Skills and Techniques
Rigging
Rigging is an essential job of a Lighting Technician, you cant use fixtures if they are not set up first. When rigging, you often have to attach fixtures to Trusses or IWB (Internally Wired Bars) so that they can be lifted and held up in the air so that they are out of sight and can shine their lights down onto a stage. When rigging, you must ensure you are safe by wearing a hard had and steel toe capped boots as to avoid any injuries on the most common injury locations. When rigging to a Truss or IWB, you will have to attach clamps to the bottom of the fixtures and bring the Truss/IWB in so that you can place the fixture on the bar. Tighten the clamps and place a safety bond around the fixture and bar. It never hurts to be safe! After each fixture is up, you will need to cable up the fixtures so that they have power and are connected to your ION desk, via DMX, which will be how you control your fixtures. You will need to know what model the fixture is to know how many AMPs of power the fixture needs to run effectively and not be either underpowered or overpowered as each could damage the fixture. You also need to know the model of the fixture so that you can patch it into your operating desk, this is because the desk needs to identify what type of fixture it is so that it knows the fixtures capabilities and limits.
When operating a truss, you must make sure, you are controlling all motors on the truss and that they are going in the same direction. You must make sure you have a spotter down on stage and make it clear to anyone else in the workspace that the Truss is being moved as too avoid any accidents occurring (see health and safety for further details). The Truss motor controls provided here are just examples of how they may look, different controllers can, and will, vary
IWBs are usually controlled via a drilling mechanism, drill one way to go up, other way to go down. This means you must be careful when operating the drill as you do not want to injure any of your mucsles or get clothing caught in the drill.
Patching
After setting up your Ion or Eos Desk, you will have to soft patch each fixture into the desk so that you can have control over the fixtures and can ensure they are fully functional. To do this you must use DMX cables to connect the desk to each fixture; each fixture has a DMX in and DMX out channel meaning you can 'daisy chain' DMX cables between each fixture. After successfully cabling each fixture, you want to set a DMX address to each fixture, to single out the fixtures on the Desk and make sure the desk doesn't see them all as one singular fixture. Each fixture typically requires 27 addresses, so lantern one would be addresses to 1-27 and lantern two would be 28-54. To patch into the desk, you need to go onto the patching panel, select a channel to patch a fixture into, select the design of the fixture and what type of lantern it is so the desk knows what fixture it is, select Universe 1 (or whatever universe your DMX is plugged into) and type down the starting number of the address. You must do tis for each individual fixture in your rig. After that you are free to operate your lanterns
