Weekend Tron Dance with lasers

[mystery123]

Hi guys,

here is the last show we did with lasers and Tron Dance costumes:



By the way, our video camera is already quite destroyed - do you have any idea, what's really good video camera for lasers?

[The_Doctor]

If you managed to destroy a video camera that easily in just a weekend, I have to wonder about the cumulative damage done to a large number of eyes...

[mystery123]

Well of course I expected comments like these. But we do shows for living and we develop our own controllers - we can't afford any laser show injury. The camera is already 3 years old and has many destroyed pixels, because we shoot the laser shows at full power without people usually (also the video is mix of several records to prevent any damage to the audience).

[The_Doctor]

You've done shows for years, right? Gettign paid doesn't make you expert in MPE. I'm not either, I balked halfway through Steve Robert's 'Marilyn Monroe' course. Search the forum, you'll find that easily enough.. Now, even though I don't know the details of Maximum Permissible Exposure, I'm fairly sure that you can't kill a video camera in a weekend with short pulses of class 2 exposure.

EDIT:
I can definitely add to that... I managed to damage, slightly, a CCD on a Canon A40 with a 100 mW DPSS with no IR filter, total output about 450 mW. This was fast-scanned as a 'liquid sky' effect from just ten feet. I was careful not to get that scan across my eyes, but I was willing to risk the camera... Despite this obvious burn, the camera was far from 'destroyed'. So if yours was, you're definitely getting some big pulses of light in it. Judging by what I've seem 450 mW do, I'd suggest your pulses are a lot stronger, and I wouldn't risk seeing it live.

[White-Light]

Hi guys,

here is the last show we did with lasers and Tron Dance costumes:



By the way, our video camera is already quite destroyed - do you have any idea, what's really good video camera for lasers?

Best suggestion I can think of is if it's your show, place the camera in a fixed position eg on a tripod before the show and BAM it with enough width to allow for any panning you want to do. You can always use a 2nd camera facing away from the show to capture crowd reactions etc.

I'm assuming you have an equivalent of a BAM in Fiesta, I don't know.

So far as cameras are concerned, I believe the better the low light sensitivity of the sensor, the more sensitive it is potentially to laser, hence the reason why the some of the more expensive cameras are allegedly so badly affected.

I have an Old Canon HV30 and whilst I haven't deliberately exposed it to laser, at the LEM a couple of years ago a mistake was made during a show that allowed a brief full power scan of those watching with 2x 3W laser and 1x 2W laser (from memory) (the BAM's were accidentally left off). My camera was on at the time and showed no damage. I can't guarantee that wasn't just luck though but it might perhaps give you a starting point for a reasonable quality camcorder which no doubt isn't too expensive to junk these days.

[mystery123]

The thing I really hate is that noise when shooting in night... quite interesting some mobile phones do better video in the night than these handy cams... I've also tested camera for about 5000EUR, but again, the picture was horrible...

[Galvonaut]

Looks great.

I did think some of those beams looked pretty hot going into the audience though. Do you know how many mW per cm2 are going into the audience?

How are you using the camera? You might have to mess about with the settings to get things right.

Keith