DEFINITION February 2019.pdf

FEATURE | L IGHT I NG

RIGHT BB&S feels the bigger trend is that it’s all finally going to be LED, except for the 6Ks and 12Ks.

that.” That’s not to say the company lacks options. “At BSC Expo, we’re bringing out the Area 48 Colour. It will be the most compact light out there. It weighs 4.5kg including power.” Plesner concludes: “The biggest trend is that it’s all going to be LED finally, except for the 6Ks and 12Ks, they’re going to remain standard because it’s getting too expensive. You can do 2.5kW HMI, 5kW and also 10kW tungsten is doable. Beyond that point, it wouldn’t make sense.” LITEPANELS Higher power has been a constant target for LED. Product specialist Andrew Woodfin works for Litepanels, possibly the first really popular purveyor of the technology. He admits: “what we’re requesting, myself and my counterpart in the US, is high power RGB fresnels. There really aren’t any high powered ones that are colour accurate. That’s the reason we haven’t gone down the route of bicolour daylight tungsten fresnels. We don’t think that the tech is at a point where you can get the brightness and colour accuracy.” Such a product might do well for any company, though Litepanels is already busy building its Gemini soft panel. Released at IBC 2017, the fixture has found favour in live and as-live TV including Wimbledon tennis, Dancing on Ice , The Voice and Strictly Come Dancing , deployed by the dozen to create animated lighting effects. The lighting that can be stored and archived We’re looking towards harvesting metadata from

are pretty 1980s – archaic serial data, one-directional.” While wireless protocols are already widely supported, Pierceall is interested in wired connections, too. “A lot of guys will say ‘I don’t want to have to wire every fixture in the rig’. The thing is, every fixture has a wire anyway. We’re looking at integrated power and data.” He adds: “We’re looking towards harvesting metadata from lighting that can be stored and archived with LUTs and CDLs. A production could come back and do re-shoots and already have information. We’re going to be demonstrating some of that at BSC Expo this year.” The company also manufactures the Lightblade product for NBCUniversal. “We basically doubled the power in the same form factor for the linear light that we’re building for them. We’re offering 80 watts in two feet of light, which is pretty blinding,” says Pierceall. Peter Plesner, founder of BB&S, feels that not all lighting needs to be capable of full colour mixing: “Definitely not. If you have to make a studio, a fixed installation for a news show or something like that, I need my clean 5600K. I’ll just go for

colour temperature is that white light to an expectation of reasonable quality with bicolour. Now the expectation is full spectrum. Whether you call it red or crimson or a specific gel number or an XY coordinate on a CIE chart.” Hive specialises in colour mixing LED hard light, a somewhat neglected field. “Hard light is still missing in a world full of lovely colour-changing panels. What the world doesn’t need from us is another one of those, but it does need something like a Pocket PAR with SkyPanel controls,” says Miller. Hive’s LED driver for the well-known Source Four profile, which operates like K5600’s Jo-Leko HMI, was introduced at IBC. Again, Miller’s analysis of the next big thing in lighting is “control and control systems – on the light and remotely – programming, the development of DMX and then beyond DMX, ArtNet, wireless DMX.” CINEO Rich Pierceall, CEO of Cineo, takes up the theme: “What we’re showing is indicative of where we see tech heading in lighting, which is a network infrastructure. Traditional control methods, such as DMX

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