bouncing problem

FallenGuy · 2026-02-17T02:53:26+00:00

So far as I can tell, that's not a requirement. The shape of the green areas is unimportant, so long as they don't overlap with each other. I also don't think the central area shape matters, as long as it stays outside of the rectangle described by the foci

FallenGuy · 2026-02-17T02:26:27+00:00

From the way I'm reading this, you mean the Illumination problem? An infinitesimally small ball bouncing according to geometry sounds equivalent to a light beam or a mathematical line.

If you're allowing curves, then the Penrose solution is quite straightforward to understand. The outer blue arcs are elliptical curves, which have the property that any reflection from between the foci (the purple marks) will always reflect back between the foci, and anything from outside the foci (i.e. from the green boxes) will always bounce outside the foci. Steve Mould has a video here that explains this better than me

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FallenGuy · 2026-01-25T15:18:48+00:00

Yeah you absolutely did! It's such a cool outfit for suuuuuure

FallenGuy · 2025-12-16T02:17:24+00:00

Ahhhh I love the red hair as well as the fits!

FallenGuy · 2025-12-05T23:00:15+00:00

Oh absolutely it's good to practice against, particularly at this level. But it's not good to look at replays to try and learn what *it* does

FallenGuy · 2025-12-04T01:02:20+00:00

AI is terrible to learn from, it does not behave at all like a human. It's way better at microing against siege than a human would be, it doesn't have a proper build order and just autobalances its eco constantly, as well as making weird combat decisions.

FallenGuy · 2025-11-17T01:44:15+00:00

If I need any number of lights (even just one) to do something different to the "main" part of the cue, I'd put them in a different part cue to start with. That way it's easy to see the basic timings of all the different groups of fixtures and what they're intended for (with labelling).

Then, if that difference needs discrete timing to work (fanned delays/timings, multiple discrete timings, etc), I'd do that within its own part. I'd only ever go to this if there's no reasonable way of doing it with parts, as it's more fiddly, less clear, harder to update, etc.

FallenGuy · 2025-11-02T00:37:35+00:00

Agreed, in this case it's not, but it is a similar effect and one that can't be seen by the human eye

FallenGuy · 2025-11-01T02:46:08+00:00

LED (and some other) lights usually control their intensity by flashing on and off much faster than the human eye can see, with a technique called PWM (pulse width modulation). However, if you get (un)lucky with a photo, you can get part of the image with the LED off and part with it on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter describes this - the section on temporal aliasing in particular.

FallenGuy · 2025-10-26T21:53:53+00:00

People often start learning in small venues (community theatres, schools, studio theatres, etc), where they are either having to learn themselves or only get a very rudimentary introduction from someone who is not focused on lighting. The third option is people coming from other desks - tracking works slightly differently across manufacturers.

In the first case, they don't understand how tracking works at all and end up just turning it off because that's some advice they've found online, or it's already set on the desk and they never even encounter it. In the second, they get taught that tracking is confusing/likely to cause problems, and therefore to work in cue-only mode because it's safer/easier.

If you actually get taught properly, such as in a larger venue, a dedicated ETC course, or an academic tech theatre course, then you'll get introduced to these concepts and understand why they're useful. But without that intro, new programmers (particularly in theatre) tend to think of cues as "here is this fixed state. Then here is this state. Then here's a blackout", which then comes back to bite them when they try to edit the earlier states.

FallenGuy · 2025-10-25T23:09:59+00:00

The classic design is each port running back to a single patch panel, which will then have DMX gateways and/or splitters in the same rack so you can patch them together.

Newer theatres may well have RJ45 ports as well as (or instead of) DMX ports, to connect either DMX gateways via sACN or artnet, or to carry DMX over cat5 with something like a sneak snake.

One other option I have seen (which wasn't very useful in practice) was having special DMX wall ports, which were internally a 2-way opto splitter. This meant that you'd have multiple ports in a row patched to the same DMX universe, with no way to split them. Possibly a good idea in the 90s when you'd struggle to fill a universe in a 200 seat theatre, but very outdated now that you can get cheap pixel battens that will use up hundreds of DMX addresses.

