Obey 70 vs Stage Designer 50 for rock show type lighting

[wm_b]

I have an Obey 70 that I got for an event I had right before Christmas. At the event I had a friend who is a touring lighting designer handle the show. He mostly uses leprecon boards and bigger controllers. I showed him the Obey 70 and we talked about how he wanted to be able to use it with the fixtures I had. I set about to figure out how to program the unit to control 4 different sets of LED type fixtures and two dimmers. I'm adding another LED fixture and another dimmer or possibly two. I will have a total of 8 or 9 fixtures. The Obey 70 can control up to 12 but I'm not sure it's really set up to practically control that many fixtures at once with so few faders.

 

He basically wanted RGB control over the LEDs in combinations of pairs. I had 12 uplights on the stage split into two fixtures and 2 par 64 type washes side filling. The dimmers were controlling PAR cans with two channels in the back and 4 up front for spots. The other two channels on the second dimmer were controlling some house lighting and one other effect.

 

He prefers to light on the fly rather than set up scenes so I set up the two pages of faders with the first 8 channels configured to control different combos of the uplights and side fills with RGB and intensity. The last 6 faders on the board with set to control the 4 spots individually and the two colors of back lighting.

 

It seems the Obey 70 isn't totally optimized for real time control and is more about setting up scenes and then going from one to another. It worked well enough for our event as a real-time controller but one thing he missed was having "bumbs" for the lights. From reading about the Stage Designer 50 it seems to have bumps for the lights which would be nice but I'm not sure how much it shares with the Obey 70 as far as other programming goes.

 

Is anyone familiar with the Stage Designer 50 vs the Obey 70 and is it more programmable for use as a real-time controller than the latter?

[pacerhead1979]

You are correct in the OBEY 70 is good for programmed performances. The stage designer 50 will give you 48 channels of control instead of 32 for live performances. The 50 is way more difficult to do scenes, and chases compared to the 70. If your LD wants more live control, he will have to go elsewhere to find it, like back to Leprechaun.

[soundlight]

I am very familiar with the Stage Designer 50, and it is a great desk for what your LD friend is going for. It can control 48 channels of DMX - so if you pair up fixtures as mentioned, you will probably be fine. You can record scenes in to the bottom row of faders, and you have four pages of scenes which is great - and you can have more than one scene going at the same time and you can fade them in and out and you can record multiple steps in to each scene. It's a phenomenal little desk once you find your way around it, but it can be a bit hard to step up to and figure out right away - and the manual is not that helpful. I, however, love the board and think it's about a thousand times better than something like the Obey 70 (I originally had the Chauvet DMX-70, which was the predecessor to the Obey 70). I like to run shows just like your LD friend - having everything very accessible and being able to fade things manually and mix things live, so I understand where he's coming from there.

 

Also - to the previous poster - why is it more difficult to do scenes and chases on the Stage Designer? I find it easier, and I can use more than one scene or chase at once in "mix chase" mode, and I can set fade times on the fly like the Obey series and manually step through scenes and tap-tempo for quick rate control. Other than a few flaky buttons after hard use, I've had nothing but good experiences with it.