Which way to hang intelligent lights

[LDsteve]

Originally Posted by bladeaudio

Got a question. I've worked with two different LDs and seen them each do this differently so I'm wondering which is considered more of a standard practice.

Say the back of the stage is "north", the audience is "south."

When hanging intelligent lights how should they face in relationship to each other? In other words, for example, if I have 2 lights that are hanging out over the crowd facing north towards the stage, and 2 lights that are hanging on an upstage bar behind the stage, should the lights on the upstage bar still be oriented "north" or should they be oriented south back towards the stage?

Doesn't this effect the programming? If the lights on the upstage bar are oriented south, wouldn't that reverse the pan direction and screw up any effects programming? Or would you never program an upstage light with a house light in the same effect? Or is this as simple as just reversing the pan direction in your console?

Curious minds want to know!

Good question and it seems like you got some good answers. I just wanted to add a bit to the conversation.

In your original post it didn't seem like you mentioned what type of intelligent light. There of course is a big difference between a moving head and a mirrored light.

While it really is a personal preference thing, the mirrored lights become somewhat obvious of how to hang them depending on what you want to hit.

The moving head light really doesn't matter as much because you have a much wider range of pan and particularly tilt. What seems to drive the choice on movers is often times the LED window and whether you want to be able to see it from the audience or not. Also moving heads often come with some type of hang suggestion such as an arrow pointing US. This at least insures your tilt will work correctly moving US to DS and not SL to SR.

One thing that does really matter when haning moving heads is that you hang them uniformly. This means if I hang one moving light on my DS truss with the LED facing the crowd, then I typically should hang all the movers on that truss in that same way.

This process helps a lot in programming and really speeds things up. FYI, most good lighting consoles will allow you to alter things like pan/tilt offsets in the patch and fix bad hangs like this but it is much easier to just hang them right the first time.

You also might want to visit a free training website we created for the stage lighting community. We have over 30 hours of training videos all about stage lighting. It's called LightingTrainer.COM, check it out if you like at http://www.lightingtrainer.com

Happy Lighting!

Steve Irwin

[josh.goldener]

well, and if the pan/tilt direction is a priority, invert them on yuor lighting console, they can be controlled backwards!