Stage Lighting Hire

Profiles, washes and battens: what each does

Three fixture types cover most small-scale work. A profile gives you a hard-edged beam you can aim at one thing. The Selecon PLPROFILE1 zooms between 18 and 34 degrees, carries four shutter blades for trimming light off a wall or a set edge, and takes a gobo in its accessory slot. Reach for a profile when something needs lighting specifically: a soloist, a doorway, front light that must stay off the cyclorama. Washes do the opposite. They throw soft, wide colour with no defined edge. The Equinox Fusion 260ZR MKII and Fusion 300FXP are moving washes, so they pan, tilt and zoom as well: a lot of looks from few units, which is why they suit dance shows where the picture changes every number. Battens are linear. The LEDJ Pixel Storm 12 Quad Batten MKII and Chauvet COLORband PiX-M sit on the deck or fly on a bar and give an even band of colour — up a cyc, along the front of a stage, behind a dance line. Chauvet's tilts on a motor, so it can face the audience for one number and the cloth for the next.

Lighting a hall that has no rig

The commonest mistake in a school hall is rigging the pretty stuff first. Colour on the back wall photographs well. It does nothing for the grandparents in row eight who cannot see a face. Front light comes first. Two or three profiles on stands each side of the hall, angled in at roughly 45 degrees across and 45 degrees down, will light faces properly and throw shadows downwards rather than sideways. Everything after that is decoration on a picture that already works. With no lighting bar you are working from stands. Wind-up stands get fixtures high enough to be useful; short tripods put light straight into performers' eyes. Throw distance matters as much as height. The same profile covers roughly twice the width from twelve metres as it does from six, so a long hall needs fewer units for the same stage, provided there is somewhere at the back to put them.

DMX without the jargon

DMX is the control signal, and simpler than it looks. One cable leaves the desk into the first fixture, out again into the next, and on down the line: a daisy chain, not a star. Each fixture is given a start address and reads a block of channels from there. That block's size depends on the mode you select. The Pixel Storm 12 Quad Batten runs as one colour across the whole bar in a short mode, or with every LED addressable in a long one. Choose the smallest mode that does what the show needs; a universe holds 512 channels and pixel modes eat them quickly. Terminate the last fixture with a 120 ohm terminator. Use proper DMX cable rather than mic cable — the impedance is wrong and the flicker it causes is miserable to trace on a show day.

How many fixtures, and what about power

A workable starting point for a hall show is four to six profiles for front light, two or four battens for colour behind, and a pair of moving washes if the looks need to change. Drama with a fixed set wants more profiles. Fifteen dance numbers want moving heads and battens, because you get variety without refocusing between pieces. Power is rarely the obstacle it once was. The PLPROFILE1 draws around 150 watts where the tungsten profile it replaces drew 500, and it dims internally, so there is no dimmer rack to hire. Moving washes are the hungriest items here, at up to roughly 300 watts each. Worth checking which sockets share a circuit — halls often run the whole room off one ring, and the kitchen urn is on it.

Desks, strobes and the finishing touches

Fixtures are half the job; the rest is control and effect. We hire lighting desks from the school-friendly Zero 88 FLX S24 up to the Orb for bigger plots, so the rig you take is one you can actually drive. Around the edges sit the pieces that finish a look: a strobe for lightning and chase moments, sunstrips for warm retro footlights, battery uplighters for walls and foyers with no cabling, and LED pars by the handful for general colour. Halls that still own tungsten lanterns need something to dim them, and that is the three-channel Zero 88 AlphaPack; beside it a single-channel TrueDim covers one lantern on its own, a followspot at the back of the hall or a practical lamp on the set. One thing this list is not for is working light. Plain white LED floodlights, in 50W, 100W and 200W sizes, hire separately for get-ins, loading bays, backstage corridors and marquees; contact us for pricing. They are not stage fixtures: fixed neutral white, no colour, no DMX, a wide spill over everything in front of them. They are the light you rig the stage fixtures under. If you are not sure where to start, tell us the venue and the show and we will draw up a rig that fits both.

Hire rates

Rates are per day and exclude VAT. A longer hire costs less per day — tell us your dates and we will price the period exactly. Ask us about delivery and hiring with a technician. Where a line says contact us for pricing, we will quote it when you enquire.

Common questions

Also for hire: sound desk hire · pa system hire · radio microphone hire · smoke, haze and effects hire · wired microphone hire · power and cabling hire · stands, rigging and comms hire · av and video hire

Talk to us

Not sure which is right for your venue? Tell us about the show and we will recommend what suits it.

Call 0333 404 0621, email [email protected], or send us the details of your production.

Related: Theatre production · Dance shows · Training · Production toolkit