Hello, I'm a Congo user....

Hi there.

I am Stephan, living and working in Geneva, Switzerland (french speaking part of Switzerland)

I work as a freelancer in theatres, and in events as well. I also work for a company that sells and rents lighting equipment. One of my activities in the company is to keep in touch with Congo development, such as software updates and so on, and helping our Congo customers for any issue they have with the console.

For big shows, I use Sequences a lot, tracking, editing times (like attributes times, channel times), channel database, and I was really glad to work with V5 effects, really creative way of designing chasers for the LD. I love the easy way to record effects on presets and seq.

For large show, most of time we have plenty of time for programming, and it helps us to go really deep in the seq editing so we can be very precise, and we can try a lot of different things. When we are on events, we usually have less time programming on site, but I usually program the congo before the event, so we have very few things to set up right before the event.

This week I will finally be working on a Congo Jr. for the first time. The tricky thing will be to find the right keys at the right places ! I will have to set up a Net3 Gateway soon as well, it looks really simplier that Net2 to set up.

Voilà

Stephan

Hello,

John Palmer

I am based in Los Angeles, California.

I work in theatre, concerts, and a very little bit of broadcast.

I use the Congo features depending on the show that I am programming.  Theatre show with rehearsal...sequence on the main playback groups loaded to masters to speed programming.  Concerts are a mix of prebuilt generic sequences and then using masters for everything.  My favorite feature is doing on the fly color changes to a different palette in a time so easily.   I use this ALL the time.

I love the channel layouts.  When I have the time to get them built, I use them to work with visiting LD's (some who don't speak the same language as I do, but they can point), and to pre-program off-line.  Channel database is fabulous.  I just recently worked out the procedure to get a Lightwright ASCII patch imported into Congo.  So, now when my paperwork is done, so is my patch and channel database.

BTW, Congo and Congo Jr. depending on the venue.  The switch is a little weird while you instintively reach to a particular area for something that is now on the other side of the console.  If you use the Congo Jr. Wing, I get into the habit of always going back to my color page of direct selects before switching it back to masters mode.

Take care,

John

I'm in Salina, Kansas, in the USA.

I work in a Community Theatre, producing 12 theatrical productions a year (5-6 of them musicals), plus hosting a number of other events, such as concerts, dance recitals, and corporate events.

I use the console mainly as a theatrical-style playback desk, running off of one sequence, triggering everything from the main playback.  Most of my productions are run by volunteers, so I try to make the show  "just pressing the GO button".  That being said, I use master links, all of the great timing features (waits, delays, channel times), the effect playbacks, the client on a laptop, and lots of macros.   My favorite features are the versatility of the the masters (I love that I can put anything I want on there, from groups to presets to sequences to keys -- one of my favorite features), the auto-groups (no more channel schedules!), and the channel layouts (no more magic sheets!).  Really, the thing that's changed the most since my days with the Express is that I don't have to be constantly referencing paperwork to program a show, everything is labeled on the console, which makes it incredibly fast to program.

On theatre-style shows, I get one to two weeks of pre-programming time,  two to three days of programming after I've seen the show in rehearsal, and four days of rehearsal before we get an audience.  On dance recitals/concerts/corporate events, three days for programming, no rehearsal, everything is run for the first time with the audience there (this is where I do a lot of busking and use the heck out of the masters).

I love this desk, it has cut my programming time in half, yet given my much more complex and exciting shows with the all the features.