LDI 2017 At A Glance

November 20, 2017

In a last minute turn of events, I found myself trekking through a cold rainy morning in Philly to fly back out to Vegas for LDI, the Live Design International convention. While this show is mostly put together for theatre, architectural, and concert lighting designers, our worlds are beginning to cross over more and more. I thought it would be beneficial to get out and take a look at what was being offered as 2017 comes to a close, and to see some of the things we have been eyeing up to purchase this year.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I’m going to write about DMX again in this post. I’m going to keep writing about it because you should all be using it starting right now. I’ll do my best not to get repetitive but I was at a live lighting show….and it is awesome.

Immediately upon entering the convention center, I was walking through a thick haze. At first I thought it was the Marijuana Growers convention in the next hall over, but it turns out the haze just leaks through the doors when every lighting manufacturer is running 10 different smoke machines to show off their product. It was clear that this show was going to be an eye-opening experience for me to realize the possibilities of integrating live lighting concepts onto our sets and into our rental stock.

As has been the trend, this show solidified the move away from traditional tungsten, HMI, and fluorescent lighting is still in full swing. Finding a tungsten fixture was like a needle in a haystack among the myriad of lighting options showcased here. Though this isn’t a new revelation from an industry standpoint, it certainly opened up new possibilities in my mind with moving lights that have gotten so much smaller and lighter in their form factor that they could be extremely easy to incorporate into our sets.

The Chauvet Rogue spots really stood out as a versatile LED fixture at a really affordable price point that could easily be integrated into even a smaller budget project. Instead of an RGB mixing LED chip, it features a 240W single chip and then uses gel swatches to color the light. It doesn’t offer dichroic filters to allow color blending like you can do with an RGB chip, but it does have a dichroic CTO to allow a color temp adjustment from the cool 7000k of the chip down to around 3000k. The output is killer, and it offers many other standard features that you’d find in a moving spot light like interchangeable gobos, iris control, and beam splitting. It may not be the cream of the crop when it comes to moving heads in the live lighting world, but this light stood out among other offerings in its price point and looks to be an awesome entry into bringing some moving heads onto more sets.

Chauvet Rogue LED at LDI 2017

Of course there were also some fixtures that we have been dying to see exhibiting as well. The SkyPanel S360-C was here at the Arri Booth. We had already put down our deposit on it blindly, but seeing it in person for the first time really solidified the move. I’ll cover it in more detail in the near future but MAN this thing is a monster. With about a 3×4 foot aperture, it puts out a serious amount of light that wraps nicely and throws for a good distance. There is no denying that it is huge, but I expect that is something we will all accommodate in exchange for the intense output, low power draw, and tunability productions have all come to expect.

Arri SkyPanel S360-C at LDI 2017

I’ll touch more on some other lights we plan on stocking in 2018 in some follow up posts, but for now let’s stay on track with the “live” aspects of the show.

I spent some time at the ACT Lighting booth talking with the crew about how we have been implementing DMX into our stuff this year and how we can move forward with it. Using Luminair has been great for us and continues to be an essential tool on set, but we are quickly finding its limits and yearning for another option in some scenarios. Not-surprisingly, there were a ton of ways to expand on that and this show left me with a lot to consider.

One great thing that they offer is a series of classes on their MA lighting systems. These lighting desks are serious and are used at venues and studios across the world for all kinds of shows. They are huge consoles with multiple control panels and screens more than we would ever want to pop out of a truck for a day. However, MAlighting offers some other options in that world that are more compact and ready to set up at a moment’s notice.

With MAonPC lighting software, you can get almost all the features of the full size console on a laptop with the addition of a tiny control wing to output the DMX. This software offers tons of advantages over using an iPad in times where you want to do more than just “control” the fixtures. Creating shows is easy, patