MA Dot2 Review
Click here to check out the review on the actual MA Dot2 Blog, written by Thor from AMBERSPHERE SOLUTIONS and Myself.
On the day the dot2 range was announced back in March last year ,our inboxes (as I am sure the inboxes of all the MA distributors around the world) got completely flooded! People wanting pricing, spesific quotes and info in general. One of those emails were from Joel Luther-Braun.
Joel is a student at Twyford Church Of England High School and they were looking into adding another console to their inventory. As he is the most technical of the students there. He was tasked with looking into options.
For those of you who work in sales, you know it can be tricky with schools when it is the student’s that get in touch. On one hand, they are usually much more technical than the teachers. But on the other hand, they don’t have the authority to make decisions. And many times, they would have gotten in touch because they are curious and the school doesn’t even know anything about it. Nevertheless, they all deserve the same level of attention and respect. They might not be in a position to make decisions now. But who’s to say where they might be in 5-10 years!
A couple of emails back and forth with Joel and it became apparent that he knows more than just a little bit about consoles… As I found out while talking to Chrissy from our training team he has also done the gMA2 training with us previously and from what she was saying. He picked it up very quick.
Fast forward to October last year and Joel got in touch again. I had promised him they could borrow a console from us at a point when they had a chance to really try it out. So he got in touch asking if there was any chance of borrowing a gMA2 Light(!) Naturaly because he knows the gMA2 and he so far had never used the dot2. As chance would have it, because of training courses we didn’t have any gMA2 consoles available. He was a bit hesitant to use a dot2 as he feared it would not have the features he needed. We discussed it back and forth a bit and he agreed that it would be worth having a closer look at it.
Bellow is Joel’s thoughts on the dot2 experience. It’s completely unedited, (apart from some grammatical errors he fixed when I said I wanted to use it for this post! Got to love that level of detail! )
It’s fairly long, so I sugest you get your self a nice cup of coffee, or if you are anything like my Directors. Tea. Made with boiling hot water thank you very much. And fresh milk! Enough fresh milk. But not to much milk of course… And cake! There must be cake! And I will stop waffling and hand you over to Joel! Enjoy!
Recently I had a hands on demo with the DOT2 desk, new from MA Lighting. The desk was used on two of our biggest events in the school year. The first event it was used on was Sing Gospel, a gospel concert held in a local church, the second event was our annual in-house concert, the popular music competition, known to students as the PMC.
When I found out that I was going to be using the desk for the week I was quite sceptical. I hadn’t heard anything particularly positive about the desk as people who are used to larger desks felt that it was missing many features. However after demoing the desk I was really happy with its ease of use and flexibility. MA is offering a desk that, even in this early stage of development is stable, reliable and capable of doing pretty much anything you want in spite of its currently limited feature set.
Before starting the week, Thor Saether from AmberSphere Solutions, provided me with training on the DOT2. What surprised me was how easy to us it is. Throughout the week we ran beta software which enabled us to use some features that were new to the desk. If you have any previous experience on any other intelligent lighting desk, you can easily transition onto the DOT2. You may need to get used to how the Germans title things such as a chaser being a chase but this is minor detail and doesn’t affect the ease of use. Being a school, there were students that hadn’t the faintest idea how DMX and lighting systems worked. A few days before the arrival of the DOT2, the students had a brief tutorial on our current lighting desk, an ETC Ion. Following this, the students were quick to pick up the controls and syntax of the DOT2 allowing them to create complex scenes with very basic knowledge of the desk. The DOT2 is definitely a simple to use, powerful control desk.
Having only been released in April, I was worried that there would be a lot of functionality missing. What I hadn’t realised is that MA had incorporated a command line into the DOT2. Thor showed me the command line for the DOT2 which contains some of the functionality available in the GrandMA series, such as MA Tricks. This came in very helpful during programming for both shows. For both events I used a DOT2 XL-F, a B-Wing and a DOT2 Node 1k (being used as additional DMX outputs on the stage floor). I ended up assigning MA Tricks to some of the buttons on my B-Wing for easy access and to speed up the time of programming.
Sing Gospel is the biggest external event that the students provide tech for, the church where it is held has no existing lighting setup, so an entire rig was put in for the show. Since Sing Gospel and the PMC were on the same week, we hired equipment that we could use in both events.
