Converting a Community Theatre to LED's

[Don Allen]

Any suggestions on what led fixtures would replace:
Selecon axial Acclaim 600w 44 degree zoom profiles (12)
Strand Patt223 1000w 8 - 60 degrees fresnel (12)
Selecon Compact fresnel 7 -5 0 degrees 1000w (2)
mixed 500w fresnel (12)
Strand Patt23 500w profile (6)
Strand Coda 4x500w cell cyc lights (4)
Par56 300w (12)
in a community theatre. They are applying for a substantial grant to upgrade their community theatre and a mains upgrade from 32 amps 3 phase to 64 amps is one of the more expensive costs.

What is more appropriate, RGB, RGBA, RGBW ?

This is where offsetting costs may make led's more ecconomical as a long term solution.

They will also need a lighting desk upgrade from their LSC Axiom 24/48. Perhaps an LSC Maxim XXL as it is advantageous to have faders for some community theatre operators. A pc based program will be better value for a competent operator as a colour picker is great for leds.

Going from the original CCT30 axial 1000w profiles to the Selecon axial Acclaim 600w 44 degree zoom profiles has saved them power (4.8Kw) and given them more light intensity. They now want to see if they take the next step.

Thanks for your suggestions
Don
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Lighting Designer and manufacturer of Theatre Electronics

[prubie]

Hi Don,
As you probably already know the industry is littered with thousands of LED fixtures, however most of them so far are more aimed at replacing Parcans and for rock and roll etc. The technology is only just starting to pick up to a theatrical quality in terms of colour mixing quality vs output. The biggest problem is the control over the beam, I don't know of any led wash lights that give you barndoors that actually work in flagging off the edge of a beam - simply because all the high output led wash lights use multi-source LED emitters.

As unbiased as possible (and if anyone has better suggestions or wants to correct me please do) here is a list of a few I know of that may be of worth looking at. In addition to these more known brand selections there are a select cheaper brand led fixtures that may do the job especially for replacing things like your par 56's if a broad colour spectrum isn't an issue. You may also want to check out 80v profiles / fresnels as an energy saving option, though these are generally more aimed at replacements for 2k lamps.

Profiles:

http://www.robertjuliat.fr/ProductsGB/ALEDIN_vGB.html
This seems to be the best option currently for replacing theatre profiles with a LED alternative, though again i'm not sure exactly of its output comparison to say your 600w Axials.
http://www.seleconlight.com//index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.p1&category_id=150&product_id=10331
though this is more aimed at the display /architectural market, it may suffice as a low wattage profile replacement,

Fresnels / Wash lights:

http://www.seleconlight.com//index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.p1&category_id=151&product_id=10334
compares with a 1k/1.2k fresnel, but again you wouldn't be able to use barndoors.
http://www.etcconnect.com/products.ledfixtures.aspx
I've used these and although they are more of a wash light they certainly live up to their name in terms of colour reproduction. I found it hard to pick a gel colour i couldn't replicate accurately.

There are many more options in the moving head range, and even a couple of decent ones that are emerging, but these are the fixed theatrical ones I can think of for now.

[phild]

Ask Graham Henstock what he thinks of the Philips Selecon PL1. The STC owns 10 of them.
(Edited to correct manufacturers name..)
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Never play leap frog with a unicorn

[David Ashton]

And the prices are?

[phild]

You will get change from $2500.00. (But not much) Pricing varies with accessories too.
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Never play leap frog with a unicorn

[Andy Ciddor]

It strikes me that this must be one hugely expensive power upgrade to consider replacing a bunch of perfectly good fixtures with high-cost low-output LED fixtures. In terms of energy savings it would take a moderate-use community venue decades to recover the replacement cost of the new fixtures.
<troll>I might suggest that for the number of hours of usage that many of these venues get, you may find it more cost effective to hire in a gen set to drive the second rack of dimmers whenever there's a production big enough to require it. </troll>
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Andy Ciddor

[GL]

I tend to agree... the mains, I can understand upgrading (never miss out on a chance to investigate the condition of the neutral wiring) but are the current fixtures in good working order?
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"No matter what age we are, some have never quite left the schoolyard"

[Don Allen]

The current fixtures are all in good working order.

The other sections of the theatre are a bit miffed that the lighting claims all of the incoming power and they want airconditioning for the patrons.

There are three dimmer racks in use with an average of one fixture per dimmer channel apart from the cyc channels which have 2kW each.

The main disadvantage of led lighting at present is the poor spectral content on the light beam. They have used my 48 x 5w RGBA led pars and found them suitable for musicals but we did not bother trying them for drama.
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Lighting Designer and manufacturer of Theatre Electronics

[manchild]

I'm sorry to say that both cost and quality is likely to make LED an unattractive option here.

