Summer Social Part 1

And so begins the day that never ends. I somewhat foolishly perhaps, decided to get up early to put the finishing touches to my housemates birthday cake. Officially it was yesterday but I didn't have time to finish it before we went out and as I wasn't going to be back until tomorrow afternoon I thought it best to get it done now.

Having finished that somewhat earlier than I had allowed for, I had enough time to put the finishing touches to the fixture profile I had been writing for Freestyler. It was the profile for the extended mode of an existing feature as all of our lights are set to the extended mode and for some reason, despite this being a very popular light, there is no default profile for it and so I decided to write one. Having never successfully done this before, I wasn't expecting it to work first time and so when I got to test it with the real thing and all but one of the channels worked I was pretty pleased with myself.

Before I got to that point however, there was the problem of wiring these lights into the existing install system. Because the lights in the room are all fairly old, they only have XLR-5 style ports on them. The newer lights we use have both three and five pin ports and so most of the time we only use the three pin sockets because we have lots of the cable for this and a very limited supply of the five pin cable. I spent a long time hunting for a 5-3 pin adapter with no success until I came across some five pin cable. I had been reluctant to use this as I was almost sure they would want it in one of the larger venues but I had no other choice.

Anyway, back to the fixture profile I wrote. All but one of the channels worked fine, the problem was that the channel that didn't work was the dimmer - which was stuck on 0 meaning I couldn't see the light rendering it useless. I couldn't work out what was wrong with it as I had copied the specification directly from the user manual. I still don't know what the problem was and without access to a light to test it on, I will never know whether it works or not! I had to then change the mode of the lights and resort to using the built in fixture profile - which thankfully worked fine. I then had a couple of hours left to waste attempting to get the shape generators to work without any success and so had to draw a random pattern of my own. Thankfully it actually looked quite nice during the event, I couldn't really see much from where I was sitting in the lighting booth which didn't help matters but everything looked fine in the end.

We opened on time at 3pm, four hours after we arrived and so left everything to go and have some lunch and a look around the outside where there was a mechanical bull and some other small stall games. I couldn't resist having a go on the bull and managed at least thirty seconds which I was very impressed with and is probably my record so far. We got back from lunch to find that the lights had all stopped moving and stopped their patterns. Confused, I hurried into the booth half expecting someone to have pinched my laptop which was supposed to be controlling them. Thankfully nothing so drastic had happened by I couldn't get the lights to respond any more despite them saying that they were receiving signal. After restarting the computer, I realised that my laptop was running on its battery rather than the mains. It was plugged in but the power had tripped and apparently the laptop doesn't power USB peripherals when it's on battery. I flipped the power back on again and everything started working... for about twenty seconds when the power tripped again. I was sure that my laptop couldn't be causing this and I eventually traced the culprit to a cable going from one of the sockets in the chain out of the window powering some of the outside lights. After about half an hour, two stage managers, the technical manager and his assistant, we traced the problem to a dodgy outside light which was unplugged and normally restored.

As far as the venue I was working in was concerned, there were no more problems throughout the night and so to counter my boredom I ended up helping at another venue. It wasn't due to open until 11pm and so with three hours to get two plasmas to show a DVD, I was pretty confident it could be managed. None of the crew assigned to that venue were particularly good with AV stuff so I offered to help them. It took a few of us almost three hours to finally get it working. First off, I was told that they had a laptop with S-Video out and if I could help them get the right cables. Sounded simple enough except I only managed to find 1/5 of the bits needed. When I got to their venue, I found out that the laptop they had didn't even have S-Video out in the first place only VGA. VGA is much more difficult to split into two unlike most other cables which is a nuisance. VGA splitters are usually 'active' in that they are powered boxes with some intelligence rather than simply manipulating the connection. We had none of these splitters spare and so the hunt began for alternative solutions.

We eventually managed to convince the technical manager to give us another laptop and we had a host of things to try on that to get the two screens working. First up was using VNC to mirror the screens across the network - except he couldn't remember the administrator password to the computers and so we couldn't install anything. Next up was the windows built in remote desktop software which amazingly worked until we found out that it logged the current user off when you connected - no good if both laptops needed to be showing the same image. How about remote assistance we thought, except this wouldn't allow full screen. We were quickly running out of options and it didn't help that only one of the two PC's had the correct codec's to play DVDs in the first place. This lead us to downloading VLC portable which we knew needed no installation. This was fine for playing DVDs and so we attempted to set up network streaming so that the pictures would be synced or at least within a few milliseconds of each other. Another dead end, this simply wouldn't work for whatever reason and so the solution we were left with was to create a virtual image of the DVD to play through VLC which thankfully supports reading directly from an ISO - which we had to create on one of the crew's PC as we couldn't install powerISO! We were fast approaching opening time at this point and after the first attempt to press play on both machines at the same time failed because one was reading from the hard disk and the other from the DVD we had to waste another five minutes copying the ISO file and portable VLC to the other computer to try and re sync them. Finally, we got them working just as the DJ entered to start setting up his equipment. Apparently by the end of the evening, the screens were about twenty seconds out of sync with each other but I couldn't care less by this point, and I doubt anyone noticed anyway.

The event had come to an end and it was time for the punters to go home and for us to start packing up. Our venue didn't take very long as there wasn't much to do and so we went to help the largest venue - the Octagon - pack there stuff up. About thirty crew were there by the end and so this got done very quickly. Next stop was Bar One for the staff party where we received chips and chilli and a pack of four beers each. The food was pretty awful but well received and about half an hour later we headed to the park.

We took with us about eleven crates of booze of which a lot of it went to good use in beer fights and engineering work as you can see in the picture. Several more cans were added to the top of that until it was taller than all of us and we couldn't reach to add more. In a suitable fashion, it was then rammed into and toppled. It's amazing how many games you can come up with for using cans of lager when you are desperately bored and between that and the sea-saw swing, we were kept amused until 11am when the union re-opened for breakfast. As that is very much 'tomorrow' I shall leave the rest of this story for tomorrow's post. As it stands, I think this post wins the prize for longest post yet at over 1500 words!