Avolites is one lighting company I've not had much experience with. Based in London, England, Avolites manufactures a range of dimmers, lighting consoles, and other lighting accessories. In this review, we'll be taking a look at the Tiger Touch lighting console.
The Tiger Touch has four universes of DMX built into the console, and can be expanded through Ethernet connectivity using ArtNet (a network protocol that enables the transmission of DMX data over the network to ArtNet-compatible devices). The console comes with a touch-screen display built into the console, and can be expanded with an external LCD monitor for displaying additional windows.
It's a full-featured moving light console that supports pallets of light attributes such as position, color, etc.; it also has numerous places to store pallet entries, cues, chases and cue lists. For example, there are up to 1,000 soft-key playbacks (accessible via the touch screen); 60 pages of 10 playback faders; up to 6,000 virtual fixture handles to allow quick selection of fixtures; and configurable windows for up to 1,000 buttons within each window, such as color, position, group, macro.
For programming and control, there are three encoder wheels for adjusting attributes of your fixtures, a numeric keypad for direct data entry, and numerous mode and function buttons to give you quick access to the Tiger Touch's many features.
The console was easy to set up-like any console, there's a learning curve, but the manual presents the functions of the console in a logical order.
Patching the console consists of pressing the patch button to enter the patching mode; selecting whether you desire to patch a dimmer or a specific fixture type; and entering in address and label information. You then press a handle in the fixtures window on the touch screen, and the fixture is assigned to this button. The next available address in the patching parameters automatically gets incremented by the number of addresses that the selected fixture type consumes, so patching consecutive fixtures merely requires updating the label you want to be displayed on the handle button, and touching the next handle button. Pretty simple. And if you're patching 32 house lights to one handle, you don't even need to update the label-just enter the starting address info and label, and touch the handle button 32 times to get those 32 consecutive dimmers assigned to that handle.
For this review, staff at Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, N.C., was kind enough to let me use their auditorium, which has standard dimmers; Rosco iCue moving mirrors; Coemar iSpot Flex fixtures; and Wybron color scrollers. I had no problem patching in my dimmers and Coemar iSpot Flex fixtures, and even multi-part fixtures were reasonably easy to patch. For the Wybron color scrollers, I could easily patch both the scroller device as well as the dimmer to the same handle, so it gets treated as one fixture. However, I did run into an issue with patching a Rosco iCue-it would not allow me to patch both the moving mirror device and a dimmer to the same handle. I ended up having to use two handles for the pan/tilt and dimmer attributes of the fixture. Creative Stage Lighting, the U.S. distributor for Avolites, was quick to supply an updated profile that enabled putting both the dimmer and pan/tilt attributes on the same handle.
Notes on programming
The Tiger Touch has several ways you can program it. For churches that tend to be more "on the fly" with their services, various looks can be programmed into playback buttons on the touch screen, or into the physical cue and preset playbacks on the console. This allows you to quickly set looks at the touch of a button. And when you program devices such as moving lights into a playback fader, the attributes like beam shape, color and pan/tilt position change to their full value as soon as you move the fader up to 1%; the dimmer attribute of the fixture follows the fader position. So you can easily avoid watching the lights move into position by first bumping up the fader just a little and pausing before bringing up the intensity by moving the fader the rest of the way up.
Palettes are an important feature in any moving light console, and the Tiger Touch provides excellent support. Palettes let you program attributes for a group of fixtures into a palette entry and use them in future programming steps. For example, you can set all your moving lights to the correct attributes to light up the pulpit and program a palette entry for this. Then, whenever you need one of your moving lights to be set for the pulpit, you just select that light and press the podium palette entry. That light instantly moves into the right position for lighting the podium.
Now, let's say you've programmed a cue list (a set of lighting looks in a list that playback in their programmed order). If you manually program in positions such as the podium whenever a light needs to point at that location, and then the position of the podium changes, you'd have to update each of your cues that have a moving light directed at the podium. But if you use a palette entry for the podium position, all you need to do is update the podium palette entry for each moving light, and now your cue list will work perfectly again.
So, theoretically, if you program palette entries for all your different musicians, you can easily update your standard cues for your services by simply updating the palette entries when you rearrange the stage. This is a huge time saver.
Programming a cue onto a control or playback handle on the display is as easy as setting your lights to the levels and attributes you desire, pressing the record cue button, and touching the control where you want the cue to go. Then, you can adjust cue settings such as fade times, displayed handle name, etc. Creating a list of cues is handled in a similar way-each time you touch the handle button a new entry in the cue list is created.
A pretty cool feature of the Tiger Touch is its built-in visualizer-it will create a 3D model of your plot automatically in a rectangular room based on your fixture patch. You can move the fixtures around in the room to put them in roughly the same position as in your real room and get a reasonable view of what your lighting rig is doing with minimal effort. Definitely an improvement over the basic raw-data output window that other consoles offer.
So, what's the best environment for this console?
I'd say the ideal environment for this console is a large church using intelligent fixtures, one that tends to be on the dynamic side-not always following a set order in its services. The Tiger Touch, with its many ways of creating cues and accessing them quickly, would excel in this environment, allowing you to quickly change between dynamic looks. While it supports cue lists (and many of them running simultaneously), I found it a little awkward to program complicated cue lists. So if you're a church that works more theatrically and runs on cue lists, you'd want to take a look at how the Tiger Touch handles this before making your decision. It can certainly do it-it's just my opinion that this isn't where its primary strengths lie.
The Avolites Tiger Touch is distributed in the United States by Creative Stage Lighting and has an MSRP of $16,100.
