Colour Sound Add LED Screens

UK based lighting and visuals rental company Colour Sound Experiment (CSE) has taken delivery of the first batch of its new bespoke designed LED screen product - BT12 - which will be used to ongoing work.
The 12 mm pitch screen is very bright, light and watertight - IP65 rated, and said to be a must for the English summer.
Colour Sound's Steve Marley explains that with an increasing number of lighting designs now incorporating scenic and ambient video visuals as integrated elements, it made sense - both creative and commercial - to be able to offer an 'in-house' product to fulfil this criteria. "The industry has been talking about 'convergence' between the two mediums of lighting and video for some years, and this is now happening everywhere, so we are in a position to offer a proactive solution." he confirmed.
Having the kit in rental stock also enables CSE to offer the most cost-efficient packages to their clients, and it is also a perfect complement to their stock of Green Hippo and Arkaos media servers.
CSE services many high profile festivals and dance orientated artists for which visuals are an exciting and innovative part of the performance concept. The company's extensive experience and encyclopaedic knowledge of this specific field of lighting and visuals has contributed greatly to the evolution of the light weight, highly flexible and fully tourable BT-12 system, which is quick to rig and easily accommodated into 'house' festival set ups.
Having already invested in a 37mm pitch system to a similar designed about 18 months ago, it was time to offer a higher resolution option, with 12 mm chosen as an optimum pitch after careful consideration. The refresh rate of 3000Hz is also much faster than many other products, and the 4.4 trillion colours should be enough for the most adventurous video artists and designers.
The BT-12's phenomenal brightness is good for daylight applications and IMAG as well as for scenic and ambient video effects.
The BT-12 comes in 500 x 500 mm tiles - hugely flexible for making shapes and fitting in to a myriad of design styles. Each tile weighs an expedient 7 Kgs, so at 28 Kg a square metre, is substantially lighter than many other units, which makes a real difference when it comes to flying a back wall that is added to an existing rig as part of a 'specials' package.
CSE has cased its initial delivery of 400 BT-12 tiles in practical truck-width flight cases so they will stack 4-wide and 2-high in a standard truck pack.
Each panel is secured with a special quick-lock fixing system. A 50 square metre back screen surface weighing in at a mere 1.4 tonnes - about half the weight of a traditional screen - can be rigged and ready-to-rock by 2 lighting/video technicians assisted by 2/3 experienced stage crew in about 90 minutes ...... and flashed through in another 30 minutes.
CSE BT-12 distros are tailored specifically for even more flexibility, with signal splitters for the stage end, while the processing units are cased separately complete with TV1 video scalers (for composite, S-Video, SDI, HDSDI, VGA and DVI inputs) plus DVI splitters and monitors that can go either onstage or at FOH.
For FOH runs, CSE offers standard copper-based systems or fibre, which is good for distances of up to 20 Kilometres.
Being able to offer a top specification lightweight system at very competitive prices will please tours and production managers!
When combined with a compact lighting system comprising - for example - LED moving lights like the various GLPs that CSE has in rental stock, and needing lighter weight trussing and less rigging, it all becomes an extremely reasonable prospect for one and two truck tours and even smaller arena tours. All these tours and events can benefit from having the same high production values taking up less space, being set up quicker and costing less to transport.
Shows and events on CSE's busy summer schedule to feature BT-12 include Love Box and Field Day, both at Victoria Park, Brixton, London, Lock & Loaded on Clapham Common, London, and for the Eric Prydz 'EPIC' 3D holographic show at Global Gathering, Long Marston, where it was underneath the stage floor.
(BMcC/GK)