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From: ostroff@penelope.oswego.edu (Boyd Ostroff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Theatre Lighting S/W
Keywords: Mac, Lighting, Design
Message-ID: <1989Dec8.170703.7674@oswego.Oswego.EDU>
Date: 8 Dec 89 17:07:03 GMT
References: <5270@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU>
Reply-To: ostroff@penelope.oswego.edu (Boyd Ostroff)
Distribution: na
Organization: SUNY, Collego at Oswego
Lines: 39

In article <5270@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> chupa@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Michael A Chupa) writes:
>
>     I am trying to give some advice to a friend that needs to find
>software to do theater lighting design.  Is there anything like this that
>runs on a Mac?  I can't seem to find anything at all in this area.

ROSCO sells a program called "Candlepower" which purports to do this.  They
gave me a free demo disk for the asking (actually, its just the HyperCard
stack which serves as the "help file").  Contact them at (914) 937-1300 or
(800) 431-2338, or ask your local theatre supply house.

The "Great American Market" also sells a program for IBM-PC's called
ShowPlot, and claimed to be porting this to the Mac. Try calling Joe
Tawill at (213) 461-0200 to find out the current status.

DISCLAIMER: we were "not impressed" with the Candlepower stack, but
haven't used the real program. ROSCO sells several IBM programs
(Stagelights and ALD-Pro) which would appear to do a little more, but
my exposure to them is minimal.  Perhaps someone else can comment...

I saw the Showplot system a couple years ago running on a PC, and, while it 
did draw light plots, it was slow (written in BASIC), buggy, 
had a terrible user-interface, etc.  The people who bought it (at SUNY Oneonta,
I think) were frustrated by the lack of knowledgeable support, had been told
conflicting things about what hardware to buy, ran into copy-protection 
problems, etc.  ... but maybe things have improved since then :-)

BTW, I'm teaching a "Computer Applications for Theatre" class next semester,
and would greatly appreciate hearing about anyone else's experiences in
this area.

-Boyd

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Theatre Department, SUNY Oswego  ||||||| Serving the performing arts since 1986
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