If Richard Belliveau has been responsible for some of the most kinetically jaw-dropping moments during the last 20 years of automated lighting technology, then one of the most telling quotes came from a former colleague, who divulged to me during a trade show that "the company now employs more patent attorneys than R&D staff." It was a comment that encapsulated the mood in the articulated lighting industry towards the end of the last millennium.

It seems little time ago that Richard, the company's co-founder, inventor and alchemist-in-chief, had been squeezed out by new investors when the industry was enduring some very heated legal battles over intellectual property. But as chief developer of the HES legacy product line, he still retained a substantial shareholding in the Texas resource company and the goodwill to continue building a portfolio of intellectual property, ceding first rights to High End.

During his first incumbency with High End, Richard Belliveau was a listed inventor on over 20 national and international patents. In the freelance domain he was soon filing several more, while continuing to be paid under his non-compete agreement. That relationship is now paying handsome dividends with the realisation and development of the multi award-winning Catalyst system - and in March this year he walked back into the belly of the companyÉ which is when mondo*dr caught up with him.

When he quit in 1998, it was stated that the febrile, and often feisty inventor - buried in his skunk works on West Braker Lane - simply no longer fitted the model of the new investors, brought in to resuscitate the company at a time when the attritional battle between Vari-Lite, HES and Martin Pro was all over the press, and big bucks were being cascaded in the direction of the lawyers. "I believe that (the new investors) found me very outspoken and opinionated, and felt that they could not implement certain changes with my presence," he explained to Mondo back in September 99. "I can be non-compromising about things that I really believe in." But all that has now changed.

By the time he took up his new position as Chief Technology Officer, Catalyst (which as a fledgling invention had first mesmerised visitors to the PLASA Show in 2001), along with the whole area of patent filing, seemed to have grown up. Catalyst had not only taken the best features that inventors such as WWG (with the orbital head movement) and Richard Bleasdale (with brilliant work in software development) had imbued in it but had become a generic term for HES' entire digital lighting development programme.

So why had Richard Belliveau decided to re-enter the inner sanctum when HES already had first rights under contract to IP conceived by him? "I continued to have a very good relationship with management at High End and they felt they needed my role as a visionary," came the unequivocal reply. "Most of the work that's under development now is in digital lighting and it's a dream to be able to create projected images using light valve technology."

The company's ethos today is that their patents and IP should be shared among companies if the business arrangement is correct. "We are not an IP hoarder - it can be traded and licensed," believes Richard. "The IP devised by HES and the IP made by other people is more mature today than in the days of the first intelligent lighting products. It's more difficult for new companies coming in and the sheer amount of IP is ten times what it was then."

And yet the past seemingly will not go away. With no residual interest in developing the LED market, High End Systems sold the Variable Color Lighting System patent - developed by Richard Belliveau in the late '80s, and integral to early colour-changing fixtures - to Super Vision International, because it was felt they were better placed to take advantage of the IP. Super Vision announced their intention to implement this in the future development of LED lighting systems, since it represented the foundation on which all LED lighting products are being designed and built today. Almost immediately, they enforced the patent by filing a $10.5m lawsuit against Color Kinetics Inc for "past and current infringement violations".

The passing on of the LED patent indicates not only a radical shift in the HES technology platform but a commitment to relentlessly pursuing the digital mission and exploring the new dimensions that can be obtained by bridging the worlds of automated lighting and digital projection, in order to create "virtual scenery".

Says Richard Belliveau, "Our engineering and software development staff are dedicated toward these concepts. We still make automated lighting products but culturally we've moved toward digital lighting."

And the pinnacle of this is the DL1, HES' first positionable, remotely controlled projection system.

DL1 significantly moves the Catalyst blueprint forward by housing a digital engine in a package with the look and feel of a moving light and the versatility of a moving projector. LD's are able to take images from DVDs, videos, and other types of media and display them onto a stage, wall, prop, screen, or a set - with complete control over image size and shape. The DL1 also provides the ability to project Digital Aerials and provide uniform colour and beam intensity.

The award-winning 'retro' lightshow contrived by Richard Belliveau and programmer Tim Grivas for last November's LDI expo, featured just eight DL1 instruments, and put industry stalwarts in mind of Belliveau's audacious launch of Dataflash - the world's first DMX strobe - at SIB in Italy, in 1989. It was the year after their show-stealing Color Pro launch, and aiming to go one better, needed to commandeer a 400kW sub station just to run the 144 separately addressable pods in the giant xenon max-out, which made up the world's most advanced strobe system.

As artforms go, adjectival description of light sensation is as elusive as encapsulating the taste of a fine wine. But Graham Barron probably came closest 15 years ago, describing one fixture as producing a lightbeam "you could walk up". Richard Belliveau has been responsible for many such moments in his time.

But there is a complete generation dividing that idiom from the DL1 light engine seen at LDI, where its use in the booth presentation won High End the Best Creative Use of Light Award (while the Catalyst Pro v3.0 Media Server and Software picked up the Debuting Product/Promising Prototype of the Year award).

"LDI was the most incredible show that HES has ever put on," maintains Richard. "We had crowds in our booth every 20 minutes to watch our multimedia presentation. Lighting designers came to me after that show and said I managed to keep their attention for 15 minutes - with just eight lighting instruments!"

Although the combination of DL1's with onboard cameras first came together at PLASA 2003, by LDI that year the instrument appeared with the integral camera system and infrared information source. "The camera can operate in the dark and images can be projected live or saved on the Media Server and later manipulated and applied," says Richard. "They can operate in many stage shows where individual cameras sometimes have difficulty being placed."

