What is Reddit's opinion of
A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
5 reviews of this product found across Reddit:
Its a thorough, start to finish guide to programming. From the bits I’ve skimmed it in the past, it has had a great amount of solid, well explained concepts.
If you’re looking for the business side of things and a good breakdown of a particular workflow for LDs Steve Shelley’s A Practical Guid to Stage Lighting is a good resource.
So the best way to think about it is in terms of the stage and the lighting areas. Imagine a small stage, where there are three lighting zones across and three lighting zones deep, or a 3x3 grid. Normally, you want to number them 1-3 across the downstage edge, 4-6 in the middle lane, and 7-9 on the upstage lane. Whether you do left to right or right to left is dependent on personal preferences, although most common is to put 1 on the downstage left area.
Now, how does that relate to channel numbers? In an ideal world, you match numbers. So, starting with your front light, you number them 1-9, in accordance with what zone they hit. Down lights over stage would be 11-19, high sides 21-29, etc.
If you have more than 10 zones, say in a 5x3 grid, your numbering would just skip to the nearest ten. For example, fronts are 1-15, downs would then be 21-35, etc.
Moving lights, would be labeled the same. I usually try to start at 101, and move up from there. Obviously, if you have doubled or tripled up on lighting zones for conventionals, you might not be starting until the 200’s.
Specials and practicals I usually start at 900, just to keep them out of the way. And I try and keep them labeled similarly to the lighting zones.
The real key here is to try and keep the numbering consistent across the board.
Also, this is just talking about the channel numbers in soft patch in the console, not the hard patch dimmer or DMX numbers.
Steve Shelley had a good book about lighting design, which might be useful. And Richard Cadena also has a great book, although this is more aimed at electricians, and explains more of the electrical aspect of lighting.
This is the sort of thing that comes with time spent and failures made. I highly recommend reading through a few books that can help answer.
A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting
Designing With Light
Color & Light
The first two will have a bunch of things that aren't necessarily related to "color and effects" but are still phenomenal resources on the design process in general. Color & Light isn't a book I've read, but the other two listed it as a recommendation, so it's probably good.
You might also get a little more help by being a little more specific with your question.
Buy Practical guide to stage lighting
An amazing resource and will help you for years to come.
Popular alternatives to A Practical Guide to Stage ...
