14 IN DISCUSSION
AVOLITES: THE LIGHTING AND VIDEO EVOLUTION Stephen Baird-Smith, Avolites’ Sales Manager, discusses the company’s ‘ear to the ground’ philosophy and how that has secured its pole position in developing the future merging of lighting and video design and control. Eight years ago, Avolites was the only lighting control console manufacturer to recognise, pioneer and champion the synergy between entertainment lighting and video design through product development. Well respected and loved for its intuitive interface consoles, networking capability and touring dimmers, in 2011 Avolites added the sophisticated Ai media server to its portfolio of products. The mission: to create a seamless interface and common language for video designers, lighting designers and programmers alike. This year sees a further evolution and at Prolight+Sound 2018 Avolites launched its new light and video integration feature set, Synergy. The complexion of creative content of shows, be it lighting, sound, set design or video, is evolving. Video content increasingly drives a production’s visual aspect, while the development of sophisticated new light fixtures, projectors, cameras, means that control system developers have to work hard to keep pace. There is a complex relationship between lighting design and video design. Bands
• Above Stephen BairdSmith, Sales Manager at Avolites.
and audiences relate well to video; they’re used to engaging with this kind of content. However, even the most sophisticated video content can induce passive watching if it is not supported by dynamic key or mood lighting. The most successful show designs are multi-layered combinations of set, lighting and video and when the lighting and video content work together they can pull the video out from its two-dimensional space into three, making for a richer, more engaging, sometimes highly interactive experience for artists and audiences. The challenge lies in the translation of a show’s original video content from the rectangular confines of a computer monitor to the real-life application on stage. Increasingly, content has to be created to work across both LED videomapping and projection-mapping outputs, as well as various shapes and sizes of screens. With the advent of intelligent LED lighting fixtures, it also has the potential to be mapped across a production’s lighting elements as well - as you can imagine, it can get complex! That’s why visualisation www.mondodr.com
is a big part of the Avolites product design workflow. It allows creators to move away from the four corners of the screen into a much bigger, three-dimensional space. In fact, Avolites’ latest development, Synergy, evolved from studying the workflow of designers as a whole - not just the lighting designer and the video designer, but the content creator and set design process. Avolites’ ultimate holy grail is to bring all these disciplines together in one unified workspace. We see a situation where there’s a control surface, which is as adept with video and cameras as it is with lights, and where the workflow is the same whatever you’re controlling. Ultimately, that should empower people to do more. You may still need a media server or lighting specialist on the gig, but have control from one unified surface or the same consoles on the same network. Although that may sound simple, I can assure you it’s not! Even for a company like Avolites, which has both media server and lighting console R&D teams in the same building, it has been challenging to