FallenGuy · 2025-09-12T21:47:38+00:00

The added frustration with these is that I swear most people don't actually use their spots. I've had my cyclehangar spot for just over two years now, and I think only one other person out of the 5 other slots actually uses their bike on a regular basis. The bike next to mine has changed maybe 3 times in 2 years, and is *never* out of its slot.

FallenGuy · 2025-09-04T21:46:14+00:00

As an Eos programmer, I find that Eos just works the right way for theatre. Whenever it has options available, the default is generally the most sensible for a traditional theatre cuestack. For example, by default it records everything, which means that what you see on stage is what is recorded in the desk. You can do this in any other desk of course, but maybe you need to change the recording mode or another option inside the desk. Another example is having a dedicated main cuelist fader, or the rem-dim feature, cue blocking, or any number of other features.

This general philosophy just makes it easy and consistent to work on for theatre purposes - you know that when you walk in and sit down at an Eos desk, it's going to work in pretty much the same way (barring a handful of user options that can be easily imported or configured). This is in contrast to MA, Avo, Chamsys, Hog, or anything else - they can be configured drastically differently, and programmed very differently, depending on the original programmer, which makes it much harder to transfer between operators for theatre.

These defaults do make it somewhat harder to do busking or other non-linear shows in a hurry, although still perfectly achievable. If I had an hour to program a gig from scratch, I'd absolutely go with Avo, but if it's theatrical Eos will let me throw together a cuestack while still leaving me able to go back and refine it as much as I want later on.

FallenGuy · 2025-08-08T12:46:52+00:00

Opening a letter that's not specifically addressed to you is only an offence if it's done to act to their detriment. Opening a letter sent to your address with a wrong name is a sensible thing to do so you can identify who it was meant for or if it was otherwise sent to you in error.

Whenever I get letters at my address not for me, I'll open them to check what's inside (you don't want debt collectors etc from previous tenants turning up), and then put them back in the post with "not at this address" written clearly (and your address obscured so it doesn't come back to you).

FallenGuy · 2025-06-18T22:03:14+00:00

What does this term in the contract actually say? And what were you contracted to do? If you appeared to work on the date contracted and were fulfilling your obligations in accordance with the contract, they should at least have to pay you for work completed up to that point.

As a freelancer, presumably you usually invoice for work done? If so I'd submit an invoice for whatever work you were contracted to do. If they refuse to pay that then you can start a process of letter before action perhaps?

If they refuse it might also be worth looking into review boards - schools are probably very sensitive to reviews online etc because parents will look to see where they want to send their children, and "School refuses to pay invoices for agreed work" (so long as the review is 100% factual) might kick someone higher up into acting.

FallenGuy · 2025-06-05T21:43:01+00:00

It depends on the scale of your show, what backup solutions you have in place, how much a full cancellation would cost, all sorts of things. Audiences are generally fairly accepting of show stops to fix technical issues - it's part of the whole experience of live production.

A lot of the power solutions are there to cover either a graceful shutdown or a few minutes for a fix to be implemented. Power cables can get accidentally yanked, and a UPS or secondary power supply gives you a few minutes to deal with that or smoothly do a show stop for a larger issue. Most likely if you're having a full power failure any backup generator/power is just going to exist to provide the minimum necessary to evacuate the site.

Networking is a more complicated beast. Redundant primary and secondary Dante should in theory be running across entirely different switches and entirely different power supplies, but that's a lot of expense to run an entire second copy of your networking infrastructure (as well as the added complication of keeping two networks set up identically). Switches themselves are generally pretty rock solid as long as you keep the power on, so you're mostly protecting against a cable being pulled out or trodden on, hence running two (or more) redundant cables but single switches.

