Marquee ILC Debuts at LDI

LDI - The Entertainment Technology Show - Orlando November 2003

Entertainment Technology and Horizon Control Inc. previewed the Marquee 24/48 console at USITT in March of this year. Show goers at LDI this year got a first hand glance at the Marquee ILC (Intelligent Lighting Control).  The ET booth was showing a Marquee 24/48, a 48/96 and an ILC to a highly enthusiastic crowd.

Horizon was originally released as a PC only lighting control solution back at LDI '97.  This user interface, while popular with many users (architectural installations and churches especially), was not well-liked by ‘traditional’ theatre people. The Marquee line finally puts the power of Horizon into tangible furniture to satisfy the nay-sayers.

ILC features four attribute encoders, a dedicated level wheel and fourteen pageable hardware playbacks. Many visitors made positive comments on the "Century Array" - a hundred button array for selecting fixtures that serves dual-purpose as group and palette select buttons. These sort of button arrays have only been seen on much more expensive moving light consoles, but is now an inexpensive add-on option to ILC.

ILC also features a 'Flat' fixture model that presents all moving lights, regardless of make or model, to the user in the same predictable and friendly fashion. That means that strobe values are represented in hertz and gobo rotation speeds are represented in RPM, rather than meaningless DMX values.  Having a flat fixture model not only makes the user experience more pleasant, but swapping of fixtures of copying of attributes between different fixture types becomes painless.

As ILC goes into beta test early in 2004, watch for more unique and handy features.  Those that know Horizon will appreciate the agility the hardware can bring you and those that are new to Horizon will quickly see that Horizon Control makes some pretty nifty software.

Spec sheet here.