Tech Column hey won’t be replacing those ARRIMAX M90s anytime soon, but LED lights are casting some bigger shadows on sets and studios. Ostensibly, they consume less energy, throw off less heat and have a longer lifecycle and are more robust than say, an HMI source, all of which combines to offset their initially higher costs. The devil, however, as always, is in the details.
through a diode in combination with a specific material. Light is the result of interaction at the atomic particle level in the form of photons. There’s no filament to heat up and burn and nothing to break. Until recently, LEDs were restricted as staging lighting for live shows – either for theatres or live concerts – because they couldn’t pump out the lumens like tungsten or HMI lights.
First, a little history. LED – Light Emitting Diodes – have been around for more than half a century, though it’s only in the last decade or so they’ve become practical. The root science of LEDs goes back to circa 1907, with the discovery of electroluminescence. Work continued over the years to find a use for this phenomenon, and by 1963 the first red LED was created at General Electric. It took a decade before yellow LED came about at Monsanto. Still more work was done by more scientists and more companies before the first bright blue LED emerged in 1979. Still, it took until about 10 years ago for the technology to really start to break out of the lab and into wider use.
Things are changing, and over the last couple of years, they’ve started to reach critical mass in niche settings on movie sets, in TV studios and in TV series production. Shows like Rookie Blue and Big Brother, along with CTV and other news shows in Toronto are using them for specific shots, and shows like Good Morning America, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon have switched or are switching to at least some LEDs.
Briefly, LEDs create light when an electric current passes
20 • Canadian Cinematographer - June 2014
“They are also cutting their HVAC costs to cool down the studio,” notes Jean Francois Canuel, managing director at A.C. Lighting Inc. in Etobicoke, where the company has just moved into a 43,000-square-foot facility with
