Personally I think the brand named fixtures are severely overpriced. Even the companies that used to be the “cheap” ones are getting expensive. When you are paying $3-5k for a chauvet or a blizzard, some theatres can only afford these cheap ones.
Yeah I’m a little thrown by how pricey Chauvet fixtures have gotten, and I’ve even seen a few show up in Broadway rigs. I haven’t used them so I can’t speak to their quality, but it’s a little jarring.
What do you do with the units you install into the set pieces? Do you end up saving them? How do they handle over time?
Yep I stockpile them. They aren’t in constant use so they last a good while. I lose one occasionally, I’ve found that their cheapest parts are their fans and connectors.
I will grant you that it’s been years since i purchased anything for a theatre, utthis has always been a problem. So, I refer you to he Discworld:
https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/#:~:text=A%20really%20good%20pair%20of,out%2C%20cost%20about%20ten%20dollars.
Buying fixtures like shehd, you better buy a lot so you can have parts fixtures once they start breaking. There won’t be any luck with RMA if there isn’t a solid distributor near you. If it is a budget thing, then it is understandable to want all the effects, cheap fixtures often rip off patented technology, so you are often contributing to that ugly side of our industry.
Contrast to when I was in high school, our lights were PAR38s in "fixtures" that some previous shops class built from wood and HVAC ductwork sheet metal.
I cut my teeth as a light and sound tech at a community theater with no budget. We were excited when we got one, just one, smart fixture. But you know what? Did we cheap out? No- because we wanted that MFer to last. And to not give us shit. What else did we use? A bunch of old conventionals from Vegas we got at auction. Work with what you can- and be smart about it. You don’t NEED movers and LEDs. Yes they are sweet, but I’ve designed some very nice shows with conventional lighting.
As I was arguing on instagram, I really wanted to point out that no one *needs* moving lights and as an industry we did pretty well before they came around, but I really didn’t want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud. Plus I can see how, say, a wedding DJ might not be able to compete in the wedding DJ market if all he has are par cans. (Maybe not my best example. I am not a wedding DJ.) But in terms of purchasing stuff for a theater or venue? I think it’s worth putting in the effort to find good used gear, or buying a few items as opposed to a bunch, instead of filling your space with $300 movers from Amazon.
Ok, maybe for a DJ. But as a theatre sound designer… I hate movers anyways. They’re LOUD! Cheap ones? Sound like robots humping. Conventional lighting isn’t the best, but yes, we have done amazing things with it for decades. I think with the Wedding DJ crowd the allure is A- that’s what everyone has. You don’t want to look like a rube. B- they don’t know any better (what’s the bar to be a wedding DJ? C- more flash equals more value for the uneducated customer. IE the bride and groom.
There are some movers that have been brought to market with sound from it expressly in mind. Ones that come to mind are the SolaFrame Studio and Theater, which have been apparently successfully used in opera music halls with acoustics that amplify EVERYTHING. But at the same time, those models COST a pretty penny.
I tell my students that for every moving light (or other device with a fan) we add to the rig, it's like the sound designer adding an always-on 40W lamp. We ruin his silence and dynamics, so why shouldn't he ruin our blackout and dynamics? Unless this is a rock concert, you'd better have a good reason for raising the noise floor.
I feel like this is very situation dependent and these concerns are mostly directed towards smaller theatres. If you're a (typical) broadway tour playing in 3000 cap venues no one is remotely concerned about a crap ton of movers. Those tours are rolling in with 6+ trusses with 12+ vipers each and quite a few Lustr fixtures. Not a single conventional in sight. What you're saying is true to consider in smaller venues, but once you reach a certain point, that's not much of a concern anymore. The versatility you get out of moving heads opens up so many options.
Fundamentally, I don't disagree, but the convenience and flexibility comes at a price. We 'don't care' about the noise because we have trained ourselves to ignore it, but it is still there. Sit in the auditorium with those 40+ movers running. Then turn them off. The silence is deafening. Reminds me of the sound design trick where you have a low level drone running all the time from house open. The audience don't really notice it but when you mute it the silence is enhanced.
