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I would avoid lasers unless you know what you are doing as you can run into complicated Health and Safety issues. When it comes to movers, you can have moving heads and moving mirrors (scanners). Moving heads are very fashionable. Scanners are less so and that means more bang per buck. They are able to move faster but don't have the same range as a moving head. A moving head can project a beam behind it while a scanner can't. Movers tend to come as either washes or spots (I am guessing you know the difference with regard to beam size) while scanners always seem to be spots. The spots have different gobos to change the shape of the beam while washes don't.
Lighting comes with different kinds and powers of "lamps" which are bulbs to most people but if you call them bulbs to a lighting pro they will assume that you don't know what you are talking about and will be snickering at you while rubbing their hands with glee. On that note, they are "fixtures" not "lights" as well. Anywya, lamps. Ordinary tungsten type lamps that are similar to those in par cans. Normally these only go up to about 250W in a mover. There is another kind that is called HMI or HDI or similar. These are brighter watt for watt than a tungsten (the optics of the actual fixture have a big impact as well) and have a higher colour temperature, which means the white tends to be purer or bluer compared to tungstens. The HMI lamps are quite a lot more expensive to buy but last up to 10 times as long as a standard tungsten. They do need to be changed at regular intervals and should not be left until they blow as they can blow big style. That is OK, you just need a maintenance cycle to replace lamps and clean all the crap out. I would go for HMIs if I were you and be looking at 250W lamps.
Other issues are power and control.
So power. 24 x 300W Par 56 cans are going to use 7200W, which is the power supplied by a ring main. 24 x 1000W PAR 64s is, well, 24,000W which puts the venue in a different league. A fixture with a 250W HMI lamp is going to use more than 250W to run, possibly 350 to 400W. Another big thing on power is that an HMI lamp requires a ballast (don't ask....or more honestly, don't ask me.....) and that can require up to 3 times the normal running power when first turned on. You can turn the switch on a socket on and blow fuses.
Control. What do you have in place? 24 cans suggests a desk with either 24 channels or 12 channels with cans wire up as 2 cans per channel. I don't know if that is DMX or analogue or whether you know what the difference is - we all start somewhere. If the present desk or whatever is full then you cannot expand your system without either replacing the existing desk with one with more channels or adding an extra desk.
Hope that helps.
Andy
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