Martin Professional’s MAC 401 Dual™ LED moving head washlight was introduced last year at LDI. With its unique double-sided design, it can be used, for example, as a double washlight or beam-reflective mirror. Its 39 multicolor, single-point-source LEDs are grouped into four equal segments, and each section has individual color and intensity control. An accessory color filter frame holder allows the addition of frost filters or other custom filters, while a plug-in feature lets users add modules to the back of the fixture. The unit outputs up to 6,600 lumens, and its beam angle can adjust via a fast linear zoom from wide wash to hypermode tight in less than 0.5 seconds. Additional features include silent mode, fast mode to boost pan/tilt speed, and RGB and hue/saturation control modes. We caught up with some users to see what they think of the unit.
Lee Rose of Design Partners Inc. has used the fixture for several projects, including ABC’s Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest, and most recently for the Revolver Golden God Awards. “On the Christmas special, an outdoor daytime show, we used the units at the Disney World location instead of using the [Barco High End] ShowPix that we used at Disneyland,” Rose says. “They gave us an interesting look, even in daylight, with the ability to do separate colors in each of the four accessible quadrants. We used an assortment of chases in the segments to give some visual animation to the show featuring The Jonas Brothers, Celine Dion, and Yanni.”
Rose adds that, for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest, he had two performance stages at the music pre-tape shoot at Aria at City Center in Las Vegas. “I was looking for an interesting fixture to use for the downstage side-light position that would give me a decent illumination but would also look ‘cool‘ in the cross-stage shots on camera,” he says. “After the Disney show, I was very interested in seeing what the MAC 401s would look like in a dark stage environment. Again, the individual quadrant access made them stand out, and yet they still provided me with ample cross-light color for the design.
On the Revolver Golden God Awards, Lee adds, ”I was looking for that old wall of light look from the '80s metal band tours, and again, I was drawn to the MAC 401. Its strong colors, defined beam in spot mode, and the access to the quadrants of LEDs made it my first choice.”
Rose says the unit produces good saturated colors and that he likes that each LED output is an SMD and not discreet LEDs. His favorite feature, however, is the accessibility of the four quadrants of LEDs. “The ability to do half-and-half color looks, bow-tie looks, and color chases around the quadrants extends its use as a fixture that looks interesting on camera,” he says, adding that his only issue with the fixture is the high number of DMX channels it requires to run in full mode. “There are two sets of ‘Effects Wheels’ parameters for each of the four quadrants in addition to the color and intensity for each quadrant,” he says.
Programmer Cory Fitzgerald worked with MAC 401 Duals on Kelly Clarkson’s latest tour, designed by Leroy Bennett and one of the first outings to use the fixture. “We had three on each side as floor fixtures,” FitzGerald says. “I liked their flexibility to be both a nice floor wash/set wash and also have a good sized beam in the air. We didn’t use any video in the show, but we had a ton of MAC 301s as a moving wall and five ceiling pods. Between the 301s and 401s, we had a great amount of speed both in the movement and color effects, so we had a wide range of lighting looks we could not have achieved with conventional moving lights. The 401s were brand new, and they were still making changes to the software, but I can only imagine they’ve improved on what they started with.”