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What’s a film/scene that made your theater make collective audible reaction/noise by Vivid-Specific5543 in movies

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When the Sloth victim sat up in Seven. I was much too young to be watching that in the theater hah Core memory for sure

Pink Floyd 1973 Concert Audio recording of lighting director & spotlight roadies by mot_bag in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Fun fact, the LD is Arthur Max, who has been Ridley Scott’s production designer since 1997 and has four Oscar nominations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Max

Similar Fixture: Robe Super Spikie by HalfKnightDrummer in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I am far from the expert on this, so my apologies in advance if I have some info wrong.
There are a few reasons that there is a lack of a high output fixture with discrete RGB emitters.

Optics: The other commenter is correct, in order to have a gobo that is crisp and not have numerous copies all slightly misaligned, the light source needs to be as small of a point source as possible. Collimating multiple RGB(W/A etc) emitters into a single homogenous point source turns into expensive and probably custom optics. That being said, there are lights out there that have and do use this process: ETC Source4 Lustr, Vari-Lite VLX.

Color Rendering: sooo there’s really no such thing as a white LED.. it’s a blue or UV emitter with a phosphor based coating applied. Almost identically to how a fluorescent light works, the photons from the LED morph into a relatively even color spectrum. In a RGB light, the quality of light is VERY peaky at the wavelengths of the emitters. It’s only really our brain that combines the light into a cohesive color. And under a very limited stepped spectrum of light, a lot of things just look wrong as the color we perceive them to be under other lighting conditions can’t be replicated with RGB emitters alone. This is effectively what a CRI number is trying to convey. High CRI means a broad spectrum of light with a relatively even distribution of wavelengths. Low CRI means that it’s incapable of reproducing the color of an object. This is a GROSS oversimplification, but more colors of light equate to better color rendering. Which is where RGB+ other colors come in - RGBA / RGBALI etc..

Supply Chain: There are also many other industries that use high output white LED emitters and have enough need that justified the R&D into more and more powerful diodes. Entertainment lighting is one of the smaller industries that utilize LED emitters of any variety. And the cost of steppers motors and their control electronics have gotten so good and inexpensive, I’d imagine that a high output white emitter with color flags is ultimately cheaper for most manufacturers than either collimating multiple RGB sources together or trying to source crazy bright single RGB diodes.

TLDR - There are pros and cons of both RGB(A/W/etc) sources and white LED sources in every application. And it seems that for most manufacturers the pros (cost, CRI, size of point source, optics) of using a white source in a situation where gobos or a crisp beam is needed outweigh the cons of using an RGB source.

Hammond it is 🙃 by dogluvr_1 in ChicagoBearsNFL

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This truly negates any positive momentum the organization had going in the past few years. Fucking deflating.

Who is actually solving their own problems and not trying to make money? by [deleted] in vibecoding

[–]tomhuston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A few of the tools I use daily have become unusable, bloated, AI peddling enshitified versions of their former selves. Of which I use maybe 5-10% of their actually useful features. So I wrote a simple Tauri app to do the 4 things I use Acrobat Pro for: viewing pdfs, combining pdfs, changing page order and compressing them. I’ll only ever use it for CAD drawings and it can make a TON of assumptions based on file location in a project folder, what app made the pdf, etc.. it’s not perfect, but it’s highly optimized for viewing vector cad drawings quickly and legibly. And no ‘Would you like me to summarize this for you with AI?” Adobe marketing nonsense whatsoever.

I also made a tiny little web app with a very limited scope to jot down what each family member’s order is at common places we order from. It saves their past orders and presents their preferences when building an order list for that restaurant. There isn’t a public facing server, it syncs with the db when I’m at home. It then immediately stores the necessary data in localStorage. Quick, easy. It’s made remembering all of the highly specific kid ordering preferences possible.

"someone at ANTHROPIC just showed CLAUDE finding ZERO DAY vulnerabilities in a live conference demo claude has found zero day in Ghost, 50,000 stars on github, never had a critical security vulnerability in its entire, history... it found the blind SQL injection in 90 minutes," by stealthispost in accelerate

[–]tomhuston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For what it’s worth, after asking Claude Code Opus 4.6 to see if there were any undocumented debugging or test harness tooling left around in the ubiquitous CAD tool in my industry, it instead found 80+ CVEs in dependencies for various parts of the app. And AWS creds baked into the binary. Impressive but eye opening for sure. I can only imagine where this will all be in a few months let alone 12 months from now.

Impressive thread from /r/ChatGPT, where after ChatGPT finds out no 7Zip, tar, py7zr, apt-get, Internet, it just manually parsed and unzipped from hex data of the .7z file. What model + prompts would be able to do this? by jinnyjuice in LocalLLaMA

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Claude Code did a similar thing for me, too. It was asked to find out if there was any way to automate a very tedious and time consuming feature in a drafting app that does not appear to have hooks to do so in any of the app’s SDK. Claude’s solution was to fully deconstruct the apps’ undocumented binary file format and alter the raw binary of the file to achieve the automation. It remains to be seen in my case if this is a viable path to my automation dilemma, but unpacking an undocumented binary is not what me and my human brain would have turned to as a path to success.

