White Light provides new network infrastructures for lighting at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Opera House and the Guildhall School
Leading entertainment lighting supplier White Light has recently provided new Ethernet lighting infrastructures at a number of leading London venues, dramatically increasing the versatility of their lighting control systems.
At the Royal Albert Hall, White Light were tasked with providing reliable DMX distribution to the dimmer room and lighting trusses to make life easier for the Hall’s staff and for visiting companies. White Light’s Roger Hennigan notes that “the Hall has a Jands Vista console which outputs lighting data as ArtNet. We therefore designed a system that used Ethernet to distribute ArtNet around the building, and then ArtNet to DMX nodes to convert the ArtNet back to standard DMX locally wherever it was required.” The final system uses products from network specialists ELC: truss-mount dmXLAN Node 1 power-over-Ethernet ArtNet nodes for each of the six main lighting trusses, a dmXLAN node 4 in the dimmer room for dimmer DMX output, dmXLAN Node 2s for DMX output on the stage gallery or in other locations as required by particular shows, and a dmXLAN Node 8 in the control room allowing non-ArtNet visiting consoles to inject DMX into the system.
Connecting the nodes together is a network system using a combination of Cat5e cable and fibre optic links. “We went to fibre for some of the runs because they were over the length limit of Cat5e,” Hennigan notes. “For these runs we used the new Neutric Opticon connectors and cables to provide a reliable and robust connector for the desk connection positions; all of the Cat5 outlets use the proven Ethercon connectors.”
The new system was up and running by mid-September 2008 and has been running reliably since then. “The Royal Albert Hall crew have commented on the ease of use and ‘it just works’ nature of their new network,” Hennigan notes.
Optical fibre is also a core feature of the upgrade work carried out at the Royal Opera House: there White Light have installed a fibre optic backbone to augment the theatre’s existing Cat5e network and to prepare the theatre for its switchover to ETC’s Eos control system, which White Light are supplying to replace the Obsession consoles which have been running the Royal Opera House’s lighting since the theatre’s 1999 refurbishment. “The new system links the lighting control office and the Vision pre-visualisation suite to the network via fibre links, and adds a file server allowing show files to live on the network. We also added power-over-Ethernet switches to the dimmer rooms, allowing power-over-Ethernet nodes to be added to the overhead lighting positions at a later date.” Currently running ETC Net 2, the system will switch to Net 3 when the Obsession retires in August 2009.
At the Guildhall School, it is again a console change which has prompted a network upgrade: the school has replaced its Strand 500-series console with an ETC Eos. Here, White Light has upgraded the existing Cat5 network to Ethercon connectors and added new network switches, while at the same time switching the network from Strand’s Shownet to ETC’s Net3.
“Lighting installations used to just be about dimmers, power and simple control,” notes Roger Hennigan, “but now even the simplest installations can include quite complex Ethernet network infrastructures. It’s all-too-easy to get these wrong and end up with a system that doesn’t work properly because of the way things are configured rather than because of the obvious broken wire or damaged connector that brought down older generations of control - which were annoying but relatively easy to troubleshoot.
“These installations show that White Light can now provide the same standard of service and support for these high-tech installations as it has long done with older generations of control: choosing the best components, providing careful installation and making sure everything is set-up correctly so that, from the user’s point of view, the lighting just works.”