Tuesday, 22 April 2014 saw Prosound host a day-long training session on the ETC EOS range of lighting consoles in their demo room, presented by UK-based lighting designer Declan Randall. Randall is one of around eight registered console trainers in the UK and while he lives and works there, he is a South African by birth which made the move to bring him here a natural course.

Consoles covered included the EOS Ti, GIO and ION platforms. The EOS Ti is ETC’s flagship lighting control desk in the EOS range with the GIO and ION models following in descending order of size. However, while the sizes of the consoles vary, the software employed is identical across all models, making cross migration from one model to another a seamless exercise.

“[The EOS platform] is not a platform that is particularly popular here’, says Randall, “whereas in the UK it’s pretty much the industry standard. So the training was a partly moving those who already own the desk along a little bit and introducing the platform to those who are unfamiliar with it.’

When asked why he thought the console was not yet as popular as other consoles in South Africa, Randall explained that it’s because it is very much a “theatre based console’.

“Yes, it’ll do the live events, it ran the Olympics, etc, but its logic approach is very much theatre-based. Of course the ETC Source Fours are pretty much everywhere so certainly in the States and UK it is absolutely the theatre console of choice. It just thinks the way we think.’

The training was split into two sessions: 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 17:00.

The morning session covered such topics as console navigation and display settings, patching, channel control and cue recording, sub-masters and cue playback. The afternoon session covered patching moving lights; working with movers, programming and control; working with palettes, groups and presets; using the colour picker and LEDs and finally, effects.

“It (the training) was quite broad-strokes but I think I gave everyone a good overview of the basic workings and philosophies of the console’, says Randall.

ETC is distributed by Prosound group company T&A Lighting in South Africa. For more information, visit www.prosound.co.za.