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Control equipment for stage and television studio lighting

Since 1967, when the British Broadcasting Corporation's television studio adopted a Q-memory (Q-file) with a storage capacity of 100, full storage capacity has become a reality. The emergence of this device broke the traditional equipment of using a single control lever (or dimmer) for a lighting circuit, and used a control lever combined with a decimal button device to control many lighting circuits. After many theaters and television studios tried 40 sets of this equipment, it was generally reported that the effect was very good. Its data program control has a capacity of 100 or 200 separate storage units, each of which controls the entire lighting scene of 300 or more lighting circuits, and can perform various dimming. The storage units can be used in the required order, whether it is instantaneous "blackout" or pre-dimming, it can be used freely. At the same time, the system can also provide many other features of operation, such as the ability to automatically control several different speeds of dimming at the same time. In addition, there is another advantage, that is, its tape program device can record the lighting of a whole set of drama or song and dance scenes into a small tape box for storage and backup, which can be played again when needed next time.

There are also better storage devices, such as the German punch card type, the British digital dimmer memory, and an American device that uses a specially designed computer and a special calibrated dimming device to project directly onto the picture tube through a "light-pen".

The requirements for lighting control in the theater and television studio are fundamentally different, so the light control equipment used has also changed. Mainly because television cameras cannot operate at very low illumination, dimmers are mainly used to balance the lights and rarely to reduce the lights to very low levels. In contrast, the scenery in the theater is sometimes performed in almost complete darkness and requires the lights to be dimmed gradually, which requires extremely fine control in the low-light part of the dimmer, but this is of little significance in television. The relationship between the dimming control device and the light output, the well-known dimming law, is the simplest method of comparing bright dimming performance.

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