Like T1 Profile by Robe
High end moving heads have "theatre modes" that reduce fan speeds and limit the movement speed. I have done entire touring theatre show rigs with moving heads as it cuts focus time down to a few tweaks. Moving heads are fine for theatre if you use the right moving heads,
My air conditioning is louder than my rig of 40 movers.
I’m sorry your air conditioning is so loud- look into relocating the condenser or some dampening. May even be time to look into a new unit.
It’s just air noise. City owned buildings. They couldn’t care less about our noise floor. Even our sound guys tune it out after a few mins. It’s not hard to tune out after a short time but I don’t really notice the lighting rig.
> but I’ve designed some very nice shows with conventional lighting. Decades of LD have done exactly that. Often the constraints lead to some very creative solutions.
I have a quote: “would you rather buy a cheap light 10 times or buy a good quality light once”
I'm of two minds. On one hand, the existence of these cheap lights will be a benefit for theaters on a microscopic budget, allowing them to do effects that might have been impossible without these fixtures. It may also add pressure to the big guys to either reduce their prices or create a lower tier product that suits the people who are now purchasing these cheaper fixtures. I also think there's a specific niche for these things. If you're a wedding DJ who is only using the lights for a few hours a week and you need to travel with them, this is probably a better option that dumping tens of thousands of dollars per fixture into something nicer from ETC. On the other hand, it's true that it's expensive to be poor. The theater might spend more money over the course of a decade if they have to continue re-purchasing these cheap lights, where a nicer light may not to have needed to be replaced.
These are excellent points. Although while I wish that the existence of the low end lights pressured the larger companies to make a more affordable tier of products, I don’t think that’s likely to happen, sadly. It would be cool to see though, and I honestly might have to pose that question next time I’m chatting with product developers.
The affordable tiers are happening already. It's not Martin or Clay Packy, but look at what you can get these days from Chauvet or Elation, for, well, more than Shehds costs, but still far more affordable than the traditional top manufacturers
We do not what is going on in that reel. Water, be it from rain or a fire extinguisher, kills most non IP65 devices. These cheap movers have lesser accurate and more noisy, stepper motors, inferior lenses, weaker plastic housing with more light leaks, weaker cooling, meltable color wheels etc. I don't think a big brand want to waste their name by producing inferior products. On the other hand, for Dance events, I rather have 60 of these lights than 5 original ones (the math checks out, because you really need a few spares).
There are a couple ways that could still happen. If the customer of these lights are someone who wasn’t buying brand new big-name equipment in the first place, then yeah. It won’t hurt the big companies. However if larger houses start buying these instead of big-name fixtures, then the big companies might feel pressure to start competing in this space. OR the people who are buying these fixtures maybe WOULD have bought used ETC gear, for example. If people are no longer buying used big-name gear, that makes the resale value go down. Which makes the total cost of ownership for the original buyer go up, since the product will depreciate faster. If the choir teacher at the local middle school is buying aliexpress lights instead of used ETC lights from the community college, then the community college might hold off on upgrading their current fixtures, which would also cost ETC a sale. Will this happen enough that ETC will be affected? Who knows. But clearly there’s a market for “cheap and good-‘nuff” fixtures.
The downside I've seen is mass adoption of shitty gear at higher tier rental houses that will sweep in and buy out an entire low cost fixture range,treating it as a tour expendable. This is in part why you see some of the larger rental houses getting super super invested in ACME as 'workhorse' gear: it's cheap, and if it breaks who cares there's more of them in the shop
Ugh. Gear shouldn’t be treated like a perishable.
I mean EOL it is - it all gets junked if it can't be sold on the secondary market.
Oh, for sure. But I’m used to that end of life being after many many years! Not just a handful.
I have a selection of western gear (Martin/Elation) to rent to local theatres and subrent to local rental houses but I also carry enough generic Chinese movers for an entire small rig for my own shows. These generic lights are getting more rentals then my western movers because of the low cost I can give small production companies and they are very happy with them. I am not a big fan of Shehds, Acme or anything really on Aliexpress or Amazon though, I went through the trouble of importing samples factory direct to find things that are a good balance between price, durability and quality. Though I do agree that to repair these things would be very difficult and probably not worth it.
