I’m planning on enlisting in the navy after high school and serving for six years but after that I don’t know if I should try and break into the industry myself or get a college degree what do y’all think?
Not too sure if I can phrase this properly.
Wanna vibe check with you guys here.
Been running redundant qlab 5 system for a theatre run.
Have anyone here figure out to how to do edits on main playback computer for rehearsal/tech then at the end of the work day instead of me grabbing my harddisk to do a full transfer from 1 laptop to the backup computer to be ready for show
Anyone here figure out how to make use of scripts or network protocols to do file transfer the entire show folder from 1 computer to another?
Dropbox is definitely 1 way to do it. But I generally clean out my playback computers and keeping it very clean and in airplane mode 99% of the time.
One of the greatest engineering marvels that Walt Disney Imagineering has created. Show sets are connected together on a giant moving mechanism that has the ability to go back and forth and lift the scenes up and down behind a massive rear projected screen to bring the story of the United States of America to life.
(0:34) This was taken today at a rehearsal for the July 4th performance at the Salute Stage on the Mall. Those dancers are incredibly lucky to not have mortal injuries. EDIT: This is not actually at the Great American State Fair, but at a rehearsal for a separate event also on the Mall (Salute to America 250, which will be on July 4th).
What fans do you use for open air fog distribution?
I think my best bet are these radial/centrifugal fans. Can they withstand heavy rain? I’m having trouble finding an IP rating on them.
These will be used as an addition alongside duct fans with perforated tubing.
No one was injured, the stage was empty at that moment
I am the technical director in my high school and I’m about to go to my senior year. I want to learn how to actually make it into the technical theater space with a focus on set building, management, and moving set pieces during shows. Can I have some advice for how to get in.
Event Strategies Inc. appears to be the producer of all of these America 250 events, including the stage where the most recent piece of staging fell, almost taking out a chorus line of dancers. Anyone here care to share any experiences?
Good evening all,
I'm an experienced (UK) H&S professional but am completely new to the world of theatre.
I just wanted to reach out to see if there was anything that you guys found useful from a H&S perspective.
This can be anything from an amazing manual handling aid, a super method of supporting with show stops or even just what you found useful from your H&S support.
Cheers!
I've always wondered how festivals pull this off because you'll see a huge artist walk on stage out of nowhere but obviously a lot of people had to know beforehand. There are tour managers, stage managers, security, artist relations, transport, hospitality it feels like there are a hundred opportunities for someone to accidentally leak it.
I remember hearing about a festival where the production team even moved the surprise act to a separate radio channel but people were still able to figure out what was going on because they could scan frequencies.
So how is this usually handled is it just about keeping the circle really small or are there other tricks production teams use to keep routing stage times and arrivals under wraps until the last minute?
Hi there,
I've been considering getting into the tech side of the theatre industry here in Australia (Melbourne, specifically), specifically light/sound operation. I've done some work on community shows and love the collaborative nature and contributing to live performances.
Are there any Aussies here who wouldn't mind me asking them a few questions?
Last year I helped out at one of my school productions with the lights and mics and stuff, and the guy they hired sayd to me I could email him and I could tag along to some work of his over the summer. that was last summer tho and I didnt do that.
ive finished y13 now and cant find a job so thought I might email him and ask if hes doing anything locally I could help with?
would that be really weird? esp as that was like a year and a half ago now
Happens at 34 seconds. are those all access staging road cases I see?
I’m a lighting designer and have more recently (last few years) been working with students. I mentored an undergrad assistant while I designed for the theatre program and worked closely with her in designing her first show for school.
All of that to say, she graduated college and is applying to an ALD apprenticeship that is a pretty big deal regionally. I’m trying to write this letter and struggling because I’ve never done it before.. and all the rec letters I’ve had written for me had to be submitted elsewhere so I’ve never gotten to read them. All of the example letters I see online are for STEM fields, and the only arts examples I’m seeing are for visual arts.
Would appreciate any and all thoughts, I want to do good by her!
Hey everyone,
Hoping that the hive mind can help me with this one. I need to re-tension my grid in my black box. For the life of me, I can't find any information online on how to safely add tension back into the system, and what tools to use. I know that you need to do one side, and then the other to keep tension even, but wanted to also make sure that its the correct procedure.
