Zero 88
Leap Frog Lighting Console
About a year and a half ago I interviewed Lighting Director Jon Griffin for an article for Church Production Magazine. One of the comments he made is that he is recommending a lighting console that is fairly new to the US market to smaller churches using moving lights: the Frog Series of consoles from Zero 88. Among the reasons he stated for recommending this console are its ease of use and volunteer friendliness. Fascinated by the strong recommendation from Griffin, as well as by its relatively low cost (List: $4,300), we requested a console for review. Zero 88, through its US distributor ACT Lighting, was happy to oblige us with a Leap Frog console.
The Leap Frog is a hybrid console, designed for both fixed theatrical fixtures as well as moving light control. It outputs one universe of DMX, and can control 48 conventional fixtures and 24 automated fixtures. It can be used stand-alone with its built-in LCD displays for critical information, or can be connected to a computer monitor for better information feedback (highly recommended). It has 20 pages of 12 submasters for storing scenes, a cue stack, and an effects generator called Fixture Random Output Generator (or F.R.O.G. Coincidence? I think not…).
First Impressions
Upon opening the box, I was quickly impressed
with its well laid-out control surface. The console has its controls placed
quite strategically, with commonly used controls up front and uncluttered. 48
faders for controlling the conventional fixtures are at the back left of the
frog-green control surface. Submasters are neatly placed along the front-left
of the console. Immediately to the right of the submasters are controls for
the cue stack, with a nice, big, blue “go” button
front and center – no question about what to press to advance the cue
stack.
Display and programming controls occupy the space to the right of the cue stack controls, followed by the F.R.O.G controls, and lastly the control wheels for manipulating moving light parameters placed on the far right edge for comfortable, easy access via the right hand. Behind the control wheels are 24 buttons for selecting which moving light fixtures you want to work with, and buttons to control which parameters should be placed on the control wheels.
Starting with Training Wheels
I first used the console sitting
on my living room floor. No, I don’t
have theatrical lights in my living room (although that’s not a bad idea).
However, I wanted to try to get the console patched for the lighting rig
at my church before showing up there Sunday morning.
I did note one oddity as I set it up – there’s no power switch. If it’s plugged in, it’s turned on. Not a big deal, but I do find it strange that there’s no way to turn off the console without unplugging it. Once set up, I broke out the manual, and quickly found the sections on resetting the console and patching in conventional fixtures (my home church has no moving lights). Within a matter of 15-20 minutes I was able to clear out the old data in the demo unit, set up a manual patch for my church’s lighting configuration, and program submasters for the common groupings of lights in use at our church.
One of the things I judge equipment on is how long it takes to figure out how to use it. It was already becoming apparent that Griffin’s assessment of the Frog series is accurate: it’s an easy console to figure out. The manual could be a little more accessible (there’s no index, for example), but I’ve yet to see a lighting console manual that’s not written, at least somewhat, with the assumption that you already know how to use the console. But, this was not a hindrance at all.
Sunday morning, I arrived at the church early expecting to find that perhaps I didn’t get the console properly patched or the submasters didn’t really get programmed the way I expected, and was pleasantly surprised to find that once connected to our DMX cable, everything worked perfectly. No tweaking was necessary. I was quickly ready to run the service how I normally do, using submasters.
First service went perfectly, and at the conclusion of the service I decided to start reading up on how to use the cue stack. It looked simple enough. So proceeding contrary to both my nature and good judgment, I decided to use the 30 minutes between services to see if I could program lighting cues for the second service. In 25 minutes I figured out the cue stack functionality (simply referred to as memories by Zero 88), had the entire service programmed, and had run through the cues to verify they did what I wanted. The second service also went without a hitch. Now that’s my definition of an easy-touse, volunteer-friendly lighting console.
Getting Behind the [Parameter] Wheel
Remaining to be explored
was the moving light side of the Leap Frog. Lacking moving lights at my home
church, I took the console over to Cathedral of His Glory (CoHG) in Greensboro,
North Carolina to use their extensive Robe rig (my thanks to Technical Director
Kenny Brutcher for his assistance and use of the facility). I arrived at 10
AM, not having read a single word in the manual about using it with moving lights.
By 10:45 the Leap Frog was plugged into the CoHG lighting rig and ready to begin
patching. Patching moving lights is done in two steps – first, fixture
types (such as the Robe Spot 575AT) are assigned to the fixture buttons. Once
fixtures are assigned, you go to the patch screen and assign a starting DMX
address to each fixture. This two-step mode confused me a little, but reading
the manual in a little more detail straightened me out. (Yes, I actually read
the directions—please don’t tell anyone,
it’s embarrassing.)
Once patched, simply exploring the buttons on the control surface made it obvious how to work the lights. Pressing a fixture button assigns that fixture to the attribute controls (three wheels and four attribute buttons – brightness, colour (can you tell it’s a UK company?), beam shape and position. Groups of fixtures can be controlled simultaneously by pressing each of the fixture’s selection buttons, or a range of fixtures can be selected by pressing and holding the first button while pressing the button for the last fixture in the range.
Once a fixture is selected, press the brightness button, and the middle wheel controls the brightness of the fixture. Select the position button, and the wheels control pan, tilt and pan/tilt speed. If there are more than three attributes in the fixture for any given category, pressing the position button again (for example) puts the next three position attributes on the wheels. It was highly intuitive, and the wheels are perfectly positioned to be comfortably controlled by the thumb, index and middle fingers.
When first working with moving lights, one quickly realizes how tedious it is moving each light to the desired position. As with other moving light consoles, the Leap Frog has palettes available into which commonly used positions, colors and beam shapes can be programmed. The flash buttons for the channel faders do doubleduty as palette selection buttons; once you have each of your moving lights aimed at a commonly used position, you press and hold the position button, and press and hold for one second one of the channel flash buttons. The position parameters for each light are then stored into the palette slot, making it fast and simple to move any of the lights back to that position merely by pressing and holding the position button and pressing the channel flash button for that position. The same procedure is followed for storing color parameters and beam shape parameters into palettes, with the console being able to store 24 each of positions, colors and beam shapes.
Programming submasters and memories with moving lights is no different than with conventional fixtures – it just works. Editing a cue or submaster is just as simple – hardly anything unexpected happened while working with the console. In fact, after only three hours of working with the console at CoHG, I had several palette entries stored for colors and positions, and programmed a cue stack for an imaginary service—another testament to its ease of use.
As I don’t find effects generators overly relevant to most church applications, I only gave the F.R.O.G functionality a cursory glance. But it also looked easy to operate, and would enable you to get groups of lights doing lots of things in random fashion.
In Conclusion…
With any piece of technology that’s
as involved as a moving light console, there’s far more features and attributes
in the hardware than we have space to talk about in a review. But suffice to
say, this console is well worth looking at for churches wanting a simple-to-use,
volunteer-friendly console for their facility. I think that most of the lighting
system volunteers I’ve
served with would not have any problem learning the console, and would quickly
move from considering moving lights as something to be feared to something
exciting and wonderful. It’s easy, it’s inexpensive, it’s
green. What more could you want?
Jim Kumorek is the managing editor of Church Production and Worship Facilities
magazines.
