Lighting designer Rob Sinclair has been a champion of the Jands Vista for many years, specifying the console for prestigious tours such as Queen + Adam Lambert and The Pet Shop Boys.
Sinclair didn’t hesitate to specify Jands Vista for Kylie Minogue’s Kiss Me Once Tour which began in the UK last September and has recently finished touring Australia.
“The Jands Vista really suits the way Louisa Smurthwaite, who programmed and ran the show, and I work,” commented Sinclair. “We’ve been trying out the new Vista v2.3 Beta software which has a great new effects engine. It makes it so much easier to do complicated things quickly.”
Sinclair notes that during the tour the back up from Jands has been “great as always – quick, friendly and efficient”.
The Kiss Me Once Tour features two Vista L5 consoles running Jands Vista v2.3 Beta software which enables them to share processing.
“We’re running one Vista L5 as a tracking back up but they share processing,” added Smurthwaite. “We’ve been putting them through their paces and testing the new software. The new effects engine is great and the matrix effects work really well with our Blade lighting grid.”
Smurthwaite further describes the Vista L5 as really quick and easy to set up, and she particularly favours that there’s not much maths involved with this console!
“It’s a very visual console which I like,” she said. “The way that some of the cues work are brilliant and no other console does it that way. It’s something I find very useful during programming. This is a very cue-heavy show, which is perfect for the Vista L5 as you can program every cue on one button, and thus one hand, allowing you to operate your ‘punctuation’ such as flashes by your other hand. Having everything programmed so you’re not having to jump around the console in order to operate the show I feel gives you more time to look up at the actual show rather than the console! It means you have the opportunity to see the finer details rather than scrambling around to get everything to work.”
Smurthwaite reports that she finds the Vista L5 enables her to simply adjust the lighting on the go, and this is important to her as she likes to finesse details to improve shows as they tour. She says that the layout of the timeline means she can do that very quickly.
Additionally, Smurthwaite relies on the Vista’s Snaphot function which allows her to—with one click—capture the current playback arrangement and playback state into a button which she can then execute whenever she chooses. This means that at the start of each song, she simply recalls that songs Snapshot and all the corresponding cues (both those playing and those that need to be released) are loaded, ready to be instantly used in conjunction with the song. This feature also aids other tours where the set list changes from night-to-night as they don’t have to worry about the page arrangement and order of the show cues.
Lighting designer Peter Rubie is also a Console Applications Tester for Jands, and he has been providing Sinclair and Smurthwaite with technical support throughout the tour.
“I have been helping them through any issues they may encounter,” he revealed. “They’ve been invaluable to the Beta testing phase and have provided important feedback. One of the big things with Vista v2.3 software is the vast improvement in networking performance. All of the playback processing the console does is now distributed across the network and so the handling is so much better even with just a single system because it uses all of the different CPU cores.”
When designing new software, Jands prioritise requests from Vista users and so several of the improvements come directly from them.
In Vista v2.3, Jands added a new feature which changes the way users navigate and view cues when editing their cue lists. Entitled Q-View, it gives users the ability to preview a cue that is not currently outputting to stage will look like directly in their fixture selector.
“You can plot without even looking up from the rig,” remarked Rubie. “Another of the many new features in v2.3 is the ability to create pages with your choice parameters on encoders. This can be accessed via the console menu or, with some fixtures selected by pressing custom and then assign on the super playback control to open up the encoder customisation window.”
