How Martin Lighting’s MAC One is raising the bar & defying application expectations

Martin Lighting’s Wouter Verlinden – product manager, creative LED, lighting and control – shines a spotlight on the MAC One fixture and explains how the manufacturer is raising the bar in terms of developing fast and responsive lighting fixtures, and how the popular backlight effect on the MAC One was a happy accident.

How did Martin Lighting come up with the idea to create the MAC One fixture?

The MAC One came about in a quite unconventional way. We have had the MAC Aura family of products for a long time, but then we thought, ‘What if we did something smaller?’ – so the MAC One was born out of the idea of making a really small fixture that’s easy to use in large quantities. It's been a while since Martin did something in that category. 

The most memorable product would be the MAC 101, which was more than 10 years ago; it's not really a continuation, but it was inspired by that small lighting fixture that fits everywhere and is easy to use in large quantities thanks to the weight and the size of the fixture. 

So the idea of doing a small fixture came from saying, ‘The MAC Aura is a really useful product. What if we take it one step smaller?’.

The Fresnel lens seems to be a big part of the identity of this product. Was it there from the initial concept?

There were a few different ideas. One of the ideas in the beginning was to do a bubble lens, like the MAC Aura, but to make it smaller, with less bubbles, but that didn't look good. We also know that designers love the single lens look rather than the dotted or bubble look that has become the norm over the last 10 years, or a PC lens. 

But the problem with the PC lens is that it's quite heavy, and we want this fixture to be extremely fast on the pan and tilt movements. You need to have a very lightweight lens sitting at the front of the unit, and that's where the Fresnel came in – to make a really lightweight lens at the front of the fixture, allowing it to be fast and responsive on movements. 

As soon as we started prototyping a Fresnel lens for this fixture, the look of the lens gave us goosebumps. I'm 100% sure that our designer community also really loves the look of Fresnel lens. It has a little retro feel to it because that's how lighting fixtures used to be, before we all went LED and modern. 

The original theatrical-style fixtures used a Fresnel lens. The feedback on that lens has been overwhelmingly positive; it's a breath of fresh air after 10 years of wash lights all having that bubble look, which Martin also started with a MAC Aura, many years ago.

Lighting designers love lighting fixtures that are fast and responsive. How did you raise the bar in that regard with this fixture?

From the start, it was meant to be a small fixture that produces a very punchy beam when you pull the zoom to an arrow. It's really important that that beam can move fast and be responsive from standing still, to being at full speed – ramping up quickly. The weight of the fixture helped a lot with that. 

In this fixture, we employed a new set of technology. Normally a lot of parts in moving lighting fixtures are metal and aluminium; here we used a lot of composite plastics to reduce the weight, and by making the weight of both the yoke and the head of the fixture much lower, the motors can move them around faster. We kept the pan and tilt motors from the MAC Aura, which is a bigger, heavier fixture, but combined it with a much lower weight of fixture, allowing for higher acceleration and higher speed. 

We also combined that with our latest motor control algorithms in the firmware of the fixture. This was invented for the MAC Ultra to allow that big fixture to be faster and more responsive. That same technology was used in the MAC One where it allows the speed and the responsiveness, acceleration and deceleration to be insanely impressive. 

Then we pulled all the strings from mechanical design, to motor control, to firmware design, to all work together and get the maximum out of this.

This fixture doesn’t use the traditional red, green, blue and white mix of LEDs. Why did the team opt for a different mix of colours?

For the MAC One, we developed our own LED module. It's a custom in-house designed module with different LED dies on a single module. Originally it was red, green, blue or white. The first prototypes, which we still have somewhere in the basement, were using red, green, blue and white LEDs. Then we were working on a lot of different fixtures where the lime gave us something extra. 

Halfway during the development we modified that custom LED module. We flipped the white LEDs out and put lime LEDs in. We started testing it, and it gave us more than we expected. It was a win-win situation: we got more light out of the products than we had with the red, green, blue and white engine, but at the same time, the lighting spectrum was a lot nicer. So both on a TM-30 scale or CRI scale, or even more importantly, for television and broadcast, a TLCI scale, the numbers went up massively. 

We got much richer colours – much richer skin tones – out of that red, green, blue, lime chip, so it was obvious for us. We get the same colours, we get even more output than we had with the white version, and now we get a much richer spectrum of light, which is great in theatre applications, but also on television, with cameras being sensitive to how the lighting spectrum is constructed. So that was a win-win and we knew we were staying with this solution.

