Stage lighting is the craft of lighting as it applies to the production of theater, dance, opera, and other performance arts. Several different types of stage lighting instruments are used in this discipline. In addition to basic lighting, modern stage lighting can also include special effects, such as lasers and fog machines. People who work on stage lighting are commonly referred to as lighting technicians or lighting designers.
In theatre, a lighting designer works with the director, choreographer, set designer, costume designer, and sound designer to create the lighting, atmosphere, and time of day for the production in response to the text while keeping in mind issues of visibility, safety, and cost. The LD also works closely with the stage manager or show control programming, if show control systems are used in that production. Outside stage lighting, the job of a lighting designer can be much more diverse, and they can be found working on rock and pop tours, corporate launches, art installations, or lighting effects at sporting events.
A mixing console or mixing desk is an electronic device for mixing audio signals, used in sound recording and reproduction and sound reinforcement systems. Inputs to the console include microphones, signals from electric or electronic instruments, or recorded sounds. Mixers may control analog or digital signals. The modified signals are summed to produce the combined output signals, which can then be broadcast, amplified through a sound reinforcement system or recorded.
DMX512 is a standard for digital communication networks that are commonly used to control lighting and effects. It was originally intended as a standardized method for controlling stage lighting dimmers, which, prior to DMX512, had employed various incompatible proprietary protocols. It quickly became the primary method for linking controllers to dimmers and special effects devices such as fog machines and intelligent lights.
A dimmer is a device connected to a light fixture and used to lower the brightness of the light. By changing the voltage waveform applied to the lamp, it is possible to lower the intensity of the light output. Although variable-voltage devices are used for various purposes, the term dimmer is generally reserved for those intended to control light output from resistive incandescent, halogen, and compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). More specialized equipment is needed to dim fluorescent, mercury-vapor, solid-state, and other arc lighting.
A lighting control console is an electronic device used in theatrical lighting design to control multiple stage lights at once. They are used throughout the entertainment industry and are normally placed at the front of house (FOH) position or in a control booth.
In stage lighting, a fade is a gradual increase or decrease of the intensity of light projected onto the stage. The term fade-in refers to gradually changing the lighting level from complete darkness to a predetermined lighting level. A fade-out refers to gradually decreasing the intensity of light until none is shining on the stage. A crossfade is when lighting levels are gradually altered from one setting to another. A fade-in is sometimes called a build, and where this terminology is used, a fade is understood to be a fade-out.
The light board operator, is the electrician who operates and may even program the light board. They are considered part of the "Electrics" Department or LX Department. All non-design elements of lighting will be handled by the LX Department, i.e. electricians. Light board operators mainly are responsible for decoding the light designer's ideas from paper to opening night ready. In some cases, the light board operator is also the light designer.
Show control is the use of automation technology to link together and operate multiple entertainment control systems in a coordinated manner. It is distinguished from an entertainment control system, which is specific to a single theatrical department, system or effect, one which coordinates elements within a single entertainment discipline such as lighting, sound, video, rigging, or pyrotechnics. A typical entertainment control system would be a lighting control console. An example of show control would be linking a video segment with a number of lighting cues, or having a sound cue trigger animatronic movements, or all of these combined. Shows with or without live actors can almost invariably incorporate entertainment control technology and usually benefit from show control to operate these subsystems independently, simultaneously, or in rapid succession.
Remote Device Management(RDM) is an addition to the DMX512 control protocol for stage lighting equipment, introduced in 2006. DMX512 was developed in the late 1980s as a standard protocol for lighting consoles to communicate with dimmers, but has since been used for more complex applications, including the control of intelligent lighting fixtures. The addition of RDM addresses many of the shortcomings of DMX512, which is unidirectional with no support for metadata.
Intelligent lighting refers to lighting that has automated or mechanical abilities beyond those of conventional, stationary illumination. Although the most advanced intelligent lights can produce extraordinarily complex effects, the intelligence lies with the human lighting designer, control system programmer, or the lighting operator, rather than the fixture itself. For this reason, intelligent lighting (ILS) is also known as automated lighting, moving lights, moving heads, or simply movers.
Digital Serial Interface (DSI) is a protocol for the controlling of lighting in buildings. It was created in 1991 by Austrian company Tridonic and is based on Manchester-coded 8-bit protocol, data rate of 1200 baud, 1 start bit, 8 data bits, 4 stop bits, and is the basis of the more sophisticated protocol Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI).
In theatre, an electrician is a person who works with the various aspects of lighting. Some of the positions among electricians include the lighting supervisor, master electrician, deck electrician, light board operator, moving light programmer, followspot operator, as well as simply electricians. This group is generally known as the "Electrics" Department or LX Department.
FocusTrack is a database program created specifically for stage lighting applications. The program is designed to allow lighting designers, lighting programmers and lighting electricians to document the way that a show is lit, in order to be able to accurately maintain the look of the lighting over the run of the show, and to be able to re-create the lighting on tour or for future productions of the show in other venues.
A colour scroller or colour changer is an electro-mechanical lighting accessory used in theater, film, dance and concerts to change the colour projected by stage lighting instruments without the need of a person to be in the vicinity of the light. A colour scroller moves plastic "gel" colour gel [actually dyed polyester and/or other base materials coated with dyes] into the beam of the light. It is generally attached to the gel frame holder at the transmitting end of a lighting fixture, so colour is introduced after the beam characteristics have been defined by the optics of the lighting instrument. Most scrollers are controlled via DMX512 protocol, but some models also utilize the RDM protocol. When colour scrollers were first introduced around 1980, a number of companies produced them, including: Avolites, GAM Products, Morpheus Lights, Rainbow, Rosco Laboratories and Wybron Inc. Now the main manufacturers are: A.C. Lighting, Apollo, Morpheus Lights and Rainbow.
VENUE is a brand of live sound digital mixing consoles introduced by Digidesign in February 2005. The family now includes 5 different consoles and a number of ways they can be configured. They can all be connected to Pro Tools, the audio editing software also created by Avid/Digidesign, to provide recording and 'Virtual Soundcheck' facilities. One of the system's key marketing points is its use of the same AAX DSP/TDM plugins as Pro Tools, an industry standard digital audio workstation (DAW). This is designed to enable the sounds recorded by the artist in the studio to be easily recreated on stage, and to allow for greater flexibility in signal processing without heavy and mechanical-shock-sensitive racks of external processors. There is also a PC-based offline editor for creation and editing of show files, although there is no audio processing in the editor.
Vari-Lite is a brand of automated, variable-colour stage lighting systems. Their intelligent lighting fixtures are commonly used in theatre, concerts, television, film and corporate events.
Art-Net is a royalty-free communications protocol for transmitting the DMX512-A lighting control protocol and Remote Device management (RDM) protocol over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) of the Internet protocol suite. It is used to communicate between "nodes" and a "server".
ArKaos is an application for live visual performance, conceived as a visual sampler for video loops that can be triggered from the computer, or through a hardware interface. The application is available in two versions: ArKaos VJ MIDI, conceived as a live video performance instrument, often used in conjunction with a MIDI keyboard, and ArKaos VJ DMX, which can be controlled with a DMX console.
QLab is a cue-based, multimedia playback software package for macOS, intended for use in theatre and live entertainment. It is developed by Figure 53, an American company based in Baltimore, Maryland.
