What's Actually In Those Road Cases (And Why It Costs What It Costs)

At some point in your experience of live events you have probably watched a crew roll a large black case through a venue and wondered, if only briefly, what was in it. Maybe you've looked at a production budget and seen a line item for equipment rental that seemed aggressively large and thought, for what exactly. Maybe you've just wondered why everything in this industry is so heavy and so expensive and why it seems to take so many people to move it from one place to another.

These are fair questions. Here are some answers.

**The cases themselves.**

Road cases — sometimes called flight cases, touring cases, ATA cases — are the black hard-shell containers that live event production gear travels in. They are built to take a serious beating, because the gear they protect takes a serious beating. A road case for a professional console might travel by truck, then by hand truck through a loading dock, then by dolly across a concrete floor, then get stacked in a truck again, then do it all in reverse at load-out, then travel to the next city and do it again, for months or years. The case is an investment that protects a larger investment. A good road case for a significant piece of gear might cost several hundred dollars. This seems like a lot until the alternative — gear that doesn't survive the road — costs several thousand to repair or replace.

Inside the cases is the actual production infrastructure. Let me walk you through the major categories.

**Audio.**

The audio department's cases contain the consoles, the amplifiers, the signal processing, the cable — miles, sometimes literally miles, of cable in various formats for various purposes. The console at front of house — the FOH position where the audio engineer mixes the show for the audience — is often the most expensive single piece of audio equipment on a production. Professional digital consoles used on touring productions and major live events can run anywhere from twenty thousand to over a hundred thousand dollars. This is before you add the speakers, the amplifiers, the monitoring systems for the stage, the wireless microphone systems, the intercom systems, the recording infrastructure if the show is being captured.

The speaker systems for large productions — line arrays hung from truss, subwoofers ground-stacked or flown, delay towers positioned through a festival field to get coverage to the back of a crowd — are themselves a significant logistical and financial undertaking. Professional touring line array elements cost several thousand dollars each, and a full production hang might use twenty, thirty, forty of them. The rigging hardware required to fly them safely adds more. The labor to hang them adds more. By the time you have audio in a room at festival or arena scale, you are looking at a system that represents a genuinely remarkable amount of money and engineering.

**Lighting.**

Lighting's road cases contain the fixtures — moving lights, LED washes, spotlights, strobes, hazers — along with the cabling, the dimmer racks or power distribution, and the console. Professional moving lights, the kind that pan and tilt and change color and beam pattern and gobo automatically in response to console commands, can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a budget fixture to several thousand for a professional touring unit. A full lighting rig for a significant touring show might involve hundreds of fixtures. The truss to hang them from, the motors to fly the truss, the chain hoists and the motor controllers and the rigging hardware — all of that is separate from the fixtures themselves.

The lighting console is its own specialized piece of software-driven hardware that takes years to learn deeply. The major professional consoles cost tens of thousands of dollars and are operated by people whose specific expertise with those systems is a significant part of what makes them hireable.

**Rigging Hardware.**

This is my world so I will spend a moment on it. Rigging hardware includes the shackles, the slings, the motors, the chain hoists, the truss, the span sets, the load cells, the beam clamps — everything that goes between the structure of a building and the thing being hung from it. Professional rigging hardware is rated and certified. The working load limit of a shackle is stamped on the shackle. The capacity of a motor is tested and certified. The truss is engineered to specific load ratings. All of this exists because the consequence of a rigging failure is not a broken piece of gear — it is a thing falling on a person, which is a category of outcome that we in the rigging community take with a seriousness that is, if anything, not taken seriously enough by the rest of the industry.

The hardware itself is expensive because it is manufactured to tight tolerances from quality materials and because the liability chain around it is significant. The labor to rig a show is expensive because it requires people who are trained, experienced, and trusted to make life-safety decisions in real time. When a producer asks why rigging costs what it costs, the answer is: because the alternative is considerably worse.

**Video.**

LED walls — the large pixel arrays that serve as backdrops and stage elements in modern production — are among the most capital-intensive pieces of production infrastructure in current use. Professional LED panels cost hundreds of dollars each, and a significant LED wall installation might use hundreds of panels. The processing infrastructure that drives the wall — the media servers, the signal routers, the control systems — is itself a significant investment. The labor to install and operate it is specialized and valued accordingly.

**Why It All Costs What It Costs.**

The production budget line item for equipment rental is large because the equipment is expensive to purchase, expensive to maintain, expensive to transport, and expensive to insure. The rental rate on a piece of gear reflects not just the cost of that piece of gear but the amortized cost of the cases it travels in, the truck it travels on, the warehouse it lives in between shows, the technicians who maintain it, the insurance that covers it, and the overhead of the company that owns and manages all of it.

The labor costs are large because experienced production professionals are genuinely skilled and genuinely in demand, because the hours are long and the physical demands are significant and the margin for error in many departments is zero or close to it.

When you look at a production budget and it seems like a lot of money for a relatively brief event, what you are seeing is the cost of making something appear effortless. The effortlessness is the product. The infrastructure behind it — the cases and the cable and the consoles and the rigging hardware and the people who know how to use all of it — is what makes the effortlessness possible.

Nothing about this is cheap. If it were cheap, it would look it. And you'd notice.

— Dots