MA integrated the much loved colour picker with the fader module from the GrandMA series into the DOT2. It was easy choosing colours for the LED fixtures however choosing colour for the lights that contained a colour wheel was a lot more difficult. Although you could choose the colours via the colour picker there was no way to see the inbuilt colours inside the fixture on the colour wheel; they were not even highlighted on the colour picker which is a feature that I love from other lighting desks. It would be good to see this implemented in a future firmware update. The Node 1k was used as DMX output behind the stage, which was connected to the desk via a Cat5 cable. There was no latency between the desk and the node, it worked seamlessly. We did have an issue where the Ethernet cable was pulled out of the node (there was no locking pin on the RJ45). This was obviously not a fault with the node, however, as there was no indication on the desk that the node had been removed from the session, it could present a bigger issue if unnoticed. Luckily it did not happen during the show but during programming. It would be good if a warning system could be implemented in future updates.
Sing Gospel was mostly busked due to many of the acts not being able to make sound checks. So I created group, colour and gobo presets so that I could quickly change the mood if need be from the base looks that I created and stored on faders. The preview button on the console came in handy when I wanted to create a new look without it showing on stage. I created an empty cue and previewed the empty cue. This allowed me to create a look on the DOT2 3D visualizer without it showing on stage. During the interval when there was a basic look on stage, I was able to program some more looks without it outputting live. The preview feature is something that I wish more desks had because it was extremely useful. For Sing Gospel the DOT2 was perfect and outperformed the expectations I had of it. It was easy and quick to program even with very little rehearsal time.
The second event that the Dot2 was used on was the PMC. The PMC had a larger rig compared to Sing Gospel since we had existing lighting which we then expanded. Since the PMC is based inside a school with students helping run the technical side of the event, there were students who we couldn’t allow to use the desk. Luckily, although not currently documented anywhere, the DOT2 has a lock function implemented. When I was around I showed some of the students how to use the DOT2 and they picked it up extremely quickly and built some nice looking scenes from the simple knowledge that they had gained operating the desk.
The DOT2 was set up to use the maximum amount of universes (8 universes), for the event. Two were run over physical DMX lines in the venue, another 2 were used via the Node that we were supplied with, and the final 4 were outputted as ArtNet to some of the lights.
The 4 ArtNet universes were used for 34 SGM LT-100 LED strips which covered the ceiling. I had never used ArtNet prior to getting the DOT2 so I wasn’t completely sure whether I would encounter problems. Setting up the desk to output ArtNet and choosing which universes to output was a breeze, with no problems. When using a network switch in the control room, we did have a problem which for some reason locked the console into a boot loop during rehearsals. This was a fairly big issue, as there was no autosave on the console (another future update?), luckily I had backed up a few minutes prior to the crash so very little work was lost. Once the switch was unplugged from the desk, the desk did its final reboot and then continued to work as normal. I can confidently say that it was not a problem with the desk as removing the switch stopped the crashing.
I set up the desk so that each page of faders contained a different act so that I could keep the looks separate for each act. What I really found useful during programming was having the ability to assign commands to physical buttons on the button wing. I used the button wing primarily for MATricks and for any flashes of different fixtures. I also added things like house and judge lights to the buttons.
Throughout the show the DOT2 kept strong and performed amazingly without any struggle or hiccups. After the show several people came to the back and said how high we’d raised the bar this year. My colleagues and I all agreed that with the current features set in the DOT2, it is able to produce amazing shows. The ease of use during programming and the quick controls allowed for different looks to be created easily and efficiently. The nature of all of the events that we do means that having a desk that is good for busking is essential and the DOT2 certainly allows for this very nicely.
The DOT2 is a simple yet powerful desk. The intuitive interface make it easily navigable. MA has provided enough flexibility to create nice looks quickly without having the complication seen on other desks. All the features that you need are a button press away which makes it very fluid to operate and program on. The DOT2 also has the power to control everything from simple rigs to complex rigs without compromising the desk’s performance. During the time that I had the DOT2 there were a few features that I felt were missing, however, I imagine that some of these will be added in future updates. All of the features that it had were stable and reliable. MA has not rushed ahead creating features that only partly work or released a version containing lots of bugs. They have focused on making the DOT2 reliable and a solid desk to work with, which really shows. From what I have been told about future releases I am really looking forward to the new features that are to be introduced to the DOT2. The DOT2 is a desk that I was very comfortable using with only a week of practice. If I were to be given a DOT2 to work with again I would be more than happy as it is an excellent desk to use.
Joel is 16! Have a look at the pictures here from PMC (courtesy of Martin Kantauskas of AIVIA Photography) and here from Sing Gospel (Photo: David Lindsay) and let that sink in! He got into lighting when he was 13!
.My prediction… We’ll bee seeing more of his work over the next years! You can check out his website for a bit more info on what he gets up to! http://www.mediadude.co.uk He is also one of the nicest guys you’ll ever work with!
