6MST0107_Lighting_Will_Salzmann_Transcript

Hi, I'm Will Salzmann. I'm one of the production supervisors and lighting designers at PBS Wisconsin, and I am sitting here with our Ion Xe 20 lightboard that does this. 

Pretty simple, but it actually can do a lot of amazing things. This board, as it is, can control over 2,000 individual lights. 

When you're bringing up lights with this board, there's different ways of doing it. You can do them individually. You can do them in groups. You can do them in submasters. You can have inhibitive submasters. There's a whole lingo that you have to learn. 

Right now, we have different groups of lights on the set controlled by submasters. Then, you have inhibitive submasters, which are red. Those, you can assign to individual lights so that you can paint within that submaster without affecting all of the others. 

Before this lightboard can take over and actually run lights, the lights have to be in place. So, what we do is a lighting director, lighting designer uses a program called Vectorworks Spotlight, which is specifically tailored for designing lights. 

When we hang the lights, we have motorized batten ceiling, so we bring the ceiling down. We hang all of the lights. We circuit all the lights. We run the battens back up. 

And then, somebody has to go up in a personnel lift and actually focus the lights, which we bring up one at a time. And then, once everything is at the sharpness and the framing that they want, then they add the color or the diffusion to soften it. 

There's lots of different steps in it. Then, you have to come up with a patch that assigns each of these individual lights you see graphically represented to a circuit. Each of those circuits goes into a dimmer. Each of those dimmers can be controlled by this board. 

The lights that we have, for the most part, are incandescent or tungsten lights. They have a color temperature of about 3,200 degrees Kelvin, which is on the warm side of the spectrum. The trouble with our studio lights is they put out 70% heat and only 30% light, which is why we have a massive air conditioning system in place in the studio. 

Our ultimate goal is to have this board controlling individual LED lights in the studio. They have a fraction of the power consumption. They don't put out the heat that incandescents do, plus we would not need dimmers because they have dimmers built into them. 
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I have focused lights in the studio, on location, in stadiums, you name it. You can create so many different worlds, looks, emotions with light, and we're able to do that here. We're allowed to do that here, and that's why I work here.