Neo laserists invade pittsburgh!
It was DR Lava's Birthday.
So We had to celebrate.
So We invited all the North East Ohio Laserists to go to see the Buhl Planetarium laser show at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.
This is personal for me, and many others in our area, as the Buhl Dome got us hooked on laser shows of a very high standard.
OK, first off, the Planetarium in Pittsburgh used to be in its own beautiful building that is now the Childrens Museum. It had a real Zeiss star projector, not one of these new fangled CRT things, as they didn't exist yet. When I was my first full color laser show there in about 1984 or so, It was a whitelight krypton 168. Yes,Virginna, there was no argon in the tube, 4 colors, red, green, blue, and yellow, on 4 g120 scan heads, one for each color. With a pressure pump refill system to maintain color balence. Pressure pumps can take the tube pressure both up and down, yet they have no vacuum pump and are sealed onto the tube.
The only graphics came off Eprom, from a Laser Media ZAP system, ie about 24 frames of 8 bit animation in the whole show, with analog rotation.
A Pangolin was a rare ant eater in Zoo at that time. In fact I would have had to look the word up in a dictionary if you used it.
Shows back then were very much done manually on consoles with analog abstract generators, and when I asked to see the soul of the machine, well a tarp was on it that only came off when the lights were down. Ie, its a secret.
A core track of cues could be recorded on 8 track FM encoded tape at only one place in the world, the Laser Media studios. The zap system ran off a dumb terminal, but mainly fed into the abstract system for analog rotation.
Graphics were very, very simple, NO 3D either. In fact, no color, the colors were assigned by the scan heads.
It was a hopped up version of this:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=BRQ...J&dq=4,006,970
So lets just say shows back then really needed a skilled operator.
The fellow's name was Greg.
Lets just say this required a artistic skill level that few people still doing lasers have, because you do it in real time, tunring 10 turn pots, with few presets. In many cases with about 40 unlabeled controls that all interact. Back in the early 80s the idea of high contrast visuals with timing and a full color Gamut were not something you encountered every day. I mean a color TV still cost around 500$ back then. A few computers did 480 x 320, but real computer graphics then were only at universities and very big corporations, viewed by a select few. So that dome was Mindblowing, and folks drove for miles to see it. Suffice it to say it was a money maker too.
Then the new science center opened, Buhl closed as a building, and the new facility got a LFI installation,first with a colorshot, then two STAR-C ion systems with Omniscan. But things were going down hill.
So Enter the Pictire of George Dodworth and Lightwave. You've seen some of George's work, Roger Waters etc. George is the US Arctos dealer.
George too, got his start watching the same old Dome I did, but a few years later. We used to go to the old LFX conferences.
George did something about the decaying systems at the Science Center.
Did it to the tune of three 2 watt ACTOS RGB systems, a dual card Pangolin Pro, 3D Studio Max etc. Provided some skilled staff too.
Fast forward to Saturday, 2 days ago.
Mr, Dr Lava, Mrs Lava, James Lehman and some of Dr Lava's friends show up for a show.
James and I wanted to see Laser Beatles, so we got there a hour before the rest.
Laser Beatles is the Mike Dunn Beatles show, modified for 3 projectors. Instead of just running Pango playback, a mix of Pango and Live pro and some natrix switching gear is used, so Digital Dave, the abstract creator/operator, injects abstracts at the light points, and for teh last two songs, one head stays graphics and the other two go European style beams, done very well. The old dome was threatre in the round, the new one has the modern directional seating, so with beam projectors stage left and stage right, you can drop the offset down and do beams.
I cannot say enough about the color gamut of the arctos, but that is a whole hour more of typing. 6215s, direct diode blue, and fast greens, save that revue for another week.
So a typical show runs 45 minutes. Towards the end they hit the fogger and scan downwards, making a nice two head beam show off live pro.
The beams hit the back side of the dome low over the audience.
We saw Beatles, U2, and a mixed album Floyd show.
