Late last year we caught up with Howard Ungerleider from Production Design International in Toronto who was showing off a new technology for background lighting. At that time Howard was working on becoming the Canadian distributor for SOFT LED manufactured by Main Light based out of Wilmington, Delaware.
You create your show using the Light System Composer (LSC) software from Color Kinetics running on a PC. You can take advantage of the extensive library of built-in special effects or you can import designs from other applications such as Macromedia Flash.
Once your show is ready, you can upload it to Color Kinetics Light system Engine (LSE) an Ethernet based hardware controller that stores and plays your show. The LSE lets you assign ways to trigger playback such as keypad input, DMX signals, and time elapsing.
There are 4 levels of resolution available:
- High – 4” vertical and horizontal centers, comes on an 8’1” by 33’5” panel (Drapery) weighing 130 lbs.
- Medium X – 4” vertical and 8” horizontal centers, comes on an 8’1” by 33’5” panel (Drapery) weighing 150 lbs.
- Medium – 8” vertical and horizontal centers, comes on an 16’1” by 33’5” panel (Drapery) weighing 150 lbs.
- Low – 12” vertical and horizontal centers.
You can virtually connect as many panels together as you want to go from small to large backgrounds. You can have multiple backgrounds in various areas of your stage. The panels are 130 to 150 lbs and can be easily worked on by two people. They fold up into a small package, two 16’x33’ panels can fit into a 30”x50”x30” flight case. The LSE, the power supplies, and the Ethernet cards are all rack-mountable.
So you have a very cost effective way of providing stage backgrounds. For those interested in more details and pricing, I am sure Howard or someone at Production Design International will be more than happy to answer any of your questions and yes, PDI is the official distributor of Main Light's Soft LED system for Canada.
We would like to thank Elise Del Vecchio from Driven To Design for helping us with some of the camera work!
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