LSC
MaXim Lighting Console
Of all the areas of technical production that I get to serve in, lighting is probably my favorite. There’s something about how lighting, combined with the placement of softgoods, can dramatically affect the mood of a room of people that is just plain fun to work with. So, I was quite excited to have the opportunity to test-drive the LSC MaXim LP lighting console. And even better, it arrived in time for my church’s first-ever Christmas production, for which I was the volunteer LD (lighting designer).
Overview
Supporting two universes of DMX, The MaXim LP console
is designed with one-off, on-the-fly operation in mind. Extensive support for
scenes and automated fixtures, and a well-thought-out flexibility in
operating modes makes this deceivingly simple-looking console an exciting and
powerful tool. The unit I was provided has 72 faders, which can be configured
in a two-scene preset mode; a 72-channel wide mode; and a scene-oriented mode.
There are three banks of faders: the yellow bank of 36 faders is dedicated to
controlling DMX channel levels or automated fixture intensities. The red bank
of faders contains another 36 faders, which can be used to control either the
same 36-channels as the yellow bank when in two-scene preset mode; another 36
DMX channels or fixture intensities when in wide mode; or as storage repositories
for 36 scenes, cue stacks or chases. Additionally, there’s a small blue
bank of faders that can also be used to store scenes, cue stacks and chases.
But wait – the red bank and the blue bank have nine pages of memory available to them. This means there is a total of 324 locations to store cue stacks, scenes or chases with the red bank of faders, and 54 locations with the blue bank.
The console also has a master section, containing master faders for the yellow, red and blue banks; a pair of fade-in/fade-out time faders; a stack playback section with master fader, forward and reverse step controls, a flash button and a step/stop button; and a function control section with an LED screen, and numerous control buttons to create, edit, delete and copy cue stacks, scenes and chases.
If you order it so equipped, the MaXim comes with the PaTPad – a touchpad/display device for working with automated lighting fixtures. The PaTPad enables you to patch in moving lights to a control channel, enabling the intensity of the light to be controlled with a fader, and the rest of the parameters to be manipulated by the PaTPad. Up to 36 fixtures can be controlled by the MaXim LP model I evaluated. This has been doubled to 72 fixtures in the new v2.00 software, as you can now patch automated lights to the red faders in wide mode.
In addition to the two instruction manuals for the console (one for the overall console; the other specifically addressing the PaTPad), LSC provides a useful training video on CD-ROM which walks the user through how to use the features of the console—excellent for visual learners.
Taking It for a Spin…
One of the first things I appreciated
about the MaXim is its quick learning curve. Patching the console was very intuitive—you
select a DMX address, and press the Flash/Assign (F/A) button for the
channel you want to assign it to.
One quickly notices a helpful feature of the console—each button has a red LED embedded in it, which helps guide you through the legal keystrokes for any operation. Press the Record Scene button, and all the lights for the red and blue faders blink twice; then the lights for those faders that are already programmed remain lighted, making selection of an unused fader simple. All operations of the MaXim function like this, guiding the user through the steps required to complete an operation.
Another feature I love is the variety of ways fade times can be controlled through the MaXim. For a scene or a stack, fade-in and fade-out times can be set to be manual (following the movement of the fader); hard-programmed into the scene (for instance, a three-second fadein time and a six-second fade-out time); or controlled by the time faders in the master section. When I used the console for our Sunday morning services, I quickly fell in love with the ability to pick fade times via the time faders based on the moment, and then move the scene faders to the desired intensity and let the console control the fades. It gave the lighting for the services a smoothness that is difficult to achieve with manual fades, but kept me in charge of setting the timings, even at the last moment before the transition.
As the first event I used the console for was our Christmas production, I immediately focused on programming commonly needed groups of lighting areas into scenes, and used those to start programming a cue stack for the event. Cue stack creation was also very easy, as is editing the cue stack to make adjustments to particular steps. However, one idiosyncrasy did pop up that drove me crazy for a few hours. My first cue had house lights up at 100%, and specified a fadeout time of 30 seconds. My second cue was to bring house lights down to 20% while bringing up the center stage apron lights in five seconds. No matter what I did, I could not get the fade-down of the house lights to happen in the specified 30 seconds – it always took five seconds. The explanation from the company’s tech support is that the fade-out time is only used if the channel is going to 0% - otherwise, it’s considered a fade-in (even if it is decreasing in intensity). To work around this, I needed to change cue two to leave the house lights up; and make cue three fade the house lights down to 20% with a fade-in time of 30 seconds. I found this very counter-intuitive, but once you know how the console “thinks”, you can deal with it. I’d like to see an option added to the setup function of the console to cause lights decreasing in intensity to always follow the fade-out timing.
Automated Fixtures
As my home church isn’t equipped with
moving lights, I took the console to both New Horizon Church in Durham, North
Carolina and Cathedral of His Glory in Greensboro, North Carolina to make use
of their moving light rigs. My thanks go out to both churches for their assistance
in this review.
The MaXim, when equipped with the PaTPad option, is also a very effective moving light controller. Through the PaTPad, you can grab individual or groups of fixtures, and set parameters via its touch-sensitive control surface. Fixture patching is straight-forward through the normal patching mechanism, and LSC has an extensive fixture profile library on their website. You select the starting DMX address for the fixture, select the fixture type from the library, and press the F/A button of the channel you wish to assign the fixture to. The channel fader will control the intensity of the fixture; other attributes are controlled via the PaTPad.
To work with a fixture, you press the Get button on the PaTPad, and press the F/A button of the channel the fixture is assigned to. The attributes appear on the PaTPad, and control of those attributes occurs by simply running a pointy object (such as your fingernail or a PDA stylus) across the horizontal control the attribute is assigned to. If the fixture has more than six parameters, the parameters are layered on the PaTPad in an intuitive way. Multiple fixtures can be manipulated simultaneously if desired. To make programming simpler, the MaXim enables parameters to be stored into palates for later recall.
To store a scene with the attributes of the fixture, you press the Store or Store+Level button on the PaTPad, followed by the F/A button for the red or blue fader on which you want to store the scene. If programming a cue stack, the Store+Level button stores the parameters and channel levels into the next step of the cue stack.
Editing scenes that contain moving light parameter data is equally easy – you press the Edit key followed by the F/A button of the scene you which to edit, and the PaTPad automatically gets loaded with the fixtures in use in that scene. Editing parameters for any of the fixtures automatically edits the data stored in the scene.
However, editing moving light parameters in a cue stack initially appeared to be a different story. None of the documentation mentioned editing moving light parameters saved into the step of a cue stack, and I was completely unsuccessful in figuring out how to do this. With help from LSC technical support, I learned that, yes, editing moving light parameters in a cue stack is indeed supported, and the procedure given to me by technical support worked perfectly. It’s odd that the PaTPad manual almost ignores the use of moving lights with cue stacks – something hopefully they will address in the next revision of the manual.
In Conclusion
Overall, I really enjoyed using the MaXim. It’s
easy to use, has far more features than I was able to explore, and meets a variety
of needs. For most church environments, operating lighting on-the- fly is common,
as there often isn’t enough time to work out the minute details of the
service, and then program the cues. This console excels in that mode, and the
cue stack functionality is more than sufficient for many church situations.
The console is rugged and well-constructed. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend
this console to my church when we’re ready to upgrade our lighting system.
And with an MSRP of $6,376 ($4,452 without the PaTPad if you don’t use
moving lights), the console is a good value for the church environment.
