Lighting Units, Altman 360Q,

Lighting Units – Altman ERS and Friends
(Original article written in the mid‑1990s, lightly updated today)

This page began life in the mid‑1990s as a basic guide to the Altman ellipsoidals and other conventional fixtures I used when I was teaching at The Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, NY. It remains online and maintained because so many schools and small theatres still rely on these older incandescent units in day‑to‑day production work.

Today, most new installations have shifted toward LED fixtures, with ETC’s Source Four family becoming the most common reference point for modern ellipsoidals. If you are working in a venue full of Altman 360Q units, think of this page as both a retrospective and a practical survival guide for keeping those classics working.

Today’s Technology vs. These Classics

Since this article was first drafted in the mid‑90s, manufacturers have made enormous gains in efficiency, optics, and control. LED ellipsoidals, Fresnels, cyc units, and moving fixtures now deliver more output per watt, longer life, and far better color control than the incandescent Altman 360Q ever could.

The ETC Source Four quickly became the dominant ERS in professional and educational theatres, and its LED descendants are now standard issue in many new builds. Even so, the older Altman 360 and 360Q fixtures still teach the same fundamental lessons about beam control, focus, and color that apply to every modern light you will encounter.

The Berkeley Carroll “Leko” Inventory

When this guide was first written, Berkeley Carroll School owned a mix of Altman 360Q ellipsoidals, along with a few non‑Q Altman 360 units. In the booth and on the pipes, they were casually called “Lekos,” even though they were Altman brand units rather than original Lekolite fixtures.

BCS owned the following Altman ellipsoidals:

• 6 1/2″ x 4 1/2″

• 6″ x 9″

• 6″ x 8″

• 6″ x 12″

• 6″ x 16″

All of these are ERS units: Ellipsoidal Reflector Spotlights. They are the workhorses of most theatres, covering everything from basic area washes to tight specials, from long FOH throws to shin‑level side light.

This is a 6″ Fresnel. The Fresnel uses a Fresnel lens, hence, its name. This unit provides a soft, circular light and is often used for back light and down light. At least in our theater.

This is a 1000Q Follow Spot. Altman.

Shutter and Iris module

PAR Cans

PAR (Parabolic Aluminized Reflector) lights look a lot like oversized car headlights. The lamp, reflector, and lens form a sealed package, and you cannot change the relationship between filament and lens.

A typical PAR can produces an intense oval pool of light with soft edges. You can rotate the lamp inside the can to rotate that oval, but you cannot sharpen or soften the edge the way you can with an ERS. Lenses come in a few standard spreads: wide flood (WFL), medium flood (MFL), narrow spot (NSP), and very narrow spot (VNSP).

Common sizes include PAR56 and PAR64, where the number equals the diameter in eighths of an inch (a PAR64 is 8 inches in diameter). PARs are staples of concert and rock‑and‑roll rigs, especially with haze in the air to show beams, but they see less use as precise FOH instruments in traditional theatre.

One important exception is ETC’s Source Four PAR, which uses a separate halogen lamp and interchangeable lenses rather than a sealed beam lamp.

Strip (Border) and Cyc Lights

Strip lights and cyc lights are long fixtures with multiple lamps arranged in a row. They typically throw light outward at right angles to their length.

A strip or cyc unit often has three or four circuits, each with a different color (commonly red, green, blue, and sometimes amber). By blending the intensities of these circuits, you can create a wide range of colors on a backdrop, cyclorama, or stage floor.

These fixtures are ideal for:

• Coloring a cyc or sky drop

• Low, even footlight or groundrow light

• Broad color washes across large areas

Scoops

Scoops are large, open‑faced fixtures with a simple reflector and no lens. They are inexpensive and very forgiving, but they offer almost no control over the beam.

Because there is no lens system, you cannot sharpen the edge of the light or easily shape it. Scoops are handy for worklight, dead‑simple stage washes, or lighting a cyc in a pinch when nothing else is available.

House Lights and Work Lights

House lights provide illumination for the audience before and after the show and during intermission. They are usually incandescent or fluorescent floods, often on dimmers but sometimes on simple switches.

Work lights are the backstage and onstage utility lights used for load‑ins, rehearsals, and maintenance. These are almost always switched, not dimmed, and are usually off during performances unless deliberately included in the design.

Moving lights or intelligent fixtures were originally implemented in 1972, but the first computer-controlled stage lighting fixtures began to gain widespread acceptance in the concert industry in the early 1980’s. As the digital age progressed, the cost of these fixtures was reduced and they slowly started being used in more ‘traditional’ theatrical environments. Intelligent fixtures are currently used in almost all major theatrical productions.

Usually relying on compact Arc Lamps as a light source, these fixtures generally use Stepper Motors connected to varying internal devices to manipulate the light before it escapes the fixtures front lens.

Examples of internal devices are:

• Color wheels with dichroic lenses used to change the color of the beam.
• Pattern wheels with Gobos used to change the shape of the beam.
• Shutters used to ‘dim’ or ‘strobe’ the output
• Automated lens trains used to focus the beam.
• Irises used to change the size of the beam.
• Gate shutters to ‘square off’ the beam.
• CMY color wheels using subtractive colors to change beam color by inserting dichroic glass filters with varying levels of color filtering into the optics chain.
• Prisms

The majority of these fixtures also use Stepper Motors to enable movement of the light fixtures output by either moving a mirror which reflects the beam, or by moving the entire fixture lens train. This allows the fixture to cover large areas by varying the X-Y coordinates of the beam. Higher performance fixtures use stepper motors for pan and tilt motion.

Moving lights are controlled in many ways. Usually the fixtures are connected to a Lighting Console, which outputs a control signal. This control signal sends data to the fixture usually in one of three ways – Analog (which has largely been phased out), DMX (which is the industry standard control protocol), or Ethernet Control (which is still in development). The fixture then takes this signal and translates it into internal signals which are sent to the many stepper motors located inside.