r/stagelighting

Thanks in advance and sorry for my lack of understanding ahead of time. Really appreciate any and all guidance.

I run a junior hockey team and have been wanting to juice up our gameday atmosphere for some time. Hoping to do so for next season.

I’ve had some preliminary chats with a company in the area but their quote is well above what we’re hoping to spend. Now their quote was also for a fully installed system. But it was like 50k.

What we’re looking for:

Rink lighting: setup in the second deck and projected onto the ice surface/crowd

- 3-5 moving beam lights: would like the ability to project team or sponsors logo
- some addition spot lights or something for special effects.
- need to look ok with arena lights on and hopefully better with them off

Entrance tunnel lighting: for player entrance pre game and pre- period

Not sure what to do here. Something fun. Maybe a moving bar or something.

Haze maybe?

Additionally, cabling could be an issue so potentially setting it up with wireless dmx or something?

Then best practices for setting it all up either with a board or software so that it’s fairly easy to operate.

Sorry that this is vague but really open to anything.

Arena is a fair size. Hosts around 2000 people. Distance from upper deck to centre ice is probably around 125 feet or so.

Willing to spend 10-15k or so.

Any help is appreciated.

Hi everyone, is there anyone currently working in stage lighting in Japan? I’d love to connect and hear about your experience.

So i want a moving headbeam that is cheap and fast on the music beats and more functions you guys know some??

I am having a really bad experiance with this company and want to warn any of potential customers do buy from this company!

We bought over 8000 dollars worth of moving heads from them in the last month.

Throughout the buying process the lied about stock capacity to us and tried to put pressure on us to finally buy from them.

After the lights reached us and we installed them in our night club half of them lasted exactly one night until they were not working properly anymore. After two nights alll of the12 pcs. we ordered where not working anymore.

The problem is that the PAN rotation stopps working when the motor should rotate at higher speed. On slow (and i mean really really unusual slow) they seem to work for a certain time. When the error occures the driver chips on the mainboard will probably fall into a state of overpowering and will cut the Power of the PAN motor immediately.

The architecture of the moving head seems to be extremely cheap and the engineers don't really know what they are doing or how to choose the right components which will last.

So after weeks of back and forth arguing with them they let us send them hundreds of pictures measuring different power lines or stuff on their mainboard, checking stuff about the lights ourselves and finally changing multiple parts in the lights they didn't found the problem at all.

The customer service (Maye Su) is really bad, no words of sorry so far and they don't even think about sending us working prodcuts - they are still trying to get us (as paying customers) change more parts and motors on these brand new purchased lights.

After over 15 years of importing stage lights from china i have never had a worse experiance than with this company! They are trying to get in the european market and also producing lights for a dutch company called Light Inc.

Be aware and stay away from the!

Later this year I'll be LDing my first theatre show since graduating, so without access to the software I was using through my education licences. It's currently not worth investing in a licence or paying thousands for a software, but I do need something to make my plans + calcs etc, 3D vis would be amazing but I'm probably asking for too much there.

I'm most comfortable on Capture, have also used Vectorworks but very confident, never touched WYSIWYG.

What software do early-career LDs use?

Does anyone know a youtube video or something, of a mythical theatre in a ~ 12m x 10m size stage? I’m looking for lighting ideas, there is no built structures so mostly empty stage.

I am ordering spare lamps for a small space with s4s.

B&H has USHIO HPL575 at an attractive price. Thing is, the photos show a lamp with a cream colored base between the globe and the pins. I have never used this lamp with a cream colored base- only the plain old aluminum. Does anyone have experience or insight here?

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who posted. I ordered a 6pack of full ceramic base ushio hpl575 from B&H which is nuts because they are usually high-dollar, but not this time. When they come in, I will check them out and will update as we use them!

Hi. I work for a small theatre and they have a HOG4 and some Mac moving heads with lamps. Not LED.

For a long time you would have to lamp on using CONTROL and LAMP STRIKE

but recently when you start running cues without striking the macs. They are lamping on themselves. The movers are not always used so the lamps are running when not needed. The other day I came in and the fixtures were giving a HOT error.

What could have caused this? I believe the settings on the movers were set to not lamp on automatically, but they could have been changed by a rental? Or could someone have built a macro to lamp them on?

Thanks

I'm new to learning how to program moving beams, and I've had another model of beams before I got these recent ones. From videos I've seen on YouTube, the beams have the ray of light that appears, which is why they're known as beam because a beam of light shoots out. Even my previous model ones had beams appear, but these don't. Does anyone know how I can solve this issue? I thought it could be a manufacturing issue but I have 12 of these so it can't be that all 12 have an issue with shooting out a beam. I can get the shapes and colors to show but I want to see the trail of light as well.

Hey everyone,

I’m planning to get into wedding special effects in the Quebec area and I’m trying to build a simple setup for events.

The idea is to use:

• low fog / “dancing on clouds” effect for first dances
• cold spark machines for entrances and key moments
• possibly some basic event content (photos/videos)

Right now I’m looking at equipment like:

• Antari ICE-101 (low fog machine)
• Chauvet DJ Hurricane 1600 (fog / atmosphere)
• 2–3 cold spark machines
• a basic DMX controller (like Chauvet Obey 40)

Before I start investing, I wanted to ask people with experience in weddings / DJ / live events:

1. Is this a solid setup for weddings or am I missing something important?
2. Is the ICE-101 reliable for real wedding use or should I go higher end?
3. How many spark machines are typically used for a good effect?
4. Any brands to avoid or better alternatives?
5. Common mistakes beginners usually make with this kind of setup?

I’m just trying to learn and put together something reliable and professional-looking.

Any advice would be really appreciated 🙏