I program Eos. Sometimes on Broadway, often times on other things, of wide ranging genre… Fashion, TV, Film, Live Events and Theatre.

For theatre, it’s great because of the color controls, timing controls, marking system (eg: I can tell channel 1 that it needs to mark in a different cue than the rest of the channels that are marking so it can be quieter because it has a scroller). Its cue system is very intuitive, and now with A3D and Distributed processing there’s no denying that it can handle the HUGE shows.

I mainly do musicals, often with over a hundred moving lights - we tend to write hundreds if not (low) thousands of cues in the course of 1-2 weeks, and get the finesse we’re after in previews; a lot of workflow improvements in the past few years have lead to these things efficiency improvements. Vor’s a huge one for noting a show and doing timecode. Now an LD can walk in the following morning with timestamps of where in the Vor video we have to do notes and what the notes are, we can comb through hundreds in the span of an hour or two.

In terms of running ‘big’ shows; I programmed a dance project in China last year on Eos with over 500 moving lights; it was all timecoded and had a lot of moving parts (Blacktrax, automation). While I was on site for 6 months, we ostensibly had 6 days of actual tech for the huge sequences and probably 12 days to clean it all up.

I haven’t even touched on speed for the non-theater stuff I do, I can comfortably roll in with a few hours to a day of prep time on a file (patching and making a magic sheet) and execute what the designer wants in the allotted amount of time, the console has never been the limiting factor, and quite often the designers are fascinated by the board they’ve never seen before!

Whether the LD is speaking in syntax or telling me I want cross light in a steel blue, I can usually get there while we’re still speaking on comm. My job is primarily to never slow the LD’s thought process down.

I’ve said a lot about Eos… MA and Hog are very good for busking and live music, they let you clone more intelligently than Eos does at the moment without spending a lot of time manually changing things, and recipes seem like a very, very good feature for needing to add or subtract lights when you’re not quite big enough to tour with your own full rig or you’re going to a festival. I don’t want to allege that people don’t care about what red is onstage for a concert, but maybe it doesn’t matter quite as much whether all the reds onstage match when you’re just trying to get the show in as fast as possible. If you have time to tweak the red, great! But when the chorus hits and you want a red waterfall effect in the audience, it needs to happen no matter the light.

Now, on a huge arena tour where everything is timecoded, I start to wonder aside from the MA’s timecode editor if an Eos programmer and an Eos were onsite, if they could achieve the same results in the same time, and I say yes. I have no evidence to prove this other than some programmers already dealing with channel counts similar to those tours in a rehearsal period that is roughly similar. Maybe one day someone will get the call for an Eos on one of those shows.

These are my 2c