Black News Channel, which launched on Feb. 10 and is the nation’s only African American news network, features a dynamic news set lit with Brightline L1.2 and L1.4 SeriesONE LED soft light fixtures. Designed by Devlin Design Group in Scottsdale, Ariz., the main set features a news desk, two large LED video wall areas, and a small interview set. RGB lighting elements – including hanging set pieces, walkways, and video wall backlights – created some talent lighting challenges. Lighting designer Bill Holshevnikoff said Brightline has “great control options on their fixtures, so you can make sure you’re not spilling light on the RGB elements and spoiling the color.”

Presteigne Broadcast Hire, a leading dry hire and total multi-location production equipment provider, today announced the appointment of Jane Skinner as Senior Hire Desk Co-ordinator.

Reporting to Presteigne North Hire Manager Roy Gaterell, Skinner is based at the company’s northern office in Warrington, equidistant between Manchester and Liverpool.

Skinner started her career at Granada (now ITV) in Manchester as a coordinator for Granada Reports and This Morning.

She then progressed to drama with Mersey TV/Lime Pictures, working as a technical coordinator on programmes such as Hollyoaks and Brookside. Due to her expertise, Skinner was soon seconded to the production department where she undertook resource and production coordination roles.

Skinner comes to Presteigne from a Liverpool-based dry hire office, where she had converted her experience as a dry hire customer to apply it as a supplier.

Skinner said, “I am delighted to join Presteigne, which has a well-established reputation for excellence. I am already enjoying using that reputation to establish relationships with new clients and reinforce those with existing ones, both of which include an extensive number of contacts from my previous roles in production.”

Presteigne CEO Adrian Young said, “Roy and I are very pleased that Jane has joined us. She understands and exemplifies the value we place on providing excellent service to our clients, and the commitment to our staff in providing an environment that enables them to perform at their best.”

Tiffen will be at the BSC show on their stand #307, where you can see and try the latest

and best Steadicam products, the Steadicam M-2 with revolutionary Volt

integration, the Steadicam M-1 and the Steadimate-S for handheld gimbals like

the DJI Ronin-S. It’s also a chance to find out about the ever popular

Steadicam Workshops coming up in 2020.

The latest Tiffen Filters will be available to see and try including NATural ND and NATural

ND Graduated filters, Diffusions and Diopters. Also featured will be the latest

range of Lowel’s lighting products, the Lowel Tota LED, the Tota LED Production

Kit, the Blender XL, the Pro Power LED Bi-Color and the Ego LED.

Come and talk to the experts on the stand, including Robin Thwaites, Danny Hallett, and Eren

Ibrahim

www.tiffen.com

Matthews Studio Equipment, offers yet another smart solution that makes life on set a bit more convenient. New Panel Stand https://vimeo.com/348274238 answers the need for a quick set-up stand that aptly supports today’s panel and balloon-style lighting fixtures, LED monitors, screens, overhead frames and backdrops. What’s more, convenient wheels add on-set mobility especially combined with the low profile legs to maximize leeway and maneuverability, even with low hanging equipment.

This heavy-duty wheeled crank support offers a maximum height of 11’ and a minimum of just 55”. With a load capacity of 70/80 pounds, it is an ideal mate for popular panel lights as well as 45” to 85” monitors that it supports either horizontally or vertically, so it is handy when creating content for mobile mediums and vertical advertisement aspect ratios. Built for low clearance, Panel Stand’s main column can be adjusted and lowered at the leg base while its shallow wheelbase facilitates rolling underneath furniture, vehicles, or other obstacles.

Rugged yet compact, this versatile wheeled carrier also comes equipped with premium Tente® caster wheels, pins to hang a door rack for truck storage, a 1-1/8" Junior receiver, a 5/8" Baby pin, and a built-in ergonomically balanced carrying handle for transport. The tough black powder coat finish provides a professional look that blends in well on set. The Panel Stand is ready for action in a moment, then quickly folds up tight, ready for its next use.

Like their full complement of industry leading stands and other equipment, Panel Stand is available through Matthews Studio Equipment dealers. For more information visit www.msegrip.com

Brightline, a leading manufacturer of energy efficient lighting systems, now offers technical support through Zoom for its resellers, integrators, and clients. The cloud-based videoconferencing system allows Brightline to program light fixtures remotely, re-focus, visually diagnose potential issues, and perform other troubleshooting. 

“Zoom service is ideal for time-critical issues,” explained Kathy Katz, Brightline managing partner. “You don’t have to struggle through a phone call without visuals or schedule onsite service. Zoom gives us ‘eyes’ in the room.”

To request a free Zoom technical call, contact technical support at techservice@brightlines.com.

