ETC Lighting

by David Fox

Lighting technology has advanced slowly, but surely, over the last decade, but not when it comes to the standard batten lights that illuminate large areas, according to ETC Lighting, which introduced a replacement at IBC 2002, which it claims is more than 40% more energy efficient.

The new ETC MultiPAR is based on ETC's Source Four PAR lights and also provides more illumination than previous batten lights. It comes in versions with 3-, 4-, or 12-lamp strips or as a 3x3 grid. Custom lengths are also available, all of which allow for easy lamp replacement and focusing, with power ratings of 375W, 575W or 750W. Instead of having four different types of par lamps for different effects, each cell in the MultiPAR has four lenses and one HPL lamp, resulting in a lighter, smaller (12 lamps in a 2.5m strip) and more flexible package. They are also switchable between three circuits of four, or four circuits of three lamps, to allow multi-coloured lighting effects.

ETC also has a new combination control console, lighting design and visualisation toolbox, and networked lighting system, called Emphasis. It has the same user interface and processing power as its existing Expression and Express consoles and controls automated lights as well as conventional dimmers.

For lighting design tool, it has a new version of the Emmy Award-winning WYSIWYG visualisation software (used for the 2002 Eurovision Song Contest), with an easy-to-use graphic interface, which can be used for design, planning, programming and monitoring on the same system. Users can pre-light a complete production offline, using a virtual set and the lighting plot created in WYSIWYG, saving studio time. During the production, when a change is made on Emphasis, that change dynamically affects the plan in WYSIWYG. Emphasis also allows users to preview upcoming lighting cues in a rendered view. Each system can control the full range of 32,767 DMX values available on the ETCNet2 network. Expression and Express consoles are upgradeable to Emphasis.

Nov 2002

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David Fox