Working with Australian dealer Jands, ETC has helped to overhaul the lighting control at Sydney’s world famous Opera House.Following a comprehensive assessment of the venue’s needs, Jands installed four ETC Eos and three ETC Ion desks, so there would be a desk in every control room in the building.
The Sydney Opera House accommodates some 7.4m visitors each year who take in around 1,700 performances in seven different spaces, ranging from the main concert hall, with almost 2,700 seats, to the intimate 14 metre wide Utzon room.
Tim Kennard, lighting sales manager for Jands, explains: “In addition to the control desks, we also installed remote processor units and video interfaces, as well as remote focus units. For complete control, we provided 37 touch screen displays.
“The Opera House management and staff were really pleased with the way the desks worked, with a very similar usage style to their previous equipment. Training ran over a 12 week period and involved Jands controls specialist Alex Mair, Nick Simmons and Graham Parker from the UK.
“The upgrade covered all controls in every venue of the Opera House, and there are further upgrades planned, including more moving lights and dimming systems.”
Head of lighting at Sydney Opera House, Toby Sewell, adds: “Switching to Eos and Ion was fairly easy for our operators, as the logic and syntax are very similar to our previous control desks. When opting for the ETC control, I consulted our clients such as the [Australian] Opera Company who are very comfortable with ETC. I found a lot of the theatre designers were much more comfortable with ETC and its philosophies. Sydney Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare had purchased ETC Ions, so it made sense for us to have ETC Eos as the control room desk.
“The ETC desks are really intuitive in how they use moving lights. We’ve had extremely positive feedback from our operators on both Eos and Ion. They seem to have integrated well into the system; we’ve had them a few months now and everybody is very comfortable with them.”
The PLASA award winning Eos control desk is sister to Ion and Gio, the newest addition to the ETC control desk range.
Gio sits in the family line-up between Eos and Ion, and is officially launched at PLASA 2011. It offers the full power of Eos functionality, but in a smaller footprint. Features include integrated, articulating multi touch displays and helpful backlit buttons.