I'm mainly trying to figure out how to stop the wire rope from just spinning, and not tightening, while I attempt to tighten said wire.
Also yes I know, contact the installer/manufacture. Trying to do this myself and save a little money if its possible and safe to do so. Thanks y'all!
Edit: Just wanted to say that at the end of the day, I'm going to do what ever is safest, which is going to be to hire a company to come in and do this. Liability insurance and all that fun stuff too...
This is my first time doing summerstock. Its at a great company, the pay is fine, the housing is okay, I love my roommates and have made many friends. And yet I am still miserable. Its very far from home, where my family and partner and pets are, in a climate i dont thrive in, with no AC or time for escape. I am debiltatingly homesick, hyper sensitive from Long distance relationship and now im having issues at work. Is this just not for me? Its been over a month and everyone tells me ill get used to it but the more time that goes on the worse I feel. Every time I start to get better something else bad happens. I never thought that i would feel this way or have such a hard time, it has me questioning if I should be in this field at all. Please be honest.
Hey everyone,
First off — I know this is more niche than what usually lands here, so bear with me. 😅
For anyone who's never touched live events: show-control software runs the technical side of a show. Instead of a sound op hitting play, a lighting op pushing a fader and a video op rolling a clip — all at slightly wrong moments — you build one ordered list of cues, and the operator just presses GO. Each GO fires the next thing: play a sound, roll a video, fade the lights, send a MIDI/OSC message, and so on. It's everywhere in theatre, concerts and corporate events.
The de-facto standard for this is QLab — it's genuinely great, but it's macOS-only and proprietary (and gets pricey once you need the paid tiers). If you're on Windows or Linux, or you just want something open, there isn't much that's actually good.
So I built Inkue: a free, open-source, cross-platform (Windows / macOS / Linuxs QLab's vocabulary and workflow closely so operators feel at home, but it'sGPLv3 and runs natively everywhere.
What it does today (v1.0):
- 14 cue types: Audio, Video, Image, Group, Wait, Stop, Fade, OSC, MIDI, Light (DMX over sACN + Art-Net), Mic, Timecode (MTC/LTC), Text, Memo
- Sample-accurate low-latency audio (WASAPI/ASIO on Windows, CoreAudio, ALSA)
- Flicker-free video/image output via libmpv
- The boring-but-critical live stuff: crash-recovery autosave, a pre-show "check workspace" pass, audio device-loss fallback
- OSC remote control, a timecode engine, DMX lighting
Tech, since this is r/opensource: Rust backend (real-time audio engine + show logic), React/TypeScript frontend, tied together with Tauri v2. The audio callback is lock-free — zero allocations, locks or I/O — and video runs through libmpv's OpenGL render API.
It just hit 1.0 and it's a solo project, so it's young: the binaries aren't code-signed yet, and there are surely rough edges and bugs or things not working as intended. But it's genuinely usable.
A bit of honesty: I'm a sound engineer by trade, not a developer. Inkue is almost entirely vibe coded — built hand-in-hand with AI, feeling my way through the architecture rather than knowing it cold. I know that'll make some people here wince, and that's fair.
But I'm genuinely proud of it today, because it means my ideas can actually take shape and ship — in a life that's already full, where time is the scarcest thing I've got. A few years ago a project like this just wouldn't have existed; I'd never have found the hundreds of hours to learn all this from scratch. Now it's a real 1.0 I can put in front of people. That still feels a little wild to me.
GitHub: https://github.com/FonograF/Inkue
I'd love feedback — whether you're a dev who wants to poke at the Rust/Tauri s someone who actually runs shows and can tell me what's missing. Contributions welcome.
Cheers!
Antenna topper? Silicon ring? Coloured tape? Elaborate paint job? What you got going on?
Hey y'all,
I work as an AV tech and production manager, and we routinely have to weigh down our gear with sandbags. All of our sandbags are zippered pouches with a ziplock bag of sand inside. recently the ziplock bags have been ripping and the sand spills everywhere. Anyone have any ideas on how to better package the sand to go in pouches?
Thank you!