Are planetarium laser shows antiquated?

[swamidog]

like this.

Scan through (or in laserium speak, scan glasses) are anything that you might want to put a beam through. Diffraction gratings, art glass, photography special effect filters, and plexiglas with a bit of dulling spray are just a few examples.

Torture (or in laserium speak, dimple tube) is a plexiglas tube with dimples pressed into it. Take a 3/4" tube heat it carefully with a heat gun and push several dimples into the tube at points around the circumference. (experiment with depth and angle - and remember Plexiglas fumes are bad for you.) Let it cool and rotate it on axis at right angle to the laser beams. Ideally the different color beams shouldn't be superimposed. This is one of my all time favorite laser effects. It's especially fun if you have a beam torquer to play with.

[The_Doctor]

Nice. Thanks. Given a stepper motor's repeatability, that could be great. I got some nice shapes out of wired frosted glass, like dragons and lanscapes, etc, really cool images. The trouble I had was repeatability. The idea of setting up a repeatable system to recall an image in demand occured to me, but the idea of using axial rotation didn't. My gimbal idea never got built, far too demanding and expensive, but if I can stick stuff on the end of a stepper motor I might have another shot at this. There is one weakness, the lack of multidimensional movement, but given how much can be had from it, that's worth it. Sliding movement on axis controlled by actuator against spring pressure might be a cheap way to get more motion out of it.

[laserist]

snip
...not saying it needs to be live and different each time, but it needs extra effects. ...

Ok, I'll say it:

IT NEEDS TO BE LIVE!

ASCAP BMI & SESAC are performance rights organizations - They don't give you the right to do synchronization. You have to negotiate those rights with the artist. Good luck or deep pockets are required to play in that game.

[polishedball]

Ok, I'll say it:

IT NEEDS TO BE LIVE!

ASCAP BMI & SESAC are performance rights organizations - They don't give you the right to do synchronization. You have to negotiate those rights with the artist. Good luck or deep pockets are required to play in that game.

So how is it that AVI uses a timeline on a PC to sync the events in there heads. This is done from converting ADAT sync to SMPTE and reading it into the PC to slave the timeline for effects. I know this is how it was done on the Omniscan, and assume similar on the Skylase.

I wish I could get some good video of my effects but they have yet to be camera friendly.

[laserist]

So how is it that AVI uses a timeline on a PC to sync the events in there heads. This is done from converting ADAT sync to SMPTE and reading it into the PC to slave the timeline for effects. I know this is how it was done on the Omniscan, and assume similar on the Skylase.

I wish I could get some good video of my effects but they have yet to be camera friendly.

The planetarium industry has a long history of violating copyrights. Back in my teens many of the images used in the shows were simply photographed out of books. Nobody knew about the copyright implications. Now many major planetariums are parts of Science Centers that have OmniMax or Imax theaters - and have been involved in program development for syndication - This involves a crash course on copyrights. Perhaps AVI has synchronization rights to the music in their shows, I know Laserium did. Laserium was the first company to get permission from the Beatles licensing board to use the Beatles music in a show. (Beatlemania was earlier, but I was told they got the rights through Yoko Ono.) I have no idea what kind of money was involved, but the company slid into bankrupcy over the next few years, and fought their way back out... Many of the shows I've seen over the years have claimed to be live when they obviously weren't more than trivially "live". From the fulldome world - music shows are often distributed without the music to avoid issues with mastering rights (and don't even mention sync rights), and maybe there's a loophole that since the museum didn't actually create the imagery that the synchronization to the music is coincidental. I wouldn't want to build a business on that kind of argument...

[absolom7691]

Brian, out of curiosity, how much of the Laserium shows were recorded? I imagine not much as most of the shows that I saw more than once were not the same except for a few elements.

[laserist]

Brian, out of curiosity, how much of the Laserium shows were recorded? I imagine not much as most of the shows that I saw more than once were not the same except for a few elements.

The Laserium data track consisted of 20 bytes repeated 40 times per second. Its original purpose was frankly to ease the transition between songs, (it's a little embarrassing to forget to drop the scan glasses from the last number… and make it slightly easer to train a laserist because they didn't have to learn housekeeping 101 first!) and to free up the Laserist's hands to do the more creative aspects of the show. So the image sizes and symmetry were controlled by 6 bytes. Course spiral in and out rates and spiral symmetry took up another 3 bytes. Beam torquer and Lissajous rate used up another 2 bytes. (Though I can't even imagine anyone ever turning off the beam torquer override - I certainly never did.) Two more bytes were unassigned, and three bytes were assigned to control the star projector and a couple of SCRs at Griffith so were the next best thing to unassigned. The last four bytes were for house keeping. Selecting and switching between image busses, offset enables, scan kills, diode logic (configured beam path in the optical head.), and some truly stupid stuff that made anything that wasn't intended impossible - the stupid stuff got stripped out before I ever touched a machine. The imagery itself, colormod, chopper, joystick, and joystick rotation, motor speeds, and literally shaking the entire projector during one section of Neptune (Holst) as well as overrides for everything except the diode logic step was under the laserist's control.

Back in the day my shows got pretty tight and evolved more over weeks or months more than from show to show. Today I'm only doing a few shows a week and I'm still searching for my baseline. Last Friday night was my 55th birthday, friends were in the audience, and I found just what I've been searching to do in the 2nd half of "Stairway". It's moments like that…

[absolom7691]

Thanks for sharing that bit. I was always curious about that. If I am ever on that side of the country, I would love to check out your work. I see now where you are coming from about what the most integral part of a show is. It is one thing to program a show completely but something entirely different to run most of the show creation on the fly, to be able to create effects that are not only pleasing but also be able to read the audience to know if they like it too. It would be neat to look into some of the laserist training that was done at Laserium to see how the pros were trained.

