PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — Since it opened in 1996, Lush has been a popular Irish dance destination. The 2,000-capacity club, part of the Kelly’s entertainment complex, which includes a hotel, restaurants, bars and holiday chalets, raised its roof and invested $2.15 million in new technology, including a variety of gear from PR Lighting. Peter Wilson, managing director, wanted technology specialists Light & Sound FX (LSFX) to amp up the visuals for the club’s resident VJs, and LSFX proprietor Darren Gardiner responded with LED displays. The centerpiece is a high-resolution Marveon LED screen P12 Indoor, with 12mm pixel pitch, which serves as the main display above the stage. There’s also a 37.5mm V-LED Spell running messages and graphic FX at high level around the dance floor.
In the foyer, another V-LED Spell curtain — each panel tension-hung on a steel wire — is fed from its own dedicated content player to advertise upcoming attractions. MilTec (UK) Ltd, PR Lighting’s distributor for the U.K. and Ireland, provided all displays.
In terms of beam effects, 24 PR Lighting Pilot 250 moving heads light up the suspended Litec truss. With its newly-raised roof, these have been set higher over the dance floor than the fixtures used previously.
“We’ve been using PR Lighting for six years and we’ve had no reliability issues whatsoever,” said LSFX’s Gardiner. “Programming of the two displays with custom visuals was straightforward,” Gardiner added, giving kudos to the support given by David Faulkes and Graham Gosden at MilTec (UK) Ltd.
The V-LED Spell works as both an outdoor and indoor background lighting effect, and as an advertising medium as well. It displays video synchronously and asynchronously with 16.7 million colors, with the advantage of being thin, transparent, waterproof and easy to rig. At Lush, the banner runs away from the circular DJ/VJ booth to provide a 528-by-33-pixel scroll at 37.5mm pixel pitch on a display that runs to almost 20 meters in length.
The Marveon P12, meanwhile, displays images in near-broadcast quality. Configured with five-by-three panels, and with 480 x 192 pixel resolution, the display measures close to 20 feet in width and 15 feet in height.
Working with different aspect ratios, Mark Coulsdon, LSFX’s IT/LED screen specialist, has given Lush VJs including Christian and Shakinda and Seamus Loughrey the ability to produce widescreen effects by configuring a Windows XP Professional computer as the central hub, with 4Gb of memory and Core 2 Quad processing. This is fitted with Matrox M9140 (quad) and M9120 (2-head) graphics cards — providing a total of six dedicated output heads simultaneously for layered effects with no loss of resolution.
“A minimum of three layers will enable us to do a scroll, such as ‘Lush,’ or mix two visuals together from the booth,” said Coulsdon. “But we have up to eight layers, with more on the ArKAos.
“Any VJ can bring in his own content and plug into the Edirol V8 to achieve eight-channel mixing, and that feeds through to the computer,” Coulsdon added. “The camera control also feeds into the Edirol, with all DVI feeds converted to Cat5.”
VJs without their own laptop and content cards can also work off the resident ArKAos Grand VJ media server with effects library. It handles all the pixel mapping of the PR Lighting V-LED displays and delivery.
Lush’s Wilson noted that the venue has attracted well-known DJs, including James Zabiela, Pete Tong and John Digweed, as well as live bands like the Undertones. But he adds that the biggest cheer each night is when the PR Lighting banner suddenly bursts into life for the first time around 10:30 p.m., as the crowd are treated to a NASA-type Test/Start-up procedure from the voice booming through the PA.
For more information, please visit www.pr-lighting.com.