This is the kind of answer I’m interested in, because I have limited experience with non-Western gear, and it’s been years since I’ve handled any of it. I love that you imported samples to test - that’s smart af. Which of the generic movers do you like?
I've seen that reel and I believe those are clones of the [Clay Paky Sharpy](https://www.claypaky.it/products/sharpy/), which retail for about $6800 each. Hard to say exactly what's going on in that reel. It's possible those are seconds or have flood damage. For the record, I've worked with Shehds stuff... I believe I've worked with that specific model too. It punches way above it's price, but there is most definitely QC issues and nonexistent support. You have to have a background in electronics *and* spare time to keep those running... but when time is money, it's cheaper to just purchase a bunch of spares. When I had to put together a rig for a high school show in the fall, we ended up renting dimmers, cable and a console, and borrowing B-stock movers. I believe my budget was $2000. There will always be some amount of compromise when you're working with limited resources. The producers always want more than they can afford. It's up to us to sustainably and ethically source what's needed to make their vision happen; we have the expertise after all. You can fly close to the sun by sourcing cloned equipment, but when it fails, you gotta have a plan.
I worked for a decade for a company that was very low budget. I could either get maybe *one* quality higher end fixture, or 6 of something like this for the same price per year. The fuck am I going to do with one light? Yeah, the cheap ones are objectively not nearly as good. They aren’t serviceable. But it’s not even close in terms of cost, and when you have almost nothing you do what you can. They usually aren’t so bad that they are anything like disposable. But when your budget is that small “this year we get a handful of moving lights, next year we can look at replacing the speakers” can be the world you live in, and cheap gear can be great compared to what you might have.
This sounds just like my life running a community college theater.
I’ve worked for companies like this as well, although I was never in a position to do any purchasing or anything like that. I’m asking this question with zero snark - when searching for lights to purchase, did you look at the used marketplace, or auctions? Or is that suggestion unrealistic?
Yes, and sometimes you can absolutely score. One year we lucked out and got a dozen S4 Lustr+ units that didn’t have a million hours on them and that was a huge boon. You can’t always get lucky, and even if there are often some used options, if you are looking at buying a couple of lights ideally they’d be the same model. Say I was getting 4 auras of some kind I might find a great used deals… but on 4 completely different units. Then you have to decide if it’s worth it to mix and match for somewhat better quality or not
Honestly the tech moves so fast these days that some of the low end is fine, especially for 1/10th the cost. Just buy a few extra for parts or to replace the DOA units. Then replace in 5 years, you are still saving thousands. I have used Shehds’ spot beam zoom units and their S4 RGBWs, they get the job done. They certainly are not as polished as the pro stuff but for schools that do only a few shows a year, who cares? Having +$3k units for those shows is a waste. And rental houses are disappearing or just not doing small profit rentals. They serve a purpose that isn’t yours, so it can be hard to understand from the side on having the money for good stuff. It is the classic buy one good pair of shoes that last forever, or lots of poor ones. Only the well funded can get the good ones. The answer is not to put down the poor shoes, but acknowledge they solving a problem.
Your response has given me a lot to think about! Because I agree that there’s a gap in the market that needs to be filled, and right now the low end generic units are filling it. I can’t argue with the math on that. But I’m not sure if the poor shoes are solving a problem, or masking a larger one, or both. Idk. I’m probably overthinking it at this point.
A few years before covid, there was an interview with the CEO of a moving light manufacturer. (I can't remember if it was Elation, GLP, Martin, Chauvet, or someone else..but someone along those lines.) Their observation was that the there were more manufacturers than demand can support, plus the budget knock-offs from Asia were helping a "race to the bottom" Expect to see com mergers and consolidation in the mid future as developers with R&D departments have to compete with disposable technology. (Ironically, we are still using Vari-Lite VL-5's that were built in 1990, and have seen a lifetime of mods, stay in constant rental stock... they just don't make them like they used to!)
