Day 25

Thursday was another technical rehearsal, this time it was the first for "The Tales Of Hoffmann". Since the next day was the piano dress rehearsal for "Madama Butterfly", I had a lot of work to get ready ("Butterfly" is the show that i'm the audio-video pointman for). The technical rehearsals are hands-off from an A/V perspective, so it gave me time to finalize things for the piano dress the next day. One project I needed to finish was an audio/video monitor in a walkway to the rehearsal hall. The conductor wanted the effect of a cannon firing in the distance, so he decided to put a bass drum in an unseen corner of the campus, but still nearby to the theatre. Since the performer can't see the conductor or hear the orchestra, they'll need a video feed of the conductor camera and an audio feed of the orchestra.

Of course the conductor picks a place that's the farthest possible from any audio, video, or power connections.

One way to get audio and video to a remote location is to modulate it, combining the audio and video together into a single signal. Remember when you had a TV with only a cable/antenna input, but a Nintendo or DVD player with the red/white/yellow jacks? You ran to the store and bought a converter box to go into the antenna jack on channel 3 or 4? That's modulation, you're turning the combined audio and video into a specific frequency which the TV interprets as "Channel 3".

So I grabbed a TV modulator, and ran the archive audio feed and the conductor camera into the box, and pushed a signal down to the rehearsal hall video jacks. I took a TV into the rehearsal hall, plugged in, and got what amounted to a very poor signal. The video was fuzzy and the audio had a really bad buzz. It wasn't a quality that I was happy with, so I ditched the idea. Now I need to run audio AND video separate, and still run power.

I could run audio over the other rehearsal hall video jack, but it was really dirty-sounding. Orchestra Services had a video jack, but only one, and no audio. I would hate to run cables all over the place, so the nearest place that had audio and video nearby was stage right.

So I grab 100' each of audio, video and power, and start taping them together into one cable. Since the walkway is right outside of Orchestra Services, which is right below stage right, I dropped the audio and video through some conduit from stage right to Orchestra Services, then along the conduit, picking up power along the way from a nearby wall outlet. The result was 75' of coiled cable that could be fed out along the entire length of the walkway.



The actual monitor will be a larger TV on a cart, but the 9" monitor was perfect to test video and power, and I used the sniffer to make sure the audio was feeding correctly.

The sun setting over the western hills is gorgeous every night, but since the sky has been mostly clear, there was little to accent the sunset. Tonight there were plenty of clouds in the sky to make an absolutely stunning visual:



The "Tales of Hoffmann" set is one of the few with a closed upstage (not looking over the hills), and since the set was contained within the "stricter" boundaries of the theatre stage, the crossover walkway next to the B-lift was also clear, meaning I don't have to go UNDER the stage to get to stage right. I was out on the back deck enjoying the weather when I saw how neat the stage looked from the back deck.



If you're curious why theatres always use blue lights backstage, i'm pretty sure it has to do with how the eyes respond to blue light (or the ultra-violet portion of the light spectrum). The visible light spectrum goes from red to violet (red, orange, yellow, blah blah), with infrared light being on the fringe of one side of the spectrum, and ultraviolet being on the other side.

Ever notice airplane cockpits have red lights in them? With red light, the pupil doesn't have to dilate as much, so pilots can preserve their night vision and still see outside as well as inside the cockpit. Some headlamps have red LEDs built-in to serve the same purpose: working in low-light situations without having the light blind you.

On the other side of the spectrum, the eye is not as sensitive to blue light, and does not perceive it as easily has red light. I think it also helps because the stage lights are so damn bright, that the transition from a stage light environment to a blue light environment keeps the pupils dilated so the blinding effect is not as intense.

You're welcome.