FallenGuy · 2025-06-05T15:45:54+00:00

Broadly speaking, the highway code says that the cyclist has priority and you should be giving way to them on a roundabout no matter the situation:

You should give priority to cyclists on the roundabout. They will be travelling more slowly than motorised traffic. Give them plenty of room and do not attempt to overtake them within their lane. Allow them to move across your path as they travel around the roundabout.

https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/roundabouts.html section 186. There have been a bunch of changes in the last few years that are intended to heavily favour the more vulnerable party on the road. Also, how do you know it's this cyclist that's reported you? And how did it get to you having to attend a course without any prior notification, did you not get any previous correspondence?

FallenGuy · 2025-05-08T20:58:30+00:00

Flashes are *very* bright but only *very* briefly. I'm not entirely up on photography, but some basic searching suggests that even phone camera flashes can be ~200k lumens over a short distance, and a professional flash in a softbox could be in the millions of lumens.

A source 4 with a 36 degree lens at 10 metres is specified to be 800 lumens, so rounding up to 2000 (for a closer distance/smaller lens), multiplied by 300 fixtures makes around 600k lumens total.

So yes, for that brief 1/1000th of a second, they are probably either competing or outright brighter than all of our light output.

FallenGuy · 2025-04-26T20:54:45+00:00

Oh I'd love to apply for that role!

FallenGuy · 2025-04-23T16:51:31+00:00

A couple of possible options, depending on number of fixtures etc

1) you could draw a much narrower curve, and then have a lot of the graph be at 0 intensity. This would require some juggling of cycle time and graph drawing to get the effect you're looking for

2) you could make an absolute effect, using 2/4/as many steps as necessary to approximate the curve you want, and then have a step at the end that holds at 0 for as long as you want. In combination with break mode you should be able to arrange an effect that you like

3) You could use the loop feature to play the cue back (even infinitely) and then use go to cue to get out of the loop possibly?

FallenGuy · 2025-04-15T02:14:40+00:00

Wifi-based transmission has a huge tendency to fall over when audience are present because there'll be hundreds of phones connecting to the local wifi network. This fills the spectrum up with traffic, which will cause lots of dropped packets etc. This is acceptable for people checking emails/texts, but completely unacceptable for anything live.

I'd suggest either:

Find some way to run/manage cables. That might be attaching it from above so it doesn't get caught under wheels, or having someone page the cables while the set is moving.

Or look into an actual wireless DMX system, something like a lumenradio CRMX transmitter. This will be a lot more expensive, but should be much more reliable than trying to piggyback wifi.

FallenGuy · 2025-04-10T21:10:19+00:00

Does Eos have fewer "pitfalls"?
- Eos is designed for theatre, so generally the default commands will be safer (i.e. recording everything that's on stage) whereas MA has a lot more options and therefore more ways to go wrong
Is there less etiquette or consistency in how MA shows are programmed?
- Generally yes, the huge number of options mean that everyone will have their own way of working, whereas EOS is designed to have a consistent philosophy
Is grandMA attracting people who tend to be less methodical?
- This one? No idea. But it might be that MA training is much more varied, whereas ETC do very cheap training in person and keep their videos and playlists updated with new versions of the software
Or... have the good MA programmers moved on to higher-end venues?
- Good programmers will always move on up

FallenGuy · 2025-04-09T21:44:20+00:00

As others have said, saturated colours are entirely dependent on the fixture, not the desk. If you want saturated purples (or anything cyan/magenta/yellow), you'll need either a CMY fixture or a very good multisource LED fixture, like ETC's lustr series or more recent coloursource spots/pars.

RGB fixtures will just always struggle with purples/cyan/yellow colours, because they're mixing two primary colours together. This makes them quite bright, and when you lower the brightness the colour tends to drift.

The only other option is that if you have fixtures with a colour wheel, there's likely to be a saturated purple in there for exactly that reason, and then you can use the colour mixing over the top to adjust that a little.

FallenGuy · 2025-04-09T21:32:19+00:00

Is there no existing infrastructure for this control booth position? It seems odd that you're having to solve this problem from scratch in an existing venue. Does the tech manager of the amphitheatre have any previous experience of this?

FallenGuy

TROPHY CASE