[laserist]

Laserist training for Laserium was often more of an apprenticeship kind of thing. There were some laserists that were trained in L.A., but I suspect the greater number were trained in the field as backup laserists. The best of these were moved up as opportunities appeared. Being a Laserist was fun, but it didn't pay all that well - on the other hand you could conceivably have another fulltime job in addition to being a laserist. You certainly needed to have a one if you were a backup.

My situation was a little unusual. I was 16 and working at the McDonnell Planetarium's Bookstore when Laserium premiered in St. Louis. Eventually I went to work for the Planetarium, and among other things ran the stars for the laser shows. So when I applied to become a Laserist at 20 years old, I'd watched roughly 1000 shows by a half dozen different Laserists, and even watched a couple of Laserists in training. It came down to two of us and Steve picked the other guy. After three months of training "the other guy" decided he wasn't ready, and Steve had to tell Scott Gardener in L.A. that "the other guy" wasn't going to be ready for the Southern Tour. Scott asked if Steve knew anybody "who could learn to be a laserist in a week" - Steve was probably a little sheepish when he said - Yah - Brian can…

Now I'd hung around the laserists for four years - and having four older brothers taught me how to stay out of the way. And while my access and understanding of the Mark 6 grew significantly over the years I had never attempted to perform a number let alone an entire show. After three nights of practice Steve watched me "perform" Laserock and pronounced me a Laserist. I said I wasn't good enough yet - He said something like - You will be…

The first installation of the tour was a bit of a disaster. (Well it felt that way at the time - but looking back that's not an unusual feeling ;-) The projector came from a planetarium which will remain nameless. A "want to be" that worked there basically stole the Mark 600 design down to the resistor values. The reason I know is the director of this Planetarium came up to me the night of the premiere and handed me some Xerox copies of some laser components that he'd gotten in the mail. Now they had been redrawn, but every component was in the same location, was the same value, and had the same designation both on the schematics and the board layout. I said, "Yes this is good, it's ours."

Phil Guskin was the tech on my first installation, and he said that it was better that I didn't have the time to polish my show in St. Louis. The projector I had on tour was a Mark 600 and the differences to a Mark 6 were significant. So I discovered much to my surprise that there were things I could do on this "inferior" machine that actually looked better than on a Mark 6. Phil sat at my ankles during the first night's shows with two test probes stuck in his hand because we discovered that if he shorted the input to a comparitor on the spiral card with it's positive supply it would ramp - which it had been down right refusing to do for "a while" - and Laserock was all about spirals. (Turns out a diode that was added to the design to keep the ramp signal from locking up was put in backward - got to test these things!)

Eventually I relocated to L.A. and became Director of Production, Special Projects, and Field Service all at the same time. After about a year of that I woke up one morning and realized that if I stayed I'd need a padded room sooner than later, and that I'd just couldn't see a path to where I wanted to go. You see what I wanted to do was design and build the next generation performance projector, and I just couldn't see that ever happening. It's been 30 years since I left Laser Images, but I've loved Laserium since that first show in 1975.

Fast forward to today. By some freakishly unlikely path I'm doing classic Laserium shows in St. Louis again. I freely admitted that one possible outcome to bringing back Laserium would be the entire city of St. Louis might yawn and go about their business. Or it could be wildly successful from the first night. What I didn't expect was that getting people to realize Laserium was here would be so much harder than in 1975. In '75 we bought some ads and did a ticket give away on KSHE and sold out - Laserium I was still selling out on the weekends when Laserium II premiered 92 weeks later. Today we are all so inundated with advertising that it rarely penetrates at all, but the audience that is showing up loves the shows just like way back when. So while the future isn't certain - it certainly looks bright…

[absolom7691]

That's pretty cool. I had interviewed for Laserium back in 1999. I was in between jobs at the time and thought about how cool it would be to work for Laser Images. I think the going rate at that time was $75 per show. At that point in my life, I just needed to make a bit more money than that given the drive. I lived about 40 miles from Griffith and the drive would have killed me. I was trying to find a part time job that would allow me to do both but alas, I was not able to find one. The full-time job I ended up with had a certain amount of overtime that was unpredictable and would have interfered. I don't know if I was a candidate for the spot or not but I called them back to let them know that I was no longer interested. Looking back now, I should have just sold the car that was burying me in payments and pursued the job further. It was a neat experience though, going through the shop on Havenhurst. I had worked for MWK for almost a year and it was really cool talking with some old school laser guys. The only laser show experience I had back then was just doing some laser work for my old high school with a Laser Illusion's PC Lite driving some G-124s and an XYP-1000 Beamscan that had MWK's GAL-3 scanners because the original scanhead was missing.

Regarding your current show in St. Louis, either you underestimated the nastolgic value of the laser shows that people remembered or people were just waiting for Laserium quality to return to the dome. I would be more inclined to say that it is the latter. My parents were the ones who introduced me to Laserium when they found that I had an interest in lasers. They had been going to Griffth since 1978. About 5 or 6 years ago, my mother was telling me about how she missed the Griffith shows and stated that all laser shows today look the same. The turnout and interest that you are seeing is probably not too surprising if the attendees have the same opinion.

Really interesting story about how you got your start.