FEATURE | NEW L IGHT I NG
LIGHT HOUSE IBC WAS A HOTBED OF NEW LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY , SOME ON BOOTHS AND SOME HIDING BEHIND THE SCENES. HERE ARE A FEW OF THE HIGHLIGHTS
WORDS PH I L RHODES T he biggest single-source LED movie light currently made is rated at around 3KW. The biggest HMIs are 24KW. That means that LED has some way to go before it can completely replace the gear that’s been in use for decades. 575W HMIs are the smallest common type and perhaps something of a watershed: once LED has started to compete at that level, the technology will really be coming of age. Matching 575W HMI, however, would require something not much less than a 575W LED, and a 575W single- emitter LED hard light has long been a tough thing to make. Even so, looking at some representative specimens from IBC2019, it’s clear that the race to do that is well underway. ARRI ORBITER The entrance to IBC’s Hall 12 this year was guarded by Arri’s Orbiter. The company has a lot of experience in LED hard light, having been early to offer a range of Fresnels, though the Orbiter is more complex – perhaps an attempt to create a light that’s all things to all people. The promotional material mentions “sheer output” as a feature, and while the power level is more
RIGHT The Arri Orbiter is a high- power LED with a wide choice of components
or less similar to an L10 Fresnel at around 500W, with the efficient, open-faced reflectors, the Orbiter should liberate more photons overall. Like anything at this power level, the Orbiter is just about usable away from a mains socket, requiring 48V input from a big floor-standing block battery. With a more cynical eye, it’s also a light with the sort of interchangeable optical components – reflectors, diffusers and so on – that have been available from other manufacturers for a while, though not with full colour mixing and not at this power level (though see the upcoming Hive Super Hornet). Speaking of colour, among the controls is an option to select by CIE xy coordinate, a welcome option found mainly at the high end, which should make it easier to colour match different lights. The reflectors closely approximate a PAR and, like any PAR, the beam is not as clean as that from a Fresnel. It does seem a little cleaner than an HMI-based PAR, possibly because the hexagonal LED array is a more consistently illuminated source. There are also projection (profile or ellipsoidal) adapters, dome and panel diffusers. It will do more or less anything, though we don’t yet know what it’ll cost.
42 DEF I N I T ION | NOVEMBER 20 1 9
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