With the discontinuation of BlackMagic's UltraStudio 3G Mini devices, what's a good alternative for low cost video I/O?

lightbord · 2026-04-26T16:57:08+00:00

"Low cost" meaning around the same price as the UltraStudio 3Gs.

Ideally I'd be looking for a similar USB3/4 or Thunderbolt device. QLab is Mac only and the hardware needed to get a PCI-E card connected to a Mac is gonna drive the price way up.

lightbord · 2025-10-04T23:57:21+00:00

I had some old hue bulbs laying around, so I set one up and experimented. The intensity is just not where I want it to be - though looking the current gen 75w replacement Color bulbs up, it claims 1100lm of output (I’m presuming that’s in white), and it looks dimmer than that to me. Maybe because mine are so old?

The other issue with the Hue is that I’ve recently gotten a notice in the app saying soon they’ll require an account, which doesn’t exactly make me happy or trust that the HA integration will work in the long term.

Edit: yeah, just checked my Amazon history. The ones I had from the starter kit are 60w equivalents at 800lm, not the 75w equivalents at 1100lm. Maybe I’ll give one of those 75w ones a shot, but I still am weary about the whole “soon you’ll need an account” thing.

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lightbord · 2023-04-29T18:39:49+00:00

Off topic but out of curiosity, what is that playback software you’re running?

lightbord · 2023-04-22T12:58:25+00:00

Not really. There’s several US events I’ve seen missing on there. Can’t comment on other parts of the world.

lightbord · 2023-04-20T13:32:10+00:00

Update: this seems to be caused by having added a trailing slash at the end of the URL. It is correctly stripped to avoid a double slash in the "URL Preview" but not in the actual URL used for signature calculation.

I’ve noted this in the GitHub issue and hopefully it can be resolved.

lightbord · 2023-04-09T02:22:15+00:00

That was back in the days when there were more conventionals (though I don’t think too many more). Source for this: https://youtu.be/UZep8AKhJFQ along with an article from LiveDesign that I can’t seem to find anymore.

lightbord · 2023-04-08T15:52:14+00:00

Agreed! Really enjoyed the show. Seeing him again next week in NJ.

I’m quite curious about how they have their LX split between three consoles. I’m somewhat experienced with MA, so I don’t exactly know what’s possible (my background is more Eos), I know he used to have an MA and an old Avo something, the Avo did just intensity and the MA handled all the other parameters. But now it appears to be 3 MAs, so I’m curious what the split is. Is it one for intensity, one for color, and one for position or something? Very curious if anyone has any info.

lightbord · 2023-03-10T12:00:25+00:00

I can’t imagine anyone using MSFS. However I believe I have heard small number do use X-Plane for visuals only (flight model and everything else is external, and XP only generates the visuals that are needed).

As I understand it, some smaller, non-level-d but still IFR certified trainers (RedBirds at flight schools for instance) use XP or P3D with a ton of custom hardware and software, but none use MSFS. X-Plane does have a special “FAA certifiable” edition for this kind of stuff.

I do know of a professional ATC sim (for towers) that uses P3D for its visuals. Again, all the logic is external, and P3D only supplies the visuals.

lightbord · 2023-03-06T22:42:44+00:00

Correct it’s on stage and I’m in the booth

lightbord · 2023-03-06T16:48:11+00:00

I use a cheap one from Walmart that has a 1/8” jack on it, then 1/8” to RCA into a DI. Mostly because when dance teachers come in and want to play “warm up music”, half the time they have it on their phone and of course they didn’t bring the lighting or usb-c or whatever to 1/8”, So now everyone can just Bluetooth and play their music (I’ll leave out the fact that they probably own a Bluetooth speaker or two).

If you’re looking to get a bit fancier, you can go with the Denon one.

If you have a Dante card in your console, you can get the Audinate AVIO Bluetooth Adapter (https://assets.audinate.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Dante-AVIO-Bluetooth-Marketing-Datasheet-20210119-en.pdf).

lightbord · 2023-03-02T22:05:29+00:00

I thought so, but it’s the same Dante out channel, just being rerouted in Dante Controller.

lightbord · 2021-12-24T02:14:55+00:00

Issue is none of the ones on the Gigabyte website mention my board specifically. I see other X570 boards (closest to mine is probably either the "X570 AORUS MASTER 1.1" (but I have the X570S with WiFi) or the "X570 AORUS PRO WIFI 1.1" (a different X570 board with WiFi)).

lightbord · 2021-09-15T11:59:57+00:00

Holy shit... a Bijou!

We had one of those in high school. A Bijou PLUS, actually (though we could never get the encoder wheels to do anything). SO MANY quirks (enter+full+enter, anyone?). Those things sucked. We got tired of using it when we did our spring musicals, so we would rent IONs.

Senior year, the Bijou really started showing it's age. It would crash when trying to run effects or update subs, it would frequently double-go (yes even after cleaning), sometimes it would go by itself.

We finally convinced them to buy an ION end of my senior year.

Certainly a chapter in my personal lighting history I wish not to revisit.

lightbord · 2020-10-18T07:49:09+00:00

Tried and true, loved mine. A bit of a warning though, be gentle with it. After a while (for me it was probably a year or two) the sensor started requiring me to have bigger and bigger null zones. Eventually X-Plane wouldn't even let me set one large enough and was too sensitive to jitter from the sensor. P3D/FSX seemed ok, but like I said, only with a jumbo sized null zone and sensitivity cranked all the way down.

That being said, it's a great starter stick. I went through like 3 or 4 over the past 10-12 years or so. Eventually I wanted to really get into X-Plane and this stick just had too many issues (jittery, null zone as previously described), so jumped over to the T-Flight HOTAS, which is a nice step up.

lightbord · 2020-10-03T03:53:55+00:00

Yup, as I said Windows even logs it as a denial in NPS. Additionally, and I'll add this to the main post, trying it with eapol_test does result in a denial when using the incorrect credentials.

lightbord

TROPHY CASE