antlear

Hi all, interesting read of all your pods so far. As a freelance lighting designer and tech I have played with many fixtures. If you are wanting use LED fixtures then I would say only for colour. Although there are White LED fixtures the brightness Is something that has only really just got comparable but the price is rather high. For traditional white light I would stick to tungsten. You can pick up some decent used lights from places like usedlighting.co.uk If you are looking at LEDs for colour don't go for the cheap ones. Generally anything below around £200 ish generally has a poor diming curve. Brands like Chauvet are perfect for LED lights. Lighting desks: As much as people moan about Zero88 their desks are really good and simple to use. Teachers love the ease of use of them and the build quality is really good. Another really good console worth looking at is the LSC Mantra. If you need Dimmers stick to either Strand or zero88.

The kit you have there is good quality. i have used similar kit to that and have friends who own radio kit like that. The thing that a school buting it will need is radio pc software to play tracks, jingles etc. The software I would recommend is Competa. Competa Playout | vectoraudio.co.uk Competa was sold but is now Free with paid support. The person who wrote Competa is a radio engineer and works/worked for Global radio. I know several ex radio station managers who really rate it... Hope that helps.

I generally advice people to go for Intel Nucs. As great as wifi is a wired connection will always be much better for a digital signage system. If you are wanting to use powerpoint have a look at showpoint ShowPoint | Auto-start Digital Signage Presentations you can put the powerpoint on a server and it will run the latest version.

Having purchased a variety over the years I have found the Numark HF125 https://www.numark.com/product/hf125 to be really robust. on many of the ones already linked to i have found that the cable coming out of the headphones becomes faulty. You can pick the Numark up fairly cheap in bulk and they do last.

Hi @robsonma, What issues are you having and where in Lancashire are you based? Anthony

If you are looking for a solid piece of equipment then the Roland is that. If you want. From a connection point the Roland has lots of options. What the Roland lacks as already mentioned is the resolution which is downgraded to 480p. If you want a unit which can do full hd and even 4k then the Blackmagic Atem range is brilliant, the only downside, every input needs to be the same, so if you have one camera set at 1080p 25fps they all need to be that. The question is what do you want to achieve with a vision mixer. If you are looking to switch between various inputs and resolutions say for a projector then a Seamless switcher from say Kramer is what you would be after. These units take multiple inputs at various resolutions and can upscale them and downscale them to various resolutions. The question still lies what do you want to do/achieve with a vision mixer. Knowing a bit more will help with giving advice. Hope you find what you are looking for.

Hi i have had a look at what you want to achieve and as great as an IDR is it sounds very over the top. I would instead look at VS-4X - Single Output - Kramer Electronics. This gives you 4 selectable inputs. Alongside this I would add a small rackmount mixer at the stage end. This would allow you to have level control on the laptop and also allows you to add a microphone. Anthony

In one school I worked in we used to buy Logitech Harmony remotes. We found that there were a lot of profiles already available for various projector makes and models. They are not the cheapest but are a bigger remote and are less likely to be lost.

I have used various serif software and for the money it is really good. Depending on how complicated the videos need to be windows movie maker maybe your best bet.

That rather surprises me that Stage electric have said that. Installations in a sports hall can be quite fun. There are ways and means to do them and things to put equipment in. Audio is the most difficult as sports halls have really bad acoustics. What are they wanting to use audio for? If the audio is for speech then this makes it more fun as the louder it gets in there the less clear the speech will be. So for example if you have 1000 people you don't want 2 speakers at the front blasting volume, you will want a distributed system with more speakers covering the width /length of the room. So i am guessing that you have identified a wall that you want to use as the projection area. One option could be to have a ultra short throw projector which would be 1 closer to the wall and 2 easier to build a cage for. You could then have a electric drop down screen. There are various options to have the projector on a dropdown method. If you had a fixed projector in the middle of a room in a cage you would want it not on a single pole as if cage gets knocked then this would much it on the pole and take it out of alignment. From an audio point I would me more inclined to go with tight in the corner potentially looking at options from K Array Install Hope that helps if you want any help feel free to message me.

Hi just wondering if you have sorted this yet?

The Headphones already mentioned are fairly good. I have been buying these recently for the music department and when bought in bulk i have got them for around the £3.00 -£4.00 mark. They feel solid and are being used lots Numark HF125 Professional DJ Headphones

Sounds like a good idea to me, I guess you could then adjust profiles for each year group as they get older and if they need more access to various websites.

I generally use Brackets Brackets - A modern, open source code editor that understands web design. Notepad and notepad ++

Most security camera systems are fairly easy to install especially if you have a good it setup as you can then just get IP cameras.