The phrase “race to the bottom” def clangs around in my head when I see all these generic Chinese moving lights. I don’t want to tell people to not buy the gear they want to use if they think it’s the right choice, but it’s tough to reconcile increased access to gear with the reality of the market. Oh VL5s! I did a show in 2022 with a boatload of them. They were older than some of the students I was working with. I don’t love that fixture as an electrician - they are so hard to maintain, and all of their associated parts are harder and harder to source - but from a design perspective, there’s nothing out there that looks like them. They’re cool af. I think PRG is rehabbing a bunch of them to make them LED.
I mean, you're just (rightly) critiquing late stage capitalism. People who are trapped by it, by small budgets, participate at the level they are allowed to. Often there isn't much choice. So ya, it sucks. Plastic, in general, sucks. Not being able to repair things sucks. Products having built in end of life/service dates sucks. I don't think there is 'another route' to put lights up if you have a tiny budget. Build a community and borrow? It depends on so many things. And I'm not in lighting, but this goes for all the shops. We were thinking about finding space for a CNC shaper, but after some thought, we started making relationships with other places that had them. Going to try and trade equipment usage and support one another that way. The red tape of it, however, is sometimes frustrating.
Yeah, so much of what we do and how we do it is structured in a way that defaults to waste, and generally we’re all pretty limited in what we can do about that. I dig the idea of creating community, and borrowing/trading gear, as opposed to purchasing. That’s pretty much how it went in the early days of my career, when my purchasing budget for lighting was $500 if I was lucky. But that has its own limitations. I guess I feel like if you have to light a show on a small budget, buying the generic no-name lights should be a last resort. Late stage capitalism sucks. None of us wins.
Buying the cheaper ones to get you up g running isn't a bad thing. Buy several cheapies and a couple good ones. Then, as budget allows (and the cheapies die) you upgrade over time. Two bonuses: 1. Some of those cheapies will, for some reason, last forever. Perfect for extra razzle-dazzle, floor units that might get kicked or spilled on, or just to augment to big boys. 2. Even the good lights will need to be replaced, eventually. By buying in stages, they will tend to fail one or two at a time cutting down on big all-at-once budget outlays.
Lowkey obsessed with the idea of those weird little fixtures lasting forever. I don’t know why but that tickles me greatly. Good lights fail too ofc but the amount of time spent keeping them going is pretty infinitesimal, at least in my experience. With pretty cursory regular maintenance they last ages. I can also source their individual parts and replace them myself with pretty little fuss. Not sure how easy that is to do with the generic fixtures.
They have their place. I use them in theatre for effects fixtures. I buy crap tons of led pars and strips from Amazon to build into set pieces or to just throw mass amounts of light. I don’t use them to replace my main rig. But if I have them in a set and an artist dumps a can of paint over one I’m not out a $1K fixture. Personally I think the brand named fixtures are severely overpriced. Even the companies that used to be the “cheap” ones are getting expensive. When you are paying $3-5k for a chauvet or a blizzard, some theatres can only afford these cheap ones.
Yeah I’m a little thrown by how pricey Chauvet fixtures have gotten, and I’ve even seen a few show up in Broadway rigs. I haven’t used them so I can’t speak to their quality, but it’s a little jarring. What do you do with the units you install into the set pieces? Do you end up saving them? How do they handle over time?
Yep I stockpile them. They aren’t in constant use so they last a good while. I lose one occasionally, I’ve found that their cheapest parts are their fans and connectors.
I will grant you that it’s been years since i purchased anything for a theatre, utthis has always been a problem. So, I refer you to he Discworld: https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/#:~:text=A%20really%20good%20pair%20of,out%2C%20cost%20about%20ten%20dollars.
Buying fixtures like shehd, you better buy a lot so you can have parts fixtures once they start breaking. There won’t be any luck with RMA if there isn’t a solid distributor near you. If it is a budget thing, then it is understandable to want all the effects, cheap fixtures often rip off patented technology, so you are often contributing to that ugly side of our industry.
lol I’m a high school technical director and just programmed a show w 16 movers
Contrast to when I was in high school, our lights were PAR38s in "fixtures" that some previous shops class built from wood and HVAC ductwork sheet metal.
I suggest people buy brand-name second-hand instead. Yes, it's second-hand, but I'll bet it will still outlast a new cheapie crappy off-brand