IN1017 - Lush By Light & Sound FX

PR LIGHTING LED DISPLAYS LIFT THE ROOF OFF LUSH

Since originally opening in 1996, Lush has been a hot destination for the dance community right across Ireland.

Now clubbers have an additional incentive to flock to the northern holiday destination of Portrush in County Antrim, following the latest £1.5m technological upgrade of the 2,000-capacity venue.

Lush is the shining jewel in the Kelly’s entertainment complex (which includes a hotel, restaurants, bars and holiday chalets). Managing director Peter Wilson asked his technology specialists Light & Sound FX (LSFX) to create a wow factor by delivering advanced LED media displays that would allow the venue’s posse of resident VJs to show off their creativity.

Proprietor Darren Gardiner opted for a complete PR Lighting solution. He specified the high-resolution Marveon LED screen P12 Indoor, with 12mm pixel pitch, as the main display above the stage, with a 37.5mm V-LED Spell running messages and graphic FX at high level around the dancefloor.

Meanwhile, in the foyer a further V-LED Spell curtain — each panel tension-hung on a steel wire — is fed from its own dedicated content player to advertise upcoming attractions. All displays were provided by MilTec (UK) Ltd, PR Lighting’s UK and Ireland distributors.

Finally, 24 x PR Lighting Pilot 250 moving heads provide the main beam effects on the suspended Litec truss — which has now been raised substantially higher over the dancefloor in the re-roofed venue to enhance the dramatic effect. Said Darren Gardiner, “We’ve been using PR Lighting for six years and we’ve had no reliability issues whatsoever. Programming of the two displays with custom visuals was straightforward.” At the same time he praised the support given by David Faulkes and Graham Gosden at MilTec (UK) Ltd.

V-LED Spell has been designed as both an outdoor and indoor background lighting effect as well as an advertising medium — displaying video both synchronously and asynchronously with 16.7 million colours. It has the advantages of being super-thin, transparent, water proof and easy to rig. At Lush, the banner runs away from the circular DJ/VJ booth to provide a breathtaking 528 x 33 pixel scroll at 37.5mm pixel pitch on a display that runs to almost 20m.

As for the Marveon P12, this will deliver near broadcast quality. Designed in 5 x 3 panels (with 480 x 192 pixel resolution), the display measures around 20ft x 15ft.

Working with different aspect ratios LSFX’s IT/LED screen specialist Mark Coulson has given Lush’s award-winning VJ’s such as Christian and Shakinda and Seamus Loughrey the wherewithal to produce ultra widescreen by configuring as the central hub a Windows XP Professional computer, with 4Gb of memory and Core 2 Quad processing. This is fitted with Matrox M9140 (quad) and M9120 (2-head) graphics cards — providing a total of six dedicated output heads simultaneously for layered effects with no loss of resolution.

Says Coulsdon: “A minimum of three layers will enables us to do a scroll (such as ‘Lush’) or mix two visuals together from the booth. But we have up to eight layers, with more on the ArKAos.”

“Any VJ can bring in his own content and plug into the Edirol V8 to achieve eight-channel mixing, and that feeds through to the computer. The camera control also feeds into the Edirol, with all DVI feeds converted to Cat5.” Alternatively VJ’s without their own laptop and content cards can work off the resident ArKAos Grand VJ media server, with effects library, which handles all the pixel mapping of the PR Lighting V-LED displays and delivery.

Peter Wilson says the venue is already attracting the world’s top DJ’s — James Zabiela on the opening night followed by Pete Tong and John Digweed, as well as live bands like the Undertones.

But he says the biggest cheer each night is when the PR Lighting banner suddenly bursts into life for the first time around 10.30pm as the crowd are treated to a NASA-type Test/Start-up procedure from the voice booming through the PA.

So to find out more about Light & Sound FX go to there website www.lsfx.co.uk

Or to see more about LUSH go to there website www.kellysportrush.co.uk