When You Need To Know How Much Power You’re Using
Import a showfile into FocusTrack, and it knows a lot about your show: when each light is on, what level it is at.
Tell FocusTrack about your rig, and it knows the power consumption of each of those lights.
Teach FocusTrack the timing of your cues, and it knows how long each light is up for.
Combine all that information, and you can work out the load of each cue, and the total power consumption of your show.
FocusTrack’s PowerTrack function does exactly that.
Using its knowledge of the rig, it can calculate the static base load of the rig (for all those discharge moving lights that are constantly ‘on’), and the load of each cue state and the total power consumption of your show.
Planning to tour a show? This lets you specify the power you need in each venue based on needs of the actual show lighting, rather than on the total connected load of the rig or a guesstimate of how much of it is used at any time.
Planning to buy some new equipment? Calculate the power used by your show, but then experiment to see how power you’d save if you switched your cyc to LED lighting.
Planning a new building? PowerTrack your recent shows to see how much power you’ve actually been using for production lighting. Then make informed decisions, not just educated guesses.
Of course, if you need to know the precise load, there is no substitute for metering your system. But if you can’t do that - perhaps because your dimmers do not have separate metering from the rest of your building’s electrical system - PowerTrack provides an alternative that will give you figures that are in the right ballpark, including details such as moving lights that are always on but reduce their load when their dimmer is closed. If you like, you can even export the data to turn into graphs or otherwise analyse in tools such as Excel.
PowerTrack is already being used by a number of venues to analyse their power usage, some to see how it could be reduced by swapping equipment, some to see how much power they should specify when designing new venues.
If it could be of use to you, why not give it a go? It’s included, for free, as a standard part of FocusTrack, which you can download here.
Excel chart showing the lighting rig’s load through the show for Children’s Hour at the Comedy Theatre, London, January 2011