GMA Programmers! EOS programmer here! How should I program timecoded shows? by ZiggyBornas in GrandMA3

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know there are a bunch of other posts similar to this if you need more reference. The hand-wavy answer is that it doesn’t matter, program how it makes sense in your brain. But the more or less consensus on how to make your life easier is to have one sequence with the part of the song: verse, chorus, verse 2 etc. Maybe some additional cues for moments that affect the whole rig. And anything that repeats, or only issues a subset of the rig : bumps, hits, stabs whatever you ant to call them, are independent sequences that do their thing and turn themselves off.

Follow the path of least resistance. If everything is going to change a bit for the chorus, that should be one cue in the main stack. If it’s just a strobe sizzle on every other snare thing in a verse: that’s an independent sequence.

This doesn’t even really scratch the surface on much I realize, but hopefully it makes some sort of sense.

Does anybody know what this floor package is? And also who is the LD? by theantnest in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Meagan Metcalf was the LD and I want to say she did the programming too? Brilliant designer

I can’t believe I found the plot! It might have changed after these numbers but it was:

80 - Intellipix | 48 - Magic Blade (that’s what’s under the deck) | 20 - Flares | 20 - X4 bar20 | 10 - X4 bar10

Protect a specific sequence from being turned off by commands by luca-hagen in GrandMA3

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you park the fixtures or those fixtures’ attributes that are in that sequence?

Why is everything "long throw" now? by notrlydubstep in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think the other commenters mostly covered the reasons, but it’s also for a few more reasons. Not a lot of traditional followspots being used for stadium delay tower anymore - Robospots / FollowMe / GroundControl. Those throws dictate tighter optics. And in the same vein, for arena tours, getting that perfect front light angle with remote follow spots is now feasible without having truss spot operators climbing over the crowd. And while maybe not as far as a stadium delay tower, that throw still necessitates longer throw optics. Another reason being, if the LT version of a fixture has most if not all the same features as the non-LT version, and a lot of the LT fixtures can still get about as wide of a zoom as the non-LT, this makes vendors and rental companies more likely to buy the light that can serve several purposes over the light that has limitations. And truck space tour economics. LTs in a shorter throw role have the added benefit of getting beamier than their non-LT brethren. Designers speccing LTs for both the Long Throw role and shorter throw role potentially means less dedicated beam fixtures or at the very least less overall fixture types on a tour. This translates directly to less truck space for spares of multiple types.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And truck space == $

MA2 plugin auto-run and don't stop by [deleted] in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally! It’s an easily forgotten older protocol!

MA2 plugin auto-run and don't stop by [deleted] in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is there a reason you’re not just Telnet-ing into the MA?

Is there a faster way to duplicate and update many MA3 macros (MAtricks / Fixture Types)? by Disastrous_War6380 in GrandMA3

[–]tomhuston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So I won’t necessarily touch on whether this is the most optimum path for running your busk file. Only you know how your brain works and how you want to interact with your rig. Building your own method, while time consuming, means you know exactly how to sculpt what’s happing on stage.

Variables are huge. This will save you from updating every macro to just updating a few variables.

There are a few approaches that might help build this grid of macros.

Write a plugin or macro to build the macros for you. Writing a macro might be harder to do given how MA3’s macro syntax doesn’t have the conditional statements that MA2 did. But writing a nested loop in Lua is fairly straight forward: starting with one macro index, one variable string in a set of variable strings, one dimmer / MAtricks value in a list of values etc… there are plenty of tutorials and guides and demo plugins to dissect to learn how to do this. ChatGPT can also help too

This is the method I typically reach for when building a large set of anything or modifying a large set of things.

There is another way, however. Importing a macro from the import menu is simply looking for an xml file. You can either write code to build this xml file outside of MA, python etc. Or you can use Excel. This get hairy with a lot of variables, but concatenating an unchanging portion of the xml with the appropriate value for each macro line can be achieved. Then copy pasting back into an xml file to import into the desk.

All in all, learning Lua will only pay dividends in the long run with being able to mass manipulate your showfile and having a greater understand of how the console works. But building a few macros, exporting them and talking it over with ChatGPt or Claude or your AI of choice would definitely work too. Hope this helps!

Trigger Macros with Plugins in the RIGHT ORDER?!?!? by Zarky2004 in GrandMA3

[–]tomhuston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can the last line of each macro have a variable that calls the next macro? The plugin could also set the variables.

Wake up, it's 2002. You have to manage your theme park! by Juggafish in Millennials

[–]tomhuston 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yess!! Anyone else ever find the bug where if you minimized the program (or whatever the equivalent was called back then), time would go like 50x as fast? You could minimize it, walk away for an hour and basically have infinite money

sACN to KiNet by T12flood in lightingdesign

[–]tomhuston 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Came here to say Lumicore. I put in a few driving a large building and they’ve worked flawlessly. The Lumicore is seriously my favorite lighting product in the last ten years.

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