Lighting manufacturers love to tell you how many diodes are in a luminaire, and they also like to tell you how much power the thing consumes, but there appears to be something of an allergy to coughing up output numbers. There’s a lot to see, and most of it isn’t very well documented. It’s been a long while since I’ve truly gone shopping for that old mainstay of small-venue lighting, the LED wash PAR, but I do take a look around every so often.
SMALL MUSIC STAGE LIGHTING DESIGN HOW TO
We can’t have anybody in the band who’s permanently stuck in “shadow.” You only get one chance to shoot a 10th anniversary concert, and we want to get it right.Īs such, I’m looking at how to beef up my available lighting instruments. The album “Clarity” by Sons Of Nothing is turning 10, and a number of us are trying to put together one smasher of a party.Īnd our master of all things videographic is concerned about having enough light. I’m in the process of getting ready for a pretty special show. I have another big show coming up very soon, and I am determined to learn from my mistakes in time.
The good news is that when you know what’s wrong you can fix it.
The washes were mostly hitting empty deck instead of people, and the spots were doing the same thing…which also reduced their effectiveness as an aerial visual. In practice, this worked out to my whole show being far too oblique to have much “wow” factor. The tangent of 45 degrees is 1, meaning that the light aiming point is at the end of a line that’s just the same length as the trim height. If I would have bothered to do the tiniest bit of trigonometry, I would have realized that – for a trim height of about 8 feet – a nearly 70 degree angle is required for the lights to be pointed at a stage’s front edge that’s 20 feet away from the light hangs. At the time, in my head, that made sense, but in practice it robbed the whole show of maximum impact. In other words, if I wasn’t shooting the lights parallel to the floor or higher, they were at about 45 degrees of tilt or lower. I was so worried about getting light in people’s eyes that I programmed the whole show with a general reference angle of roughly 45 degrees. The biggest overall problem was directly attributable to me. So everything was skiddy-whompus all the time, and it drove me crazy. (You can really see the effect of this in the picture above.) My guess is that there were two problems in play:ġ) I really did not have nearly enough torque applied on the wing-nuts holding the lights to their O clamps.Ģ) The mini-beam bases have so little mass compared to the moving head that the whole assembly is very sensitive to movement in general. I would make adjustments, and things would seem okay for a bit, but within a few minutes I’d have one or two fixtures out of whack again. I really like things to be geometrically neat and tidy, but I couldn’t get the mini-beam portion of the setup to stay horizontally aligned.
Practically speaking, this means that the beams look pretty darn okay when they’re pointed generally in your direction, but lose impact in a hurry as the light is pointed away at larger angles. As such, when fired through haze, you don’t end up with a large total volume of illuminated airborne particles along a line extending from your eye. The tradeoff, though, is that the beam diameter is small. Based on my informal measurements, they can still manage to deliver 100 lux (about the minimum lighting for working in an office) at a distance of 80 feet. They’re very affordable, and actually a bit surprising in terms of output. I had made the decision to try some mini-beams that I found online. That is to say, if you want it to look like a big column of light is blasting out from somewhere upstage – guess what? You need to have a fixture that will spit out a collimated stream of photons with a large beam diameter. Nifty aerial effects that hold up across various lighting positions require both brightness and larger beam cross-sections. Luminous flux (brightness, in other words) is important for a lighting design to have impact, but it’s not the only factor in play. The results weren’t terrible by any means, it’s just that there was a failure to “spark” in my own imagination. I can say that the gig went decently, but I didn’t quite satisfy my own hopes in the lighting department. I was out at FOH, running both audio and lighting. Just last week, a long-in-the-planning show with Roll The Bones came to fruition.
0 kommentar(er)
