Product Spotlight

Whirlwind, Inc. is a name well known to anybody in the music industry, with good reason. Makers of some of most ubiquitous and long-lasting electronic infrastructure equipment you’re likely to find on the road, they’ve been a leader in creating high-quality audio interfaces for more than 40 years.

Are you LOOKing for an atmospheric effect machine? What do you need? A hazer, fogger, low fog generator, battery powered fogger, or miniature fogger? Whatever your needs are, Look Solutions has it covered. Let’s take a quick look at three of the 10 units available from Look Solutions.

The idea of curving video walls is nothing new. I have watched as video crews spend countless hours trying to rig straight pieces of video tiles at angles, usually in a vain attempt to get a seamless, curved video wall. Techs spent the day messing around with this game of millimeters by using rulers, changing rigging, nudging pieces a hair, adding clamps, and eventually they would kind of achieve what they were looking for. Now I’m not saying this was bad, but I always wondered why there wasn’t an easy way to do this. Couldn’t someone physically engineer a product to do this without the rigmarole? Well, apparently so.

Mountain Productions, the legendary staging and rigging company based in Wilkes-Barre, PA, has come up with the ultimate road case designed for housing chain hoists. Being a certified CM dealer brought around the necessity for a stronger case. According to Mountain Productions’ Marty Wesstrom, “the average motor case takes quite a beating on the road and obviously does not have a long life. We designed this specific road case with the idea that hopefully it will be the last one you will ever need to transfer your motors and other products.”

Years ago, I was afraid of controlling my lights on a PC Based lighting controller. Recently, like in the past six months, I have come to fall in love with them. Looking back on why I was so nervous about using them was the fact that almost everything had to be done with a mouse, or by remembering those awkward keyboard shortcuts. There is something about having a console’s control surface in front of you.

One of the hottest technologies in the current visual toolkit is one that has been around for a while in our business — lasers. Lasers make a huge impact on productions, with beams of light dancing over the audience that cannot be produced by any other sort of light source on the market. Lasers are available in a wide range of offerings, from simple DJ effects to elaborate systems that require their own programmer and/or operator. For years, lighting designers have been at the mercy of translating their vision of what they want lasers to do to the laser programmer. The LD handled the lighting rig while a separate controller operated the lasers.

Our industry isn’t the only one where LEDs are making a big impact. Retail, commercial and even residential lighting designers and installers are all moving toward LEDs and away from traditional bulbs. Even with their higher upfront costs, LED fixtures are making inroads in nearly every kind of lighting application in markets all over the world.

Each year, mobile stages made by Stageline, a staging manufacturer based in L’Assomption, Quebec, get used at 15,000 events in 45 countries around the world. That number is likely to increase this year as Stageline rolls out its SAM750 — the largest hydraulic mobile stage in the world. First used at the 2013 Osheaga festival in Montreal last August, the SAM750 made its U.S. debut at Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) New York over Memorial Day weekend.

Lifting stage elements, truss, speakers… our industry requires some serious lifting power it order to make our rigs work.  Stagemaker hoists have a lineage that dates back decades, to when Verlinde of France launched the first inverted electric powered hoist, the Litachain L104, in 1975. Verlinde then launched the Litachain L5 and L10 range in 1990. In 1998, after the venerable French company (est. 1858) was acquired by Konecranes Plc in 1993, the Stagemaker SM series of hoists came to market.

With all of the various types of connectors and power requirements needed for different types of devices, power distro units for the live entertainment industry need to be flexible in their configuration. A standardized configuration will never be ideal for every situation. Whirlwind recognizes this, and has developed a new line of power distros aimed at getting the right power and connection type to your devices: the Power Link Series.

PRG’s RH+A division now offers the Ultraviolet series of lights, including the UV Bullet and UV Wash. While developed with architectural lighting installations in mind, these fixtures can also be used for entertainment industry applications, ranging from amusement parks and haunted house attractions to “cosmic” bowling and nightclub dance floors.

For floor-mounted fixtures, one of the last things we think of is the actual floor base we typically use — until we get to the gig and notice that it’s missing. I can’t count the number of times floor bases have missed the truck! It can be an honest mistake, of course. But someone back at the shop is going to get an earful. To help keep that mistake from happening, Apollo Design Technology has come up with a simple, lightweight and portable design for a highly stable floor stand that can easily fit into any cramped road case, the Hoop Stand.