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INSTaLLaTIONS
aTIONS
BYU-Idaho’s Make-Do Makeover
An older building’s lighting upgrade serves students awaiting a new auditorium
The Hart Building’s 4,300-seat auditorium is in the second phase of a three-part plan for a total lighting upgrade.
BYU-Idaho acquired a digital media server last June, and put it to good use within two weeks for a student-run show.
By DavidJohnFarinella
Many of the students at Brigham
Young University-Idaho in Rexburg
can’t wait for the new 15,000-seat
auditorium to open on campus. The senior
class, in fact, can’t wait — it won’t open until
2009 in the earliest, and most will graduate
before then. Not that there’s a lot of grumbling
on campus. Students are aware that
tithing dollars from faithful LDS Church followers
around the world are funding the
construction that surrounds them.
In the meantime, the social scene revolves
around the 39-year old John W. Hart
Building and its 4,300 seat auditorium.
Once a gym, the Hart building has been
reborn as the place to go for social dancing,
or to see and hear musical and dance
performances and to participate in weekly
devotionals. It’s also the spot where those
seniors will be gathering for commencement
ceremonies later this spring.
A Three-Step Plan
Inst
Brent Pritchett, BYU-Idaho’s lighting designer,
is in the second of a three-step upgrade
plan, scheduled over three years to meet budgetary
constraints. The first step, which was
completed last year, included buffing up the
venue’s lighting control system. This year’s
work will include an upgrade of the distribution
system and then, in 2009, the Hart building
will get the final touches on a state of the
art lighting system with rigging additions.
The Hart building isn’t shutting down
amid the upgrades. In February, the building
served as the venue for staged events including
a performance by the Vienna Boys Choir
and “Trek: Nashville Tribute to Pioneers,” a
musical tribute to LDS Church founder Joseph
Smith and his followers.
The goal of the upgrades, Pritchett says,
is to support those events and more with a
top-notch system that boasts redundancy.
“On-campus entertainment is a big thing,” he
says. “The school supports a lot of different
events that come in to the campus as well
as groups that perform here and go out and
tour. So, this room needed to support any
of those specific events and we can’t have a
show go down because of lighting.”
Moreover, he says, “we like to add a bit
of flash to these concerts, because they are
student performances and it’s not necessarily
the best quality. So, we try to put on a light
show that can help.”
The install work done in 2007 included
an upgrade in the venue’s control system,
including a dimmer rack with processor upgrades,
console upgrades and a handful of
additional control options.
For Students, By Students
Inst
Pritchett is responsible for the system’s
design and implementation, but students set
up the events. The size of the space within
the Hart building, and the fact that Pritchett
relies on student crews, have dictated much
of what Pritchett has installed there.
“It is a large room, so we have to train the
students on all of the rigging aspects, how to fly
a truss and how to take care of data distribution,”
he says. “So, we wanted some standardization
to the system so they would understand where
things plug in on a regular basis without having
to reconfigure the system constantly, depending
on what kinds of events are happening.”
There are quite a few node locations in
the Hart Building’s catwalks, Pritchett adds,
and that makes it easier for students to plug
in for data distribution.
Pritchett is using an MA Lighting Grand-
MA console as the main board and has a
GrandMA Lite board for backup. Both are
running ETC Net2 to eight universes.
This part of the upgrade has made the Hart
Building, which opened almost 40 years ago,
one of the campus’ top spots.
As for fixtures, four Vari*Lite VL 1000 TSDs
have been permanently hung from a front of
house position. “That takes care of quite a
bit,” he says, “from a spot on the stage to a
toning wash during a dance.”
For concert performances, Pritchett
brought in 12 Martin MAC 700 Wash fixtures to
buff up a moving light system that already included
eight MAC 550s and 14 RoboScan 918s.
The lighting rig also features a number of ETC
Source Four ellipsoidals, PARs and PARNels.
New Digital Media Server
Inst
The university also bought a Martin Maxedia
Compact digital media server as part of
the upgrade. The content from the Maxedia
is delivered to a 25- by 50-foot rear projection
screen via either Epson 7900 or 8300 projectors,
which were pulled from classroom stock.
There are also two 4:3 format screens on either
side of the stage that receive images from
double stacked Epson 8300 projectors and
four 50” plasma screens in parts of the room
where the screens are not visible.
“We looked at quite a few servers,”
Pritchett says. “We were looking for something
that we could move easily from venue
to venue,” adding that he was “pretty
happy with how easy it is to load content
and play it back.”
The university acquired the Maxedia
in June, just two weeks before a studentrun
show, “Guitars Unplugged,” hit the
Hart stage. With no training on the server,
Pritchett spent about a week programming.
“I got a copy of auditions, watched
performances and built effects using the
existing Maxedia content,” he said. “We
didn’t have time to create custom content
but we did quite a bit of manipulation of
the content that was already in the server,”
Pritchett says, adding that he used content
downloaded from the Maxedia Web site
and relied on “the online forum, where I
could read up on any questions I had.”
Pritchett is also looking forward to
using the screens and the server to provide
scenic backdrops during dance performances,
although he’s looking at different
projectors for that piece. “That will
be part of 2008’s budget,” he says, “a better
projector that can support the large
format. We’d really like to use the media
server as a way to do a backdrop for the
dance department.”
On the infrastructure side of things,
Pritchett cleaned up the 400 dimmers
in the room with two ETC Sensor + Touring
Racks, six SR 12 racks that have been
mounted in the ceiling and a Sensor+ Portable
Pack. “They are all CEM+, so it’s all
network configurable,” he states. “That’s a
really nice benefit, because they are scattered
everywhere.”
28 PLSN March 2008
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