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David McCall
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Quote David McCall Replybullet Topic: My view from LDI
    Posted: 11/05/11 at 3:30pm

I just got back from LDI (theatrical lighting convention) and it was almost all LEDs this year.

Everybody has LED based profile spots now and they are bright enough to be useful even in at 20' or so. Most come up a little shy when compared to a Source 4 at full with no gel, but how often do we actually use our lights at full with no gel? The selling points for replacing conventional fixtures are; less heat, long lamp life, no gels (although some units only put out white light), and less energy used. The prices range from as low as $800 for a 3rd party lamp house that fits on your old Source 4 up 2 $2500 for a real Source 4 with an LED lamp. The ETC lights were especially nice due to the extra colors. If you have ever used an Red Green Blue cyc, you know that yellows deep blues and nice pastels are pretty hard to achieve. The extra colors help a great deal.

At these prices it is still pretty hard to justify replacing your existing $300 profile spots with $2500 LED units because the pay back probably won't occur in our lifetime. If you are doing a new building or a full retrofit of a really old venue, then they really start to make sense. You don't need to buy racks of dimmers and run individual lines out to each light. An ordinary 20 amp outlet will power several lights just fine so your need for a huge amount of power is greatly diminished. You reduce the number of lights required because you can achieve nice color effects with a very basic arrangement of acting areas without having to tie up a lot of lights just to do color washes. Of course you can still do better lighting with a lot of lights if you can afford them. By the way we have to use the term profile now instead of ellipsoidals because there usually isn't an ellipsoidal reflector involved in the new lights.

There were also a lot of wash lights that can be used like PARs with the same features as the profiles. These have been around for a while, but they are finally getting to be useful for us theatre folks. The ETC lights come in many flavors depending on how you are going to use them. Some concentrate on vivid colors to the point of having fixtures that concentrate on reds and ambers, while another version is mostly about blues. They have red-blue-green-amber + to do full color and red-blue-green-white + to give you great pastels. They even have dimming curves available to simulate the red shift that is present in conventional tungsten lighting. 

Many firms were showing huge modular LED based "screens" of any size you want. I want something like 48' x 20' and that works out to somewhere around $1,000,000 +/-. Sadly that isn't going to happen in my venue.
 
We are doing Aladdin this Fall and I need to make a Genie appear. Flutter Fetti was showing off their line of confetti cannons and making quite a mess (in a good way). They have a small cannon that goes about 8' high with mirrored mylar bits. I think it will be about perfect for that effect. I just couldn't figure out how to fit him in a lamp :-)
 
 
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JoeMc
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Quote JoeMc Replybullet Posted: 11/08/11 at 8:46pm
Originally posted by David McCall

 . I just couldn't figure out how to fit him in a lamp :-)

It's easy!
Just keep rubbing the lamp & make a wish!Cry
[western] Gondawandaland
"Hear the light & see the sound!
TOI TOI CHOOKAS
{may you always play to a full house!}
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Quote JoeMc Replybullet Posted: 11/08/11 at 8:51pm

 Sorry!

Duplicated?


Edited by JoeMc - 11/08/11 at 8:55pm
[western] Gondawandaland
"Hear the light & see the sound!
TOI TOI CHOOKAS
{may you always play to a full house!}
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