Friday, January 25, 2019
What's Trending: The LED Revolution
www.livedesignonline.com: Let’s face it: Stage lighting has gone through a huge change in the past decade. Once upon a time, candles gave way to gaslight, then gaslight to electricity, and new lamps came into being from tungsten and incandescent sources to MR16, arcs, quartz, and fluorescent…and now, of course, the LED. Designers were naysayers at first—"we’ll never use them; they’ll never be bright enough; the colors aren’t true"—but today most are singing a different tune, or at least tuning in some different colors. The newest topic in Live Design’s What’s Trending series is The LED Revolution, as we check in with designers to see how they feel about those ubiquitous little light emitting diodes now.
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4 comments:
I was very lucky and my high school’s theatre was fitting with some pretty top-notch technology. We had enough ellipsoidal and par lights that we could hang a different plot for each show, usually in two spaces simultaneously. However, all the lights had tungsten lamps, and when I got here to Carnegie Mellon, I was confused on what made those special lights with the white and blue ended cable so special. As a non-lighting person, it makes a lot of sense that LED lights would take over the industry. They are better for the environment, they do not emit a ton of heat like conventional fixtures, and there is a much more diverse choice in colors. The old-fashioned person in me, however, sees the hesitation in supporting an entirely LED lighting world from a lighting design perspective involving gel colors. If the world shifts to LED, the purpose of gels will practically disappear. And while it is probably better for the environment to eliminate the production of these plastic sheets, it is the way lighting designers have been planning out their shows for decades. LED light eliminate that physical element of the design process, and I can understand why that would be a sad thing to lose. However, I think ultimately it better to switch to being more environmentally friendly, rather than sticking to tradition.
I find the passage of trends and the adoption of and adaptation to new technologies incredibly fascinating. Human creativity has an incredibly quick capability of adapting to new situations, stemmed most likely in our very rudimentary drive for survival. We always think we never can change or can never fully accept the new, yet we as a society do so constantly. The pace of technological change (in terms of electronics, the way we think of technology now) is also much faster than other past (non electronic) technological introductions. We have a hit a point of development where our inventions surprise us with their own capabilities. Although, as pointed out in this author’s melancholy lament of color, there is a loss. It is this loss and fear of loss that often makes us so resistant to change but also drives future creation. In remembering this loss we have something to strive for in the newest revision, a technology capable of doing what we miss from the old and what we love from the new. So onwards and onwards we push.
This article claims that LEDs are the future, which I completely agree with. Incandescent fixtures are wasteful, inefficient, and overall worse compared to LED fixtures. Power consumption and ease of use for LEDs are also important when considering which to use. The only real downsides to LEDs are the need for an extra cable and the higher cost up front. However, every theatre should not immediately drop their entire stock of incandescent lights for LEDs. In fact, all of that waste would likely be worse for the environment. Instead, they should phase out their lights as they break, or donate their stock to a less fortunate theatre, if they have the cash flow to support buying a reasonable amount of fixtures. However, between power saving, eliminating waste from gels, and spending less money on lamps, should the opportunity to go entirely LED present itself, I believe that the technology is in a place where it is worth it to do so.
I like that this article attempted to explore both upsides and downsides of LED lighting becoming more and more prominent in the theatre lighting world. It’s amazing how quickly they went from “yeah, they’re probably the future, but at the moment they can’t get bright enough to be useful” to the instruments we have today. LED lighting definitely has its advantages- more environmentally friendly, lower heat output, and easy color changing- but I think the author brought up a good point when they mentioned shows no longer “having a particular color look”. LEDs make it much easier to change colors on the fly, without having to get a ladder or fly in the electric and swap out dozens of gels for others, which is fantastic, but it can also mean that designers may no longer find it necessary to put as much forethought into their lighting choices. However, I can also see that this idea at least in part comes from a place of “well I had to do it the hard way, and you should too- kids have it too easy” and from not wanting a large skillset to become obsolete. I agree with Will that theatres shouldn’t just throw out all their old lights in favor of LEDs, but that we should embrace our LED future as best we can.
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