Thematics Presents : The Lightbox

APRIL 2008: My students loved using Lightbox in the classroom, both as a way of testing ideas and to make formal "light lab" presentations in which they would light a scene from a play as part of a project. We all loved the specificity of Lightbox - the ability to do highly detailed and accurate representations of your ideas, in true scale. Nothing else comes close to being able to replicate the light from a Source Four or similar instrument from 19 degree beams to 50 degree. It's easy to use and the end result was that my students were able to create sophisticated and lovely presentations. It will fundamentally change the nature of your students' work. Now I need to get one for myself! Bravo Lightbox!

GOBOS:NO MORE SCANNING! It can be way easier to scale down a gobo and keep a high resolution for use in your LIGHTBOX 19 and 26 degree lensed fixtures. Josh Alemeny explained that to scale a gobo pattern off the Rosco website all you have to do is find the pattern you want in their catalog, save it onto your hard drive, open it in PhotoShop, select image>resize>image size and when the window opens up UNCHECK the box that says RESAMPLE IMAGE. This is important. Then change the pattern to 5mm (also very important); select all, copy, close (no need to save) and paste into a sheet of blanks which you can now DOWNLOAD circles which are the perfect size for our mini templates.

The real annoying part is that once you have the little 5mm gobo in the file of blanks you have to zoom in real close and remove the negative space of the gobo (where you want light to come thru the acetate) because when you save the image off the catalog, it has white "pages" in the part of the pattern where light must pass. By holding down the shift+ when you select the white spaces with the magic wand tool will make it a little quicker. If you know about the tolerance settings, this is also a place where you can affect the edges of the selection and keep the gobo image sharp. I found a setting of about 43 was good. But once you have the negative space removed, copy and paste the pattern as many times as you want and position the pasted gobo into the exact center of the provided donuts on the sheet.

After printing on Rosco Image Pro acetate, cut out the little circles following the OUTER black circle and PlasticWeld to the bushing insert. For further instructions and files seeDOWNLOADS on this site.

ETC PC Client: To run your LIGHTBOX off your ION, EOS, Congo or Jr, all you have to do is set up a network jack at your LIGHTBOX. Splitting off your ETC switch, set up your LIGHTBOX dimmers as an auxiliary "rack"; you can even give them their own universe for control. At the ETC booth, Heidi was helpful by explaining how, by setting up a "client" on a PC which is no more than 30 meters from your switch, and using an ethernet hardline, you can use your Ion, Eos, Congo or Congo Jr to run your LIGHTBOX. And of course the beauty of using the same console is the saved cue list.

Caution: remember that when using the "client" on your Ion, you are still actually using the console as a control device so be careful if you are writing cues in the studio with LIGHTBOX and there is a show running in the theater.

Palette control: Bobby Harrell from Strand was also really helpful in showing us how the Palette v10 offers an "on line editor" (which looks a lot like Horizon for those of you who like Robert Bell's work) which you could use to run your LIGHTBOX. SeeDOWNLOADS on our site or go to STRAND's site and pull in the software. Using the patch and live control functions, you are able to run your LIGHTBOX and save cues for the show. The only downside is that every 10 minutes the software scrambles the output DMX violently. I am assured that it does not affect your cues or saved work in any way. For LIGHTBOX users this should be heavily outweighed by the convenience of having a console in your laptop. Every LIGHTBOX now come delivered with a USB port but if you need a DMX-to-USB interface we have a few we like at the ONLINE STORE.

Lastly, I know it is our product but as some of you may know, the programmer for our new control console works for our German partner, FreeStylers, and when we have a chance to see him, as we did in Houston, we learn a lot about the LIGHTBOX Operating System and it really has some cool features. A timeline to write cues, a magic sheet to organize your lighting ideas and a full library of fixtures to draft. But don't take my word for it, try it for FREE and sketch in DMX with a console in your lap(top) at www.lbosxone.com

Vectorworks and Lightwright also discussed a connection to LIGHTBOX. I hope we can work this out in the near future.

If you have an idea or some LIGHTBOX pictures you would like to post here send to blog@seeLIGHTBOX.com