The new Arena from Avolites is a self-contained lighting console designed for larger venues. It sports built-in touch-enabled video screens to give you access to its programming and playback capabilities. The surface features 40 playback faders with LCD displays to show their current programmed function and status. While you can connect an external video monitor to the console, the built-in displays are quite effective in letting you program the console without additional monitors. This helps reduce the distraction factor for the attendees if your tech booth is in the middle of the room.
Other important features include: 20 programmable macro executor buttons; three attribute encoders, four playback encoders, a 15.6-inch main touch screen with a seven-inch secondary touch screen, an internal four-port managed gigabyte Ethernet switch for distributing lighting network protocols such as ArtNet, Titan Net and streaming ACN; eight physical DMX output jacks; and support for up to 64 universes of DMX via Titan Net—16 universes out of the box at a minimum.
Arena is a full-featured moving light console with all the capabilities you'd expect in a moving light console like palettes, groups, cues, effects, triggering from timecode or audio cues, etc. And suffice it to say that all these functions work well and are pretty intuitive. So, instead of using the limited space we have for the review in going over these basics, let's focus on some of the features that make Arena unique and interesting.
Initial Impressions
The Arena's construction is substantial and clearly designed to withstand the rigors of touring. The buttons are solid and have good tactile feedback—you know you've pressed a button on this console. Faders, wheels and knobs all have a very solid feel to them. I expect this console would hold up for a very long time. It might even withstand a church youth group.
The screens are easy to read without glowing in the dark like a nuclear detonation. This provides good usability without the distraction factor for the attendees.
Cool Features
The Locate and Highlight features are very nice in the Arena. Select a group of fixtures, press the Locate button, and they all go to their default position, color and intensity. Press Highlight, and then use the fixture + and—buttons to scroll through the fixtures you selected. All fixtures go to their “low light” state except the one that's the currently the active Highlight fixture. And in Highlight mode, while all the fixtures remained selected, only the highlighted fixture is affected by the attribute editor. So, this makes it really fast to zip through and program palette positions for moving lights. It's a very effective feature.
One feature I've not noticed before in other consoles is Unfold. This allows you to take a cue list or chase and have the individual cues or chases transferred to the row of 10 faders directly under the main touch screen. If you have more than 10 cues, it utilizes additional pages for those faders. You can then edit the contents of any of these faders, and they update the cue that was unfolded onto them. When done, press the Unfold button again, and those faders return to their programmed functions.
Moving or copying items from one control on the console to another is quite simple and helpful to re-arrange your cue lists and chases in a more logical manor once you're done programming your service.
When programming moving lights, most of us have accidentally had one fixture turned in the opposite direction from the others to reach a mark, and then when programming a move, it has to spin all the way around? Arena has a “flip” function that will take the selected light and spin it to reach approximately the same position. You'll need to tweak it a little, but it gets the fixture moved around quickly, and you can apply it to several fixtures at once. Love it.
When programming cues, you can switch between the attribute wheels setting values or setting delay and fade times for those attributes. This makes programming custom timings easy and quick. And this may seem a little silly, but I like the scrollbars on the touch-screen windows. I've worked with some consoles where it's hard to get hold of the scrollbar because it's so thin, and this creates a lot of frustration. Avolites has a thin scrollbar, but it also has a little “handle” that makes it easy to manipulate with your finger. It's a nice added touch.
There are some great options for selecting fixtures as well. Let's say that you look out at the stage and see one light that's way too hot—you know most lights are at 40%, but this one is much brighter. And you're not sure which one it is. Press SelectIf @ 50 Through, and all fixtures at or over 50% will be selected. Turn down the intensity wheel, and you're done. You don't even need to figure out which light it actually was. Palettes for attributes are easy to create, and the Arena offers some nice labelling options to make them easily identifiable. One of the cooler features allows you to draw a picture using your finger on the touch screen, and that picture becomes the legend for the palette entry. Recording is as quick as setting some attributes and touching an unused button in a palette window.
Palette entries can be labelled with a textual name, but they can also be labelled via sketching a picture with your finger. This results in graphic labels that are quick to locate. The quick sketch option can also be used with the pixel mapping function, where the console will output lighting levels to a matrix of fixtures based on a graphic picture. You can also create palette entries for just time duration. Do you have a set of cue timings (in delay, fade in time, out delay, fade out time, etc.) that you expect to use often in a show? Create a palette entry for it, and it's at your fingertips.
When applying a palette, you can manually enter a fade-in time and an overlap percentage before pressing a color palette button, and Arena will apply that palette using the specified times. So, you could enter an overlap percentage of 20%, and a fade time of 10 seconds, and the fixtures will fade to the color of that palette entry one at a time with a 20% time overlap. Great for on-the-fly show execution and doing a color wash sweep and not even having to program it in advance.
So, you've selected a group of fixtures and set some attributes, are about to record a cue, and realized you missed a fixture. No problem—select the fixture, pick the Align Fixture function, and select one of the other fixtures that is closest to what you want this new fixture to be doing. It'll copy the attribute settings onto the new fixture. Tweak a little to dial that fixture in exactly how you want it, and you're good to go.
I found the effect generator very intuitive, which is rather unusual for me. It was easy to add an effect using stock patterns provided by Avolites, or create a custom effect. Deleting effects from a cue was also simply and intuitive.
You can also do audio direct from the console. While I did not test this feature, WinAmp is built into the desk, and a fixture personality that controls WinAmp parameters such as volume, EQ, playlist, track, etc., all from the encoder wheels just like a moving light. WinAmp can then be programmed into cues just like a moving light. There is a stereo output jack on the back of the desk which can be run into your PA system. This is great for controlling sound effects and click tracks that are tightly cued with your lighting.
Summing it Up
The Arena is clearly a powerful console, and I am impressed with its construction, ease-of-use and stability. I didn't encounter any problems using the system—no bugs, not blips, no errors.
However, the downloadable PDF manual for the console does have a number of problems. In particular there are key words missing out of key sequence examples which make it difficult to know what to do to achieve a function. I believe this was a problem in converting the manual to a PDF document. And in some cases the button press sequences described for a function were not accurate—I expect that the software has changed but the documentation isn't keeping up. In most cases I was able to figure out what to do. They are working on revising the manual for the next release; hopefully the conversion to PDF will work better so that the manual is more usable.
With an MSRP of $21,995, the Arena isn't for every house of worship. However, the Titan software it runs is the same as for Avolites' other console models, and if you don't need the capacity of the Arena, it's worth checking out the other offerings. In addition, a PC version of the Titan software is available and can be downloaded and used on a trial basis.
List Price: $21,995
