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Simple Question
Patrick Kraehenbuehl:
Hey there PSW.
Long time listener, first time caller.
I have a few simple question for you professional and experienced lighting designers/installers out there.
If you were going to replace a standard par 64 with a 1000w lamp with an LED fixture, where would you put your money? Does the height of hang factor at all into your decision?
Is there a reason that I still spend hours gelling 120k rigs? Why havent they been replaced with a comparable number of LED fixtures? I understand the the lunar white is becoming a thing of the past, as every time I look into the new LEDs it seems like the RGBA mixing gets damn near close to the color temperature of an incandescent.
Now I'm not going to replace any movers with LEDs quite yet, but for obvious uplighting applications, LEDs seem to be the hands down no brainer as far as power consumption, color mixing, drape/gel/leg burning concerns, etc... Does this also apply to stage washing?
Thanks in advance; please go easy on me
Cheers
Duane Massey:
The technology is there, but the price tag is still pretty steep.
Thomas Bishop:
It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Incandescents aren't going anywhere. The look and brightness just cannot be achieved with LED's (at least anything even remotely affordable). I have built a rig based on Source 4's and 36x3w tri color LED's for front lighting of bands and am pretty happy with it. The S4's provide the white and the LED's give a nice bright color saturation.
Keep in mind this is for concert work, theatre is a completely different animal and I don't think we're really there yet with LED's for theatre work. Longer throws means tighter beam angles and brighter light, both hard to get out of most of today's (affordable) LED's.
Another reason to stick with 120k rigs is sheer coverage. Sure, you can get any color out of an LED, but you still need a lot of them to cover a stage. So maybe your double hung 120k rig turns into single hung. That's still a lot of LED's, a lot of focusing, and a lot of money to invest.
Yes, uplighting with LED's is the way to go. I've been doing quite a bit of uplighting recently and I'd hate to imagine trying to pull it off with par cans. The ability to change color is a huge selling point for my clients and one that sets me apart from the competition.
Jason Phair:
LED fixtures that offer anything close to a tungsten white are some pretty serious coin. Those pars, meanwhile, paid for themselves a long time ago.
As someone else mentioned, a lot of it also depends on what kind of gig you're doing. There's plenty of RNR shows that could be done with all LED's. I haven't really seen any rocking LED profile fixtures yet, but there's some great moving head LED washers out there, as well as the static fixtures of course. For theatre, color temperature, color saturation, and dimming profile is still not in line with what LD's expect/are used to. For corporate, even with the best RGBAW LED fixtures, and even with color correction being built into the personalities, I still haven't seen a light that's going to be acceptable for video work. To the eye it may be pretty close, but the camera doesn't lie (unless it's broken).
Silas Pradetto:
Thomas Bishop wrote on Wed, 16 February 2011 09:52
It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Incandescents aren't going anywhere. The look and brightness just cannot be achieved with LED's (at least anything even remotely affordable). I have built a rig based on Source 4's and 36x3w tri color LED's for front lighting of bands and am pretty happy with it. The S4's provide the white and the LED's give a nice bright color saturation.
Keep in mind this is for concert work, theatre is a completely different animal and I don't think we're really there yet with LED's for theatre work. Longer throws means tighter beam angles and brighter light, both hard to get out of most of today's (affordable) LED's.
Another reason to stick with 120k rigs is sheer coverage. Sure, you can get any color out of an LED, but you still need a lot of them to cover a stage. So maybe your double hung 120k rig turns into single hung. That's still a lot of LED's, a lot of focusing, and a lot of money to invest.
Yes, uplighting with LED's is the way to go. I've been doing quite a bit of uplighting recently and I'd hate to imagine trying to pull it off with par cans. The ability to change color is a huge selling point for my clients and one that sets me apart from the competition.
A 120k 6-color rig is only 10 lights of each color in the front and in back. Considering LED can do any color, and that you'll only be able to use half of your LED fixtures at once a lot of the time (you need something to fade to, since LEDs don't fade too well), you could quite easily get the exact same effect of 120k of pars with 40 LED fixtures total. I think, once you factor in dimming, socapex, trussing, feeder, and the cost of the fixtures, LEDs are going to win these days.
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