I cannot say enough about the skill with the abstracts, I mean , I thought they were coming off a LFI console, not a Pangolin. Dave has worked hard to eliminate the Pangolin "Look". One thing that was nagging me, the colors in the abstracts were to well synced, that should have been a clue. Also Pangolin Pro has a wider color Gamut then the Intro and Basic systems I'm used to seeing.
One other thing, these guys have 3D Studio taken to a whole new level, because they have a lot of time to play with it. Outstanding 3d OBJECTS, far better then anything else I had seen out of 3D S Max. Very well done, and well animated, not just the usual rotates, but actually structured movement 3D animation.
A very nice mix of live control and showtime, and a ADAT as well.
Pricing was 8$ for the first show, and 5$ each additional show.
Ok, crunch time. This was still the best Planetarium show I have seen in the last 5 years. It reminded me of the good old days of hand ran shows, and much of it was manually synced. I fully expected to have seen every animation on the dome to be stock pangolin,and I had seen most of the Mike Dunn Artwork, However about 80% of the content the whole evening was origional, which is very refreshing.
but.....
Sunday Bloody Sunday was not my idea of a good U2 piece for a show, and some parts of it were a little childish or perhaps glorified war. Guys, go read up on the troubles. And perhaps change the first two songs. Both sides of that conflict might have taken issue with one or two of the depictions.
Same thing for a bit of the Floyd, the horror movie shots had some of the absolute best graphics I've ever seen, but they missed the mark. However the attempt of showing the Insane world from the viewpoint inside of Pinks head was a great new twist on Floyd Shows, which usually stick to marching hammers.
Outstanding animation and choreography and 3D, but go read some history and watch the wall again. Or perhaps replace it with some songs from Best of U2 that are a little less Maudlin and Dark. This was the opinion of most of us in the group, not just me.
But overall, four and seven eights stars out of five on content, scripting and sync.
"We dont need no education was about perfect" And for the line 'Two lost souls living in a fish bowl", the couple with human heads and goldfish bodies swimming in a goldfish bowl had everybody screaming with laughter. Laser Beatles would make the most jaded of Beatles fans, cry with laughter if they were not so busy singing along. And that was the first decent beam show I've ever seen for a Beatles number.
Now, there is a slight hardware bug, that Joe Six Pack and Mrs Six pack would not see, unless they are professional artists. What I'd call Track 0, the main
graphics head, had bandwidth issues, that showed up as distortion on fine details on the 3D. You could see beautiful 3D images that you just know would look so much better if they were not bandwidth limited by something in the signal chain. We asked about this, and were told what it was, and I'm not gonna go into details, its not the scan head. But for crying out loud fix it. It manifested itself in small, short segment, sharp, details not lining up with the rest of the image, things like the eagle's beak and the 3D SR-71 were totally destroyed by this. If you have too, bypass the fiber data link. That was not just my opinion, but the groups. And we all own scanners, so it was very annoying for us.
Oh, and bring back the lumias, your content was strong enough to get away without them, but it adds so, so, much. And a few polysector 20's would take that show from Beyond Awesome to MINDBLOWING! Note right now its just three scan heads, no other effects, except the 4 megapixel DOME.
The Skyscan as a background for the show in a way that was very tasteful, and did not detract from the lasers. The view from inside a neon plasma ball is very interesting, as were the scientific visualization stock.
So get off your duffs folks,and go see what has to be one of the best planetarium shows in the US, in Pittsburgh. Lotsa parking, and very safe with lots of security. WELL WORTH EVERY PENNY, Great Price, and a PHENOMENAL LEVEL OF SOPHSTICATION.
Then ask me to tell ya where to eat and get a drink after the show, we found a low priced Italian place with microbrewed beer that stayed open for us for a hour after closing, Oh wow what food.!!! I of course cant have the beer with my meds, but the food was awesome. I like the resturants on Squirrel Hill!
Steve Roberts
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Originally Posted by GooeyGus
