NEWS: SPECIAL REPORT
ETC lights up Media City When seeing is believing, getting solutions directly in front of customers is essential. ETC’s new Media City location looks to make that a reality, as Stuart Todd takes a tour FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS BACK IN 1975, a then 18-year-old Fred Foster began a journey into entertainment technology that would create an indelible legacy continuing to live on long after Fred’s time had passed. That culmination of continued determination and hard work ethic was realised with the opening of ETC’s new purpose-built studio. Sitting slap-bang in the middle of Dubai Media City, ETC Dubai – The Studio offers an unassuming entrance that gives way to all manner of bespoke product demonstration zones, training facilities, meeting spaces and smart design quirks. It’s a not so subtle nod to the company’s expertise and standing in the industry, but also offers probably the largest single collection of ETC and High End Systems (HES) products outside of the company’s home US market. Upon arriving at the reception area to the studio, I was given two clear options: left would take me to the inner reception area and meeting space, while the path to my right would take me to a high-ceilinged space dubbed the Black Box – so called due to the blacked-out floors, walls and ceiling so as to optimise the lighting that would be cast onto it. On the left-hand side of the room, two architectural control systems from ETC are on display – a Paradigm and Echo – while over on the right side of the room, an HES Road Hog 4 console was being expertly demonstrated in conjunction with HES TurboRay, SolaWash 1000, SolaFrame 1000 Ultra Bright and SolaFrame 1000 High CRI fixtures. In the middle of the room on a low-level truss was an array of ETC’s prized
lighting solutions being controlled via an Ion XE20. These included ETC Source Four LED Series 2 Profile, ColorSource Spot and Relevé Spot moving heads. At the far end of the Black Box, there was a great deal of attention being paid to a Gio@5 controller which was controlling the
Desire D60 house lights together with three HES SolaFrame 750s by way of ETC’s new Augment3d software. This was especially interesting as the 3D modelling software was able to interact with most other lighting manufacturers’ hardware and would in turn offer an increased amount of control over an
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26 PRO AVL MEA Januar y–Februar y 2020
assembled lighting installation. As the name suggests, the program draws on augmented reality in order to accurately reproduce the stage or space that you are working within. It’s intended to be flawlessly used in conjunction with an Eos console but other options are available and more are in the