Avolites Tiger Touch II Lighting Control Desk. Photo by Avolites.
Avolites has been designing cutting edge lighting control desks since the beginning of rock n' roll tours. Its experience with designing manual lighting desks that allow the programmer to easily control moving lights has placed the company among the leading lighting console manufacturers in the world of live interactive lighting design. Avolites desks focus on allowing programmers to express their lighting artistry during live events. As was done before the advent of memory control, Avolites' programmers “play” the lighting desk. These programmers are more artists than technicians, and Avolites' desk designs have catered to their artistry.
Due to the expanding theatrical and church markets, as well as recent technological developments that require the control of media servers and LED control, the product designers at Avolites have been adapting their consoles so that theaters and houses of worship can enjoy the same interactive lighting control that concert designers have been depending upon for years. With the introduction of the Tiger Touch II lighting control desk, theatres and houses of worship can now enjoy a very powerful lighting desk that can serve both interactive and pre-programmed lighting designs.
Avolites sent its new Tiger Touch II lighting desk to our lighting lab at California State University Long Beach. My students and I put this desk through its paces controlling several different moving lights. As you will find, we were quite impressed with the user friendly and powerful interactive features of the Tiger Touch II.
Under examination
One of the first things we noticed about the Tiger Touch II is the sturdy construction of the console. In these days of manufacturers trying to save money by using less sturdy plastics, Avolites is taking the opposite approach. The Tiger Touch II is built like a tank. The materials used in the chassis and control surfaces feel extremely durable and of top quality. When we lifted the board out of its shipping crate, we were amazed at the weight.
Sturdy buttons and wheels adorn the ergonomically designed control panel. A stunningly large, full color touch screen is placed in the perfect place, although we wished that it was able to tilt to a user-preferred angle for sitting programmers. Sturdy buttons are logically grouped on the right side of the desk. This, combined with the touch screen, makes the Tiger Touch II almost completely user-configurable. That is, you can lay out the control panel to your personal preferences.
But as we all know, a beautiful face by itself does not make a good product. Modern moving light control desks are only as good as their operating systems. The Tiger Touch II uses the Avolites Titan operating system (operating within the Windows Standard Embedded operating system on a solid-state hard drive). The software is very intuitive and adapts to the programmer’s individual preferences. One of the most appealing features of this software is how you can create your own visual icons on the touch screen. This is quite useful for its integrated pixel-mapper. You can even import images to serve as virtual buttons. This makes the touch screen very adaptable and user-friendly.
The Tiger Touch II is almost completely user-configurable. That is, you can lay out the control panel to your [liking].
David Martin Jacques
Reviewer.
Now let’s talk about the software. Titan is designed for quick and detailed control of moving or conventional lighting fixtures. Similar to most modern moving light controllers, the Tiger Touch II can be set up to play back cue lists (or cue stacks) and effects. Building cues is just a matter of choosing lighting fixtures, focusing them with the encoder wheels, choosing the fixture’s color with the massive color library (or manually through a color picker), selecting the gobo and focus, and storing that position into a cue.
The color picker allows you to mix a color through hue, saturation, and luminosity of color flags, or you can mix the color of RGB LED fixtures through the color controller. You can also create custom thumbnails of the colors you create.
The Tiger Touch II has some very powerful cue and chase effects. Editing chase steps is simple, using common computer software commands like “copy,” “paste,” and “select range.” This makes building atmospheres and chases very fast and easy. You can also import video clips and image files and assign them to a video pixel mapper. This can create some amazing effects, especially when controlling LED fixtures. The playback views are extremely detailed, showing cue legend, fade-in and -out times, and fade progress. When a chase is in a cue, there is a dedicated beat bar that shows the rhythm of the chase. Live and next cues are indicated to preview the upcoming cues in the cue list.
Hardware & usage stats
The Tiger Touch II’s hardware control layout can serve as a complete control surface. Three beautifully designed encoder wheels have just the right touch feedback. We found it very quick to focus the moving light fixtures with these wheels. There are logically laid out buttons and faders for groups, macros, static playback, paging playback, cue lists, touch screen window selection, a numeric keypad, cue list control, cue list editing, soft menu buttons, program buttons, fixture selection, attribute banks for moving lights, and live sequence control.
We found the numeric keyboard a bit unusual. It is laid out like a telephone keypad with the “1” on the top left position. This is opposite of most standard lighting control desks. We got used to it after a few minutes of use, though.
The coolest part of the Tiger Touch II is the color touch screen. The main programming window offers access to fixture groups with position, color, and beam palettes. We found this organization very efficient to control multiple groups and fixture palettes. There are several attribute windows including color mix window, zoom, focus, iris, and frost window, shape and effect window, visualizer window, cue list and channel grid view window, and two video media server windows.
One suggestion that we have for all makers of lighting control desks: Technology this powerful cannot be completely intuitive. We initially had great difficulty patching moving lights into the board. Yes, we followed directions from the manual, but the manual was using a term for a command that we could not find on the hardware. A simple step-by-step “Getting Started” video would have helped us, and future less-experienced users of lighting control desks.
Once we received details from Avolites, we found patching fixtures into the console a breeze. The desk already comes with a preloaded fixture library with more than 1,000 fixture personalities, plus it is expandable for new fixtures. The software will automatically patch almost any group of fixtures quickly and efficiently. This desk was designed for quick manual changes in the lighting rig, and its patching function displays that quality.
The Tiger Touch II incorporates “CITP” (Controller Interface Transfer Protocol, a form of media server control protocol). CITP not only offers instant and automatic patching of media server layers, but also enables operators to choose the required video clip directly from the on screen thumbnail. The beauty of this feature is that the Tiger Touch II can control almost any media server you may own. Thumbnails of the video clips are indicated in this window, so you can easily choose videos right from the console.
The Tiger Touch II has some pretty complex views and functions that are too numerous to detail in this review. Let’s just say that the Tiger Touch II’s interface can be as simple—or as powerful—as you want.
The Tiger Touch II will support up to 12 universes, making the desk applicable for large theatrical lighting systems. There are 20 submasters for cues, cue lists, and chases, 1,000 virtual playback executors, full show file compatibility with the company’s Pearl Expert feature, and 10 direct macro buttons controlling a user-defined macro library. The Tiger Touch supports ArtNet and streaming ACN, Avotalk and CITP protocols. The rear panel includes a MIDI in and out, a VGA out for an external monitor, a socket for a desk lamp, audio in, power connector, four DMX outputs, an Ethernet socket, two Gigabit Ethernet, and four USB ports on the back and one in the control surface to save and load show and image files. You can even get iPhone, iPad, and Android remote applications for this desk.
So, who should consider purchasing the Tiger Touch II? If you program live music events and like to “play” the lighting desk with the hands-on manual control that Avolites is known for, this could be the perfect lighting desk for you. This intuitive control is in the Tiger Touch II’s DNA. However, the real beauty of the Tiger Touch II is that it could also suit programmers who like to completely pre-program all their cues in advance and have them play back exactly as they wrote them, with a touch of a button. This may be the perfect hybrid lighting desk. Do yourself a favor and try “playing” one. You may never go back.
