Intrigued by the Vista's overall concept and philosophy, Rinaldi had been following its progress with much interest, but was waiting for the launch of a more compact and affordable version which would be a better fit with his budget and regular pattern of work.
He commented: "The majority of our work is exhibitions, which usually means packing all the lighting control equipment into a tiny little cupboard space on client's stands. The S3 is ideal for this as I can use it with a laptop to program shows on the stand, and then when I'm happy with the show I can remove it and just play back from the laptop itself - solving any storage problems."
The S3 control surface becomes a fully operational Vista console when connected to a PC running the Vista software and fitted with a separately purchased software unlock key for DMX output of up to 8,192 channels via ethernet. Before ordering his S3, Rinaldi rented a T2 Vista on a large rig for the Intel stand at this year's CeBIT exhibition in Germany. The rig consisted of 80 conventional fixtures, 114 LED battens, 18 Pulsar Chromastrips, various MAC moving heads and well over 1500 channels of DMX.
He commented: "I felt that both the nature of the show and the lighting design lent itself really well to Vista's way of working. As well as generics and moving heads for lighting the main stand itself, I had 114 LED battens top lighting the enormous ceiling. The brief was to change the ceiling colour, but I went one better and choreographed the colours with the content of the video walls,using SMPTE to lock the Vista onto the Video timecode."
John split the 114 LED battens into four separate heads per unit to achieve some very bold, dynamic colour sweeps from side to side and front to back of the ceiling. He found controlling the fixtures very easy using the Vista's layout screen as it created almost a picture of the ceiling from separate icons representing all 456 lights.
The show was programmed by Mark Jones. Stand design and project management was by 2LK Design Ltd.
(Lee Baldock)