MIRRAD supplies two Avolites consoles for Ben Everett’s design for producer, songwriter and performer’s headlining tour

A lot has happened in Maggie Rogers’ world since 2016, when a video of her demoing a then-newly-recorded song, “Alaska,” for Pharrell Williams at NYU went viral. Following opening slots on major tours with both HAIM and Mumford & Sons last year, Rogers dropped her own major label debut, Heard It in a Past Life, this past January, which charted in the second highest slot of the Billboard 200. Consequently, the artist has spent much of 2019 on the road in support of the album, performing a sold-out fall headline tour in such iconic venues as Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Berkley’s Greek Theatre, and New York City’s Radio City Music Hall.

The “look and feel” of Rogers’ tour this year has been a collaborative effort between the artist and Lighting Designer Ben Everett, who first started working with her when he lit Rogers’ first-ever show in London two years ago. Having toured with an impressive roster of bands over the past five years—including Bear's Den, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and The Dandy Warhols—Everett is now part of the UK-based MIRRAD team, which has been supplying a pair of Avolites Sapphire Touch lighting control consoles for Rogers’ 2019 worldwide trek.

Everett notes that he’s been using Avolites lighting consoles “pretty much since I started in the live music industry,” he shares. “I was lucky enough to learn on all of the early Titan software, and mainly used the Tiger Touch II and Quartz consoles to begin with. The features that kept me attracted to the desks at first were the ability to quickly create really impressive and intricate effects, and the user-friendly and multi-functional layout of the touchscreens. And while growing with the consoles over the years, the ease of being able to create cue stacks, key frame shapes, and pixel mapping really helps me in my day-to-day programming now.”

Brightline, a leading manufacturer of energy efficient lighting systems, today announced Open Signal: Portland Community Media Center, a nonprofit media arts and broadcast center in Portland, Ore., has upgraded the lighting grid in its 2,000-square-foot main studio with 30 Brightline L1.2 SeriesONE LED fixtures. The new lighting was installed in July.

Noah Dorsey, media services manager, said the upgrade in Studio A was prompted by the fan noise of previous lighting fixtures in the studio. “We want the studio environment to be as silent as possible,” he explained. “That was something that had been requested by a lot of producers.”

The new 5600K L1.2 lights are controlled through a DMX console. Open Signal contracted Brightline’s premier Pacific Northwest systems integrator, Advanced Broadcast Solutions (ABS), a division of Key Code Media, to supply the new lighting. Dorsey said the lighting “looks dynamic but not so stylized that it can’t be applied to multiple shows.”

Bruce Aleksander, a lighting director hired by ABS for the Open Signal project, said the decision to use soft lights throughout Studio A was based on the need for versatility and accessibility for the wide variety of producers who use the space. Though some productions use an ellipsoidal light for show-specific gobo projection accents, the main lighting is generally not altered.

It was an historic evening for Romeo Santos, one of Latin music’s most successful icons. On September 21, he headlined a night at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, which became the single highest-grossing concert in the stadium's history, a record previously held by U2.

Named for his latest LP, Utopia, the concert, which spanned 45 songs over four hours and included a guest appearance by rapper Cardi B, was as much a visual tour de force as a musical one, with 22 LED screens covering literally almost every square foot of the stage, including the ceiling. It was an undertaking that required the most robust video servers in the world, and video production designer YC3 Lighting Design turned to Avolites Ai servers to make the night magical.

YC3, which was in charge of the overall stage and production design, fashioned the system around eight Avolites Ai servers—two Q3, two R8, one R4, and three custom servers using Avolites-compatible hardware and Miami software licenses—plus an Avolites Tiger Touch II lighting control console.

“It was the biggest show in the history of Hispanic music!” shares YC3 Lighting Design Owner Yamil Charif of the estimated 85,000 fans who were there. “It was also the highest-grossing concert at the MetLife Stadium, even bigger than U2. It had to be perfect.”

And it was, though not without its challenges. Santos, known as “King of Bachata,” the strain of Latin music from his native Dominican Republic, rarely follows a script, and this show was no exception. “He likes to improvise, to make it up as he goes along,” says Charif. “There was no way we could do this with a single file and just program a server and hit a macro; this show required a lot of flexibility, which came from using many servers, so we could adjust the video images to follow what he was doing as he was feeding off of the crowd.”

New and recent products from The Tiffen Company at IBC Expo will include:

Steadicam M-2
The latest top-of-the-line Steadicam system designed to incorporate the revolutionary Volt horizon-assist system and offer a modularity never before seen with body-worn stabilizers. The M-2 can be configured in hundreds of different ways to suit operators from broadcast through feature films and beyond.

Brightline, a leading manufacturer of energy efficient lighting systems, today announced its new cMe2 huddle room light is shipping. The compact fixture delivers high-quality lighting for smaller work spaces that have inadequate lighting for videoconferencing and other video interactions.

Film, TV and theatre lighting supplier Flashlight has announced the appointment of Elaine Frost, who joins the company's UK sales department as a business development manager. Elaine will provide field-based sales and support for the company's expanding range of leading lighting brands.

Wooden Camera announces the Shoulder Rig v3, a major update to Wooden Camera’s popular Shoulder Rig at a lower price point. Now only $499 for the Base and $995 for the Pro!