The backlight effect of this fixture looks quite unique. How did that new look and technology come to life?

I often joke that the backlight on the MAC One was an accident, but it was really an accident! We never meant it to look like that. It was literally me and two of our optical engineers playing around in the optical lab in Aarhus, Denmark. 

We were playing with some LED tape behind the lens, putting it in different positions and different angles, and all of a sudden we got this really nice look that you see on the MAC One – this turbine look with all these lines in the lens. We thought, ‘This looks quite amazing. It's totally not what any of us had envisioned’. Then we made a purpose-built circuit board with the LEDs in that pattern and in that position behind the lens, and that became the backlight – just by playing around! 

Sometimes, when we do lighting fixtures, we plan really well in advance what it is going to look like, what it's going to do, what it's not going to do, but the backlight on the MAC One was one of those moments of playing around and finding the magic inside the product. That was one of those really nice moments where you say, ‘I think we found something!’

What’s the idea behind the fourbar accessory and what benefits does it bring?

The four bar was one of my personal ideas that I brought into the project, as I've been doing lighting for many decades. In my early days, we had a four bar of PARcans, so it was a 1.5 metre aluminium bar with four lights on it, and you would hang that on a stage, and it was great to get a lot of lights on a stage. Rather than hanging the lights one by one, you would hang up a bar of four PAR64 cans. 

When we worked on this product, I started sketching some ideas and I quickly realised, ‘If this fixture is so small and so lightweight, we can actually take that old idea of putting four fixtures on the bar and bring that into a modern version,’. You take up a bar of four fixtures, hang them up in the lighting rig, and four fixtures are there – so you're not hanging lights one by one, but just in blocks of four.

This really speeds up the workflow on touring shows and festivals because we don't have a lot of time to hang all the lights. Then as we started designing that four bar, we put a lot of smart ideas in there. We made it so that our flight case fits the four bar with four fixtures on it, so you don't need to put the fixtures on the bar when you're out and about. The cabling between the fixtures also can stay on the bar in the flight case. You take a bar of four and they're already pre cabled.

We added some safety solutions to the four bars, so you don't need safeties on every fixture. We added a floor stand, so if you want to put four fixtures behind the drummer, you just take the four bar, flip out the feet and put it on the floor. 

So a lot of smart ideas went into that very basic idea of going back to the retro solution of a bar with four lights that can be hung everywhere. All of a sudden, now it's a bar of four lighting fixtures, but they can all move. 

It was all enabled by the idea of having a small and lightweight fixture, because none of the other Martin moving lighting fixtures – due to weight and the size – would allow you to do a bar of four. So it came from that really small fixture, and now it's even easier to deploy with the four bar solution.

Was reducing the environmental impact a goal during the development of this fixture?

It's becoming more and more important in everything we do at Martin. Quite a few of the things we've been working on for a while have now found their way into the MAC One. The low weight and the reduced use of materials create a lesser impact. A small fixture creates less impact than building a massive fixture, but also the low weight massively reduces the cost of transportation. The small size allows more fixtures to be put on a truck, so fewer trucks need to be shipped and sent around the continent to move fixtures around.

We also did a lot on power consumption. This fixture is very low power, even in use, but still has a very impressive output. The other thing we also tweaked on this fixture is the power consumption when the fixture is not in use. 

Often in TV studios or theatres, the lighting fixtures are turned on in the morning, but only used later in the day. We really worked on the sleep mode, so that the power consumption when the fixture is in sleep mode is as low as possible. 

It's quite a bit lower than on previous generation fixtures, which were around the 25 watt mark in a sleeping state, where this one is around nine watts in a sleeping state. That makes a big difference because a lot of the time in theatre and broadcast, the lights are just in that idle state, so we’re minimising power consumption.

There is another thing which we really looked at, and the MAC One is the first, but definitely not the last Martin fixture where we intend to apply this to, and this is the packaging. Traditionally, with these types of fixtures, when they're sold for installation use, they're packed in polystyrene foam packaging, which brings a lot of protection to the product during transport and to the customer. 

But as we all know, polystyrene packaging is horrible for the environment. So our R&D team worked on a totally new way of packing and protecting the product. With the MAC One, we introduced recycled cardboard pulp packaging. It's basically used cardboard which is cut into small pieces and then moulded into a new shape, and that new shape is what protects the fixture during transport. 

