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Laser F/X On-line Newsletter - Special Reports

Saturday, May 29 1999

Pangolin School

    The first event of the day was the Pangolin School, with Patrick Murphy and Hayden Hale. There were two sessions, beginner/intermediate in the morning, and intermediate/advanced in the afternoon.

    The morning session began with a demonstration of the new Lasershow Performer console, and a discussion by Hayden about QuadMod32 in-field servicing. Then the two Pangolin representatives answered questions from the attendees.

At the afternoon session, Pangolin showed their enhanced version of the Cambridge model 6800 scanners that can correctly project the entire ILDA Test Pattern at 50,000 points per second (50K PPS). They began with a demo of two Pangolin shows, "Creation" and "Tuesday's Day Off", running side-by-side from a single scanner pair. Then the ILDA Test Pattern was demonstrated running at 50K at a 7 degree angle (the same angle as specified in the ILDA 30K tuning standard).     As with the morning session, Pangolin answered questions and did demos such as how to create complex 3D objects such as cars and aeroplanes.

Open House

    Saturday evening Michael Roberts welcomed laserists to his studio for a home-cooked meal at the Open House. The weather was wonderfully warm and clear so most of the laserists gravitated out to the parking lot to network and enjoy refreshments outdoors.

    The theme this year was "A Passage to India" with salads, green beans in chutney, saffron sticky rice and tandoor chicken. Mark Schweter also contributed curried carrots and curried potatoes mixed with peas to the meal. Cheese filled ravioli and minestrone were available as alternatives for the vegetarians in the crowd.

   After dinner, a scaffold was set up outside and the Spectronika copper vapour laser was placed on top and plugged in. Many people were amazed to see a 5-watt laser running on an extension cord carrying 7.5 amps at 220 VAC! An MDG MAX3000 smoke machine was set up in the lot and various gratings were tried with the laser so that everyone could see the beautiful emerald green and golden yellow colours produced by the laser.

    After the party ended, the crew assembled the equipment needed and transported it over to the hotel to set-up the Laser Theatre and prepare the Trade Show room for Sunday.

Links - Quick Links to Report Pages

In order to present as many pictures as possible, we have broken this special report down into a number of pages to speed access. Most of these are large pages with many images so please be patient while they download.

Laser F/X '99 Report - Introduction and background
Friday 28 May - Behind the scenes and the crew
Saturday 29 May - Pangolin School and Open House
Sunday 30 May - Trade Show - Trade Show info and pictures
Sunday 30 May - Brewster Awards - The Banquet and entries
Monday 31 May - Seminars and LaserFest
Scanner Wars - Faster than 30K scanners debut at Laser F/X '99
Candid Camera - A selection of 20 photos (very large page)

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