The Cardinia Cultural Centre sits south-east of Melbourne, on the rapidly expanding corridor that links the city to Gippsland. It recently underwent stage one of a three-stage upgrade programme, which adds an art gallery, dance studio, expanded foyer facilities, and a bigger car park. The lighting department have got their upgrade in early, adding a High End Systems Full Boar 4 and Playback Wing 4 to take care of control duties in their 356 capacity proscenium arch theatre.
Replacing a now respectably aged Road Hog 3, the Full Boar 4 wasn’t just chosen because of what came before it, but with an eye to what is coming in the future. “A lot of our lighting fixtures are already LED and we’re moving to buy more,” says Stuart Sinclair, Technical Manager at the Cardinia Cultural Centre. “We’ve got about 19 conventional fixtures left in the rig, and they will be phased out over the next two years. This actually suits our venue well, as we don’t have a fly tower. We have four bars that can move down only, with one of these occupied by the cyc. It can make lighting a challenge, but the combination of LED fixtures and the way Hog handles Palettes works well for us.”
Having run an average of four events a week in the theatre, and large conferences seating around 500 in the Centre’s banquet room, Stuart and team became more than familiar with the Hog 3 over the years. So what do they think the best improvements in version 4 are? “We love the Command Keys,” answers Stuart. “We can quickly fire anything we want from those, on or off. We like the bigger screens, as they give us more real estate for Palettes. The addition of Art-Net is great – we use a media server, and before we’d use up a DMX output to run an Art-Net dongle to connect to it. We can go straight out via Art-Net now, so that frees up an output to address other fixtures.”
Adding the Playback Wing has also given Stuart and the crew the speed they need. “The Playback Wing gives us the ability to fire cue lists or add elements without needing to move screens,” he expands. “We also have an external monitor as a fourth screen which displays our cue list view. This means we can run shows or busk without taking up real estate on the main screens, which we keep to have access to the full functionality of Palettes.”
The Cardinia crew were in the happy position of becoming experts on the Full Boar 4 long before they purchased, with Australia and New Zealand High End Systems distributor Lexair running extensive training. “It was a great opportunity for my team to see the difference in capabilities between the Road Hog 3 and the Full Boar 4,”observes Stuart. “It was very obvious why it was good for all of us to step up to the new version.”
