u/ImprovementBasic8024

I'm the in-house lighting designer at a 600-cap club in Phoenix Tuesday-Saturday, 9pm to 3am. Sunday-Monday I do mobile DJ gigs, mostly weddings and the occasional corporate. Both pay rent. Neither uses the same gear philosophy and the venn diagram is way smaller than I expected when I started doing both.

A few things that don't carry over:

• Install vs portable. At the club we have 16x Chauvet Maverick MK2 Spot + 8x GLP impression X4 hung on permanent truss. The Mavericks alone run about $5,000 each. There is exactly zero version of "I'll throw this in the CR-V Saturday morning" that involves a Maverick.
• Cue density. Club night I'm running 90 cues over a 4-hour set, each one timed to the resident DJ's transitions. Wedding I'm running 4 cues (ceremony / dinner / dance / first-dance dim). Different brain mode.
• Cost of failure. Club: a fixture craps out, swap it next morning, move on. Wedding: a fixture craps out during processional, the bride remembers it forever. So the gear has to be more reliable per dollar, not necessarily nicer.
• What it has to look like in photos. Club LDs design for "feels good in the room." Mobile DJs design for "looks good on the wedding videographer's 4K." Different aesthetic. Saturated club gels look brown on camera.

Anyone else doing both? Curious how you reconcile gear budgets. I keep trying to bring club aesthetics to mobile and it doesn't work.

Ran 4x ADJ Inno Pocket Spot Twins for the better part of 3 years. They were fine for the brewery I started in but I outgrew the venue and the venue outgrew the lights.

Just installed 4x 200W spot/beam/wash combos. ~$$345 each on the May sale, $$459 MSRP. (Kept the Innos, they're still earning their keep at smaller events.)

What changed:

• Output: massive jump. Went from 2x 12W LED per fixture (24W total inside the Twin housing) to a single 200W LED source. Haze response went from "kinda visible" to "real beam", no lumens math needed
• Channels: 19ch → 23ch (BSW200 ships as 23ch only on mine). The extra channels are mostly motorized zoom, prism rotation, color macros, frost, and independent P/T fade time which I never had before
• Weight per fixture: 17 lb → 15.4 lb so each unit is actually slightly lighter, didn't have to upgrade clamps or re-rate the truss, which was a nice surprise given everything else got bigger

Things that surprised me:

• Fan noise is louder than the Innos. Fine for live music, would not run these for a wedding ceremony
• The wash function inside a "spot/beam/wash combo" is OK, not great. If the brief is true wash work I'd still bring dedicated wash cans
• Gobo wheel is interchangeable on these. Innos didn't have that. I now own 6 custom gobos.

Picture in comments. Honest critique welcome. What would you change about the layout?