We're using no polystyrene foam anymore, and the cardboard we're using is already a recycled material, so that massively reduces the impact of the packaging. Our plan is not to stop there. 

On many other products that Martin is developing, we're constantly looking for ways to reduce the impact by putting less paperwork in the box with the products, and by reducing power consumption using recycled material. We're just at the start of this journey of reducing our impact as a company.

In a video, Headliner saw a wall / matrix of these lighting fixtures. Was this fixture designed with such use-cases in mind? How did that idea come about?

The idea of doing fixtures that can be locked together like Lego bricks or video panels in a wall actually came from products that we did at Martin a few years ago, which were the VDO Atomic Bold and the VDO Atomic Dot, which are non-moving fixtures. They're static, but they can also be locked together, kind of like Lego. So we said, ‘What if we do lighting fixtures locking together? What if we add a light to this that can move?’. 

The MAC One was born partially out of that idea: ‘Can we make a light that is small enough to be put into this matrix system, creating a wall of lights?’. It influenced the size and the design of the product, because as soon as we said, ‘We need to be able to put this product in a matrix,’ it immediately set the limits on how big the fixture can be and how much the movement can swing out of the origin so they don't start hitting each other. 

It quickly set a lot of boundaries and showed us, ‘Okay, this is what the product can do, and this is what it cannot do,’. The fixture developed as a standard lighting fixture, you could say.

That system was developed in parallel with the lighting fixture, and that really allowed us to do some creative stuff. We hope that it will also allow lighting designers and our customers to do some really creative stuff with lighting fixtures by combining them into matrixes, also with older Martin lighting fixtures, such as the VDO Atomic Bold and VDO Atomic Dot videos show. 

It was a lot of fun to quickly build a wall of lights and see the massive impact you get from a wall of moving lights for very little effort, compared to having to hang them one by one on a custom structure. It is a really exciting feature for me and I'm hopeful that a lot of our customers will pick up on that idea.

Is this fixture mainly designed for bigger shows where they are used in large quantities?

That's often misleading with the MAC One because we do this matrix system and because we have the four bars to hang them in blocks of four. This is great for touring concerts and for festivals where you want a wall of hundreds of these lights, which definitely looks cool. 

But then as we started showing this lighting fixture to more traditional customers – working in theatre and broadcast television – they also saw that the fixture is great for those applications I just mentioned, but this small fixture with this high light quality (thanks to the lime coloured LEDs) also works great for what they are doing.

They’re looking for small lighting fixtures which are extremely silent that can be fitted in small theatres at low ceiling heights, studios, or low trim height theatres. The MAC One also works great in those applications. It's a very versatile small wash light – even forgetting about the four bar and forgetting about that grid mount system – just as a regular, small fixture. 

It has proven during all the initial demos to be really useful for those applications, so we started showing the product to more and more customers. We quickly realised this is not only that big matrix and that big rock and roll-look fixture with a lot of beams in the air, it is also a really nice, compact, silent fixture for theatrical applications and broadcast applications. 

Our customers educated us on how versatile this product is, and that was eye opening for me. It ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of applications. It's definitely not a one trick pony.

The MAC One features P3 control. Is this instead of DMX, and if so, can you explain the benefit of it?

The MAC One does indeed feature Martin P3 control, which is our video mapping solution, but it's not only P3 – the MAC One is also compatible with all standard industry protocols such as DMX, Art-Net and streaming ACN, so you can use it like any normal lighting fixtures. You're not being forced to use P3; it fits into any standard lighting rig.

The benefit of using the MAC One on a P3 system, together with a lot of other Martin products that are P3-enabled, is that when you use the products in lines or in matrices, P3 enables you to send video to those fixtures. 

Imagine a backdrop on a concert with 50 of those fixtures. With P3, you can easily throw video over these fixtures and you get these really nice, organic effects just by sending video via P3 to the fixtures, rather than having to program that all from a lighting console.

That gives a lot of flexibility and you can send video into the lighting fixtures, but you can still control them from the lighting console. You get the best of both worlds by using P3 – it merges the video world and the lighting world. If it's a concert where there's a video wall, the same content that runs on that video wall can now flow across onto the MAC One products or any other Martin product that is P3-enabled. 

Once you drive everything with P3, you don't need to walk around or climb around to start addressing these fixtures one by one. It's an ergonomic feature to run it via P3, but also very much a creative feature, because now you get video and light control over those fixtures.