Q Light Controller+

Hello community,

here's a nice success story and event report :

I've been using QLC+4 for running a series of four performance evenings in this year's Vienna ImPuls dance festival, a collaborative event by several performing artists to celebrate Joseph Beuys' 100th birthday.

The event took place at the very cool event location on the rooftop of one of the most famous museums in Austria, Leopold Museum, the so-called MQ-Libelle.

The first half of the program (readings, short performances and interventions) happened around sunset and dawn, in the outdoor area.



Then at around 8:45 pm the hall was lit in pure red to invite and guide the audience inside the hall to see 3-4 further performance events of around 10 minutes each.



The hall's light equipment is very modern, but really limited for theatrical purposes: around 35 Pro-Lights RGB COB downlight spots in the ceiling, same amount of warm white spots next to these but only controllable per row not individually, and 8 ETC Desire D22 Lustr+ for the stage, organized as 2 address-sharing pairs of each front and side lights.

This equipment got handed over to us by the company running it over the year, without much usable information like DMX patch list etc., and they supplied me a small chamsys desk i never had seen before, without manual, pre-programmed for some simple presets... so, because of lack of time and my need to know my desk and react quickly to the artists' demands, I decided to use my own control system consisting of a spare laptop, QLC+4-git, an Enttec USBDMX Pro MkII and a nanoKontrol2.

The D22 definition is included with QLC+, and I found a Pro-Lights COB fixture definition for a different device that had a matching mode, so I simply used that, and 8 generic dimmer channels for the 8 rows of white downlights.

I read out the DMX addresses from the Chamsys patch page and created a basic workspace, that I kept extending and using during all the four shows. The fixture wizard generated functions and VC widgets weren't of much use in such a setting.

A separate 6 fader DMX mixer was used to independently control the two hazer channels.

I share the workspace here, in case someone is interested. To explain a bit, I created

- a multislider frame for controlling all D22s
- a few (collapsed to save screen space) frames with click&go colors, strobe and dimmer sliders for subgroups of the RGB downlights (though strobe never got used)
- some preset buttons for static light scenes/groups, some with fade times (bar, foyer, worklights)
- two cuelists (the main cuelist and a color chaser running on top of it for the final concert block). I ran the main cues by manual crossfader mostly, except for one 30 second fade and a 0ms scene change.
- two faders with nice warm-white and cold-white stage colors to quickly mix that in during creating a stage look
- I kept the (simplified) wizard-generated 16 colors frame for the D22 but never used it during preparation and running the show.

The cuelist scene name s and numbering are wrong/duplicated in parts, because for the 3rd and 4th evening I had to add scenes for some new events on stage, and simply re-used existing scenes.

To summarize, the event was quite a success, and received very positively by audience and organizers. For me as responsible and executive lighting technician everything went absolutely reliably, smooth and easy.

I hope this is of use or interesting to at least some of you.

Cheers, Edgar

bravo Edgar!
Some culture news, like a dance festival.
I was thinking you were in Germany, I've been many times in ImPulsTanz, especially with Ivo Dimchev that you should have met.
I love this festival and I really I'd like to come again.
So, maybe we've met in the past, like 5/6 years ago?
cheers
Giacomo

Yes Giacomo, I thought you were aware of that? use case #2 in https://www.qlcplus.org/use_case.html

I remember your post to my first thread in this forum.

Since Mr. Dimchev's first appearance in the festival, I had to do with him almost every year in a way or another, I've also designed and run the lights for one of his concert shows in Volkstheater a few years ago, set up a lighting concept in mumok Museum for his "selfie concert" 3 years ago which then got ditched in favour of doing it in plain white museum general "cleaning" lights...

When setting up X-ON, you were the one introducing me to QLC+, Massimo's fork which I hadn't know about (I had known and tried "original" QLC before without success)...

I remember you were experimenting with running the show from QLC+ and a nanoKontrol2, but as a backup also set up the house console, an ETC Ion or Gio IIRC.

I occasionally use QLC+ in situations where I don't have a hardware desk available that I know well enough. At MQ Libelle, they presented me a Chamsys QuickQ 10, preprogrammed for some fixture groups and corresponding color presets of the available lights, but without any documentation or person that could explain the system to me.
The time to learn the desk, or find out whether the desk setup was flexible and useful enough for my needs, simply wasn't available. So I decided to go with QLC+, and that worked out very well for me.

yes Edgar!
now I remember that production and you, it's true that qlcplus was quite new at that time.
during these years I've lost track of many posts and people... :)
I stopped working with Ivo but hopefully I'll come back in Vienna again and I'll tell you something.
in the meantime all the best.