Forget motor control from now on. I want to shoot balls of fire into the air as the fingers fly on the keyboard.
Yeah, entertainment technology is fun, isn't it
There are three "generations" of rock and roll lighting.
The first was incandescent lights, known as parcans - basically a glorified bean can with a PAR64 1K lamp in them. Hang up lots of them with pretty colour filters ("gels") on the front, and you have beutiful colours. Need lots of power though, rigs with over a hundred cans are common, so you are talking about many KW, verging up to significant fractions of a MW. Somewhere there will be racks of dimmers ("dimmer world"), and thre iwll be a lot of copper wire, mostly in the form of socapex cables, which can handle six channels of power.
Check out any video from the 80s (eg Queen) to see this tyope of lighting, still very popular today.
Then in 80s the Vari*lite company patented (and rented!) the moving light; these had a discharge lamp source, integrated filtering using dischroic filters, and they could move. First used by Genisis (yes, the 80s progressive rock group). The area is now dominated by Martin. When you see beams of light moving through the air, then thats a "mover". The discharge lamps on this type of fixture run continuously, using mechanical shutters. And some of these lights actually have a traditional tngstan light source rather than a discharge lamp, so they dim like a parcan.
The third generation of entertainment lighting is LEDs. Over the last couple of decades LEDs have gone from being something one used as a indicator light to being the building block for many types of useful lighting instrument.
One can now get LED lights in many formats, from things that look just like parcans, to strips, and to the giant video screens are LED powered. There are movers with LED light sources.
A reltively recent innovation is LED powered "proper" lighting instruments, that replace traditional stagelights, and that have a colour output that is "white" and can be used with gels like an ordinary stagelight.
Another recent great innovation is tri-colour LEDs, where one LED has multiple LEDs within it, so that it produces a single colour; prior to this fixtures had red, green and blue LEDs seperately, and this leads to issues like colour fringing.
LEDS threaten to revolutionise entertainment lighting; some folks reckon in 25 years we'll be using nothing else. Perhapos I'll be around to sere that.
Theres as few other sorts of lights used,like strobes and follow-spots.
Besides lighting, there are special effects (smoke, haze, pyrotechnics), animation (moving stuff around using motive power rather than human shoving), sound, flying (of stuff, and people) and many other technical branches of entertainment technology.
Yep, I love this stuff
