Lighting Designer Caleb Franke's Award-Winning Experience Using Obsidian ONYX Platform

	"There's a moment with any console where you figure out the flow and it just feels comfortable, and that happened with ONYX pretty quickly," says Franke.

Working alongside creative director Melody Tseng, lighting designer Caleb Franke took Elation's LDI 2025 booth and performance to the next level with Obsidian's ONYX platform. Within a couple of months, Franke went from limited experience with ONYX to designing, programming, and operating a booth at a high-profile show that earned the tradeshow's Most Creative Use of Light award.

"Obsidian gave me the tools to design an extraordinary booth and show, and winning the award was an incredible honor. The show exceeded expectations, with huge crowds at every presentation," Franke comments, noting that he has typically done much of his programming on MA consoles. "Doing a high-profile show on ONYX proved to me that professional-level design isn't restricted to a single platform. ONYX has all the power and features that a show of this caliber demands."

Although familiar with Obsidian hardware, Franke didn't start learning ONYX in more depth until this past September, just months before the LDI show. Initially programming on Obsidian's NX4 console, he transitioned to the NX W PC control wing after its release, pairing it with the NX P motorized fader wing.

"The NX W was faster, cleaner, just a better process and workflow for me-you can put whatever computer you want behind it which gave me more processing power," Franke explains. "The buttons on the NX W have a softer touch, and the NX P gave me an extra set of motorized faders. I combined those with two touchscreen monitors side by side, and it made for a really great workflow. I'm a big smooth and fast workflow person when it comes to my consoles and show files, and this setup lets me get comfortable quickly. I loved it."

The setup, which featured nearly 400 Elation lights and Obsidian NETRON nodes for signal distribution, including 10-button touch stations at product displays, allowed him to handle nearly 90 DMX Universes, with a dongle capable of up to 128 Universes.

"It was ONYX and Obsidian products top to bottom, and everything worked flawlessly."

Franke, who has designed lighting for high-profile projects such as the New Year's Eve light and firework show on the Seattle Space Needle and the Orange Bowl Halftime Show, emphasized that ONYX was easy to set up and learn, especially for a complex show.

"There are some really great things about working with it. It's easy to just get something going, for example. There are a lot of consoles out there that feel like an open-world video game with just a million ways to do everything, and it takes a lot of time to figure that out. But with ONYX, I was able to jump in and understand it quickly, which is huge when you're managing a lot of fixtures and especially multi-instance fixtures."

He says that for many designers, it's a speed thing. "There's a moment with any console where you figure out the flow and it just feels comfortable, and that happened with ONYX pretty quickly."

A highlight of the booth was the use of DyLOS video and pixel mapping to showcase complex pixel content. "We had a lot of pixel fixtures -- PULSE and SOL and the new Rebel Lines -- in a relatively small space, and DyLOS just made sense there. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the best pixel mapping engine built into a console out there. It let me focus on the creative details instead of wrestling with technical FX engine programming issues," Caleb says. "There's a lot of opportunity with it."

Franke's experience illustrates a critical point for lighting professionals: top-tier design isn't limited to a single console ecosystem. He notes that even engineers familiar with other consoles were impressed.

"There were GrandMA engineers who came up after we won the award and said, 'You did this on ONYX? OK!' We had some great conversations around that. I explained that it's a powerful alternative that delivers at a high level without the barrier of extreme cost. It's a great platform for churches too -- we install quite a few for Illuminate integration projects." Franke also serves as vice president of design and operations at Illuminate Production Services.

The bar was set high and the designer credited Obsidian's support team for helping him ramp up quickly. "Doing a show that's high-profile and needs to be top-quality can be stressful, but the ONYX team -- especially ONYX product specialist Matthew Gerardi and Obsidian director Koy Neminathan -- were a huge help. There's a learning process, of course, but having that support meant I didn't have to figure everything out on my own. We even discussed future features that could make programming and operation even faster, which was great."

Franke considers this an excellent example of ONYX's capabilities and plans to continue using it in future shows. "It was a really good experience for me and really opened my eyes to what's possible with Obsidian. I hope more users explore it for their own designs."