The output from a DV camera can be input into Catalyst via the S-Video or component video input port of the Media Server. "When I talk about the cameras in a digital light source I no longer see these as an accessory but as a component. They can do infra-red imaging, they can position the light on the stage by remote. Lighting directors can review the actors and set positions between scene changes without the audience knowing. They can be used as feedback devices to homogenise the light output projected by the digital lighting (in terms of correction). They can create interactive displays with digital light. This business is all about choice. "The DL1 is also groundbreaking because of an advanced air filtration system which can protect sensitive electronic and optical components from oil, haze and pyro."

As a result of these attributes there has been no shortage of early adopters.

Seeing the potential to converge digital media to create scenery, Marc Brickman will bring eight DL1's and four Catalyst Pro v3.0 Media Servers to the Blue Man Group in Berlin - known for its bald and blue characters and multi-sensory stage show - to enhance their permanent show at the Potsdamer Platz Theatre.

Nightclubs have also made a firm commitment. At the Club Avalon in Hollywood, DL1 has VGA, RGBHV and S-Video inputs, allowing the unit to receive a video feed and be controlled via a DMX console (see also MoS, Taipei feature later in this issue). This allows the video input selection to be switched - a feature that enables the lighting director to choose content from multiple input devices simultaneously. Through a DMX console, the user can control colour, brightness, contrast, focus, zoom and other video-related parameters of the DL1 (such as the fully-closing iris which permits true blackout).

With a Mac G5 running Catalyst, Avalon lighting designer Joel Huxtable can achieve multiple layers of video per single fixture, "so that with one projector you can produce laser projection effects that are incredible. It also allows them the ability to drop scrims in and out, juxtaposing the DL1 on the scrims."

Taking advantage of the momentum, High End Systems last month introduced the Catalyst DV v1.0 Media Server and Software. With this introduction, HES now offers two scalable, feature-rich Server solutions, segmented into Catalyst Pro and Catalyst DV offerings. The Catalyst Pro v3.0 Media Server launched the previous year, features four crossfadable video layers and twin outputs. But with the Catalyst DV v1.0 Media Server and Software, designers have the option of three crossfadable video layers and one output, to meet smaller budget and project requirements. With RS232 and RS422 serial control capabilities, it can run a multitude of video switchers and playback devices, giving the user the ability to apply more than 80 visual and colour effects to digital media. All software packages are based on the fastest Apple Power Mac processing and video card technologies and any effect can be applied to a Quicktime movie or still image.

With instant access to more than 64,000 file locations there's no waiting for forwarding or rewinding to a piece of content, while lighting and video cues can be tied to one control desk for unified DMX control of lighting and video. "The process of using projection systems onstage has been ongoing since the mid-80s and the days of the three cathode ray tube projectors," Richard reflects. "I had some designs for video installation work back then, while in the UK there were people doing pioneering work with video, such as Alex Blok with the Sonovista. Our thinking with the Catalyst Media Server is that it had to be a server for everyone, and it had to be a premier server in the entertainment area.

"You can expect to see a lot of media servers on the market but Catalyst will be the one with the greatest amount of features and we are using our experience over the last three or four years to make sure it meets the demands of the video stage lighting professional. A tremendous amount is still being learned. It may seem simple projecting video images on a stage but it's getting the configurations required by the many different users that provides the challenge."

In emphasising that the digital lighting industry is still in its infancy, he states, "There was also an infancy about the Coemar Robot, Golden Scan and Intellabeam. The main difference now is that there are more developers in the new world of digital lighting, getting paid more to do it. "There are many inventors responsible for where we are today - including LSD, WWG, Richard Bleasdale, Altman Stage Lighting, some private inventors and of course, High End Systems."

Richard Belliveau has been pioneering since he first entered the business. Word of some incredible turnkey installations (I recall Austin Nites) began filtering out of Austin when the company (then Blackstone Audio Visual) were solely importers of European lighting fixtures back in the early '80s. "When Texas had oil money we designed and produced some of the nicest and largest clubs in the world - the same as Ivor Green at Carlsbro was doing in the UK. My task was to design venues that were far ahead of their time." When the Austin-based installers turned their attention to manufacturing it seemed like everything that could be built had already been done in Europe. But High End Systems/Lightwave Research (as they had become) thought differently, turning that concept on its head. "Lighting manufacturing is something I had wanted to do since 1978," admits Richard.

Their first highly-successful product, Laser Chorus, involved the use of the low-powered laser. "No one thought that a 5mW laser could be useful in a lighting presentation, but by using multiple units we demonstrated what was indeed possible." This marked the beginning of a series of fixtures which considerably 'upped the ante'.

But Richard Belliveau knows that, for the time being at least, the multi-image show has left conventional automated lighting for dead. "The new generation of products allows ultimate creativity - you can create an entire set with digital lighting, which is important because the amount of money spent on set building is a huge part of the budget, and digital lighting can greatly reduce that cost." Because light valve projection and servers are becoming faster and less cost-prohibitive by the day, the average lighting designer now has access to this progressive projection and computing technology.

During LDI Richard had a play with some of the company's older fixtures. "I saw one of those old gobo patterns on the floor... and they are the Dark Ages compared to what images we can project now."

"High End Systems has always been known for projecting the best and most innovative images, but those full colour images have now become digital images, with movies, loops and so on. As High End Systems moves further into the future of digital lighting, I intend again to alter the perception of the status quo. "It means I can do so much more to move your mind now."