
What Happens Just Before Show Time at the Met Opera - okket
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/30/arts/metropolitan-opera-backstage-ballet.html
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blhack
Really cool. It's always interesting to see how this stuff works on the back
end.

An interesting thing on the tech side, is that almost all of the lighting and
effects in that building are probably controlled via a relatively-ancient
protocol called either: DMX or Artnet

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art-Net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art-Net)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512)

Come from a software/networking background, this was really interesting to me
because the address-space is so small! 512 channels per "universe", and most
control boards supper only a few "universes".

Part of my life (when I'm not writing computer software) involves shooting
fire effects at music festivals, so I have [luckily] gotten really interesting
exposure to a small part of the tech that makes stage/theater productions
happen.

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lflux
Modern consoles can control a lot of universes these days. A grandMA2 full-
size can run 256 universes corresponding to 65k parameters in one session, a
Whole Hog 4 is basically unlimited.

When you're running that many fixtures (big events like Olympics ceremonies,
Eurovision et c) you're usually bumping up against the limits of the operator
and tend to run multiple sessions with multiple operators so they can program
scenese in parallell.

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blhack
Wow, really cool! Grand Ma is definitely beyond the realm of what we're doing
(we use chamsys for lighting control).

I wonder what it would take networking-gear wise to deliver the same sort of
data to the same number of hosts. My naive answer is "not much".

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lflux
DMX512 runs at 250 kbit/s, so yeah, "not a lot". I've usually seen standard
rackmount gigabit switches in installations, when I was involved in touring
audio it was usually fanless consumer switches (think 8-port netgears), but
these weren't for ethernet snakes.

In terms of data, audio multicores over ethernet and video content
distribution/playout massively dwarfs the bandwidth that lighting uses. But
when it goes down, everyone notices.

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meggar
Wow, I was in the children's chorus there in the 80s, and the place looks
exactly the same as it did back then. There's also a big cafeteria in the
basement.

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plandis
The Birdman-esque cinematography was pretty cool!

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9935c101ab17a66
This was absolutely amazing.

