Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Torbay RTC: Introduction to Theatre Control Software

Live blog from #torbayrtc

Introduction to Theatre Control Software from Mark Hartley - JAM Theatre Company. They are a professional theatre company who aim to bring people into the theatre. Their workshops look at theatre, music, animation, … creative arts generally.

They showed some video clips to demonstrate the range of techniques and skills, including stop motion animation, musicals, pop videos, … The iLife software meant tey didn't ha to worry about the technology.

Looking at Arkaos (not supported any more?), Catalyst (a bit too high end?), Keynote (great way of doing live animation and text effects during a production), BoinxTV (looks amazing but add supported). For sound, they are investigating QLab - a free sound control program. Design the sound effects, timings, order, fade cues, etc. and then trigger through the software. The software allows you to control what speaker sound comes out of. The latest version of the software allows the triggering of video cues as well as switch between live camera feed and other outputs.

DMX is the new way of controlling lighting and fairly cheap USB to DMX devices will allow you to control lighting from Macintosh. See for example miniStage Console (another free package).

Using Macintosh technology to control live performance not just for recording events! See their website http://www.abiteoftheapple.co.uk/

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