The fixtures mentioned thus far are all good options, but you can expect them to run in the thousands of dollars each. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses and while each year sees us getting closer, we still don't have a fixture that replicates _all_ of a theatrical fixture's benefits.

Some considerations if you do decide to go down the LED route:

Colour Rendering.
RGB is typically no good except for a very small selection of saturated colours. Whites, tints, pastels and ambers all struggle with RGB fixtures.
RGBA will do a lot better at getting a wider range of saturated and pastel colours, managing a lot better with the ambers and oranges. You may find it still struggles a little bit in the tints. That said, the amber does help a lot in producing CTO colours.
RGBW does a lot better at producing tinted and pastel colours, but the gap in the amber part of the spectrum does still make mixing ambers and CTOs time consuming and difficult.
The best colour rendering I've seen comes from the ETC Selador range, which uses seven colours (red, red-orange, amber, green, cyan, blue, violet) and while it requires a bit more mucking about when creating the colours, it does very well in both whites and tints, pastels and saturated colours.

When evaluating LED fixtures' colours, make sure you get to mix your own colours, and compare them against gels you commonly use in that position, etc. All LED fixtures can do a nice blue or magenta, so avoid letting the sales rep lead the demo when it comes to the showing off the colour gamut of a fixture.

Colour rendering and LED is an involved (but interesting!) subject. Mike Wood has written some excellent articles on LEDs and CRI in Protocol magazine, that are available for download from his website here: http://www.mikewoodconsulting.com/articles.htm

Fade Curve
Nothing destroys the mood and immersion of a theatrical scene more than a steppy crossfade. Make sure you test the fixture fading from full to black over 2sec, 5sec, 10sec and 30sec to make sure it both fades linearly (I've seen many woeful curves in LED fixtures which come nowhere near approximating the linear-ish curve you get on a tungsten or mechanically-dimmed fixture), and without steps.

Having 16-bit instead of 8-bit colour/intensity parameters should, in theory, improve the steppiness, but in practice I've found there to be little correlation, with many 16-bit fixtures still having nasty steppiness, and the best fade curve and steplessness I've seen (Sealdor again) coming from a fixture that only supported 8-bit colour/intensity.

Smarties
Being able to see the individual LED pixels can be very distracting in anything except effect lighting. Also, if your throw is short, it can cause coloured shadows behind the subject, or coloured stripes if skimmed up a cyc.

If the fixtures are being masked by borders or legs, or they're facing away from the audience, then this is not an issue.

Framing
Most LED fixtures are wash-style lanterns, and the array of sources on them means that framing with barndoors or black-wrap means you'll generally not get a clean cut - rather you'll get a separate shadow for each source. This produces a nasty coloured edge on your non-homogenised LEDs, and a difficult-to-control edge even on those with homogenised sources.

Output
Output-wise, LED does very well when competing against a tungsten lamp gelled with L128 or L195. It does fairly well when competing against L201 or L106. It generally does very poorly against O/W (3200K), L205 or even L020 (particularly if it doesn't have an amber LED). So make sure you're judging its output on the colours you intend to use it with.


Perhaps, rather than trying to upgrade most or all of your tungsten stock, just look at replacing a few of the areas where LED makes the most sense. The cyc, parcans and perhaps overhead wash would be obvious candidates. Beyond what's already been suggested by prubie, I've found the chroma q colourforce works nicely on a cyc.

If cost is still a barrier, you may find some luck in pitching it to the council or community as either a saving in the long-term (you can consider not just lamp and electricity savings, but reduced maintenance and aircon savings, too), or a green-ification of the venue, or both.



As for desks, the Maxim is nice for generic-only control, but its patpad is a crime against humanity. The fader count is much smaller, but IMO the moving light (useful if you're mixing RGB(A/W) LEDs) and cue-stack functionality on a smartfade ML is much easier.

Depending on their age, you may find many untrained operators actually take to a PC-based program faster than they do a small-ish lighting console, but I do concede it's nice to have at least a few faders for on-the-fly control.

- Blake Garner.

[GL]

[manchild]

[GL]

I suppose, in a few years time, a closer to yellow (than amber) yellow will come along and that will make a marked difference to colour mixing led's
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"No matter what age we are, some have never quite left the schoolyard"

[Ric]

There's been a recent discussion on Controlbooth forum which ties into this.

http://www.controlbooth.com/search.php?searchid=506261

My point is to do with colour matching for touring shows, and how that would be possible with LED devices ( it basically wouldn't with current technology), but that may not be relevant in your venue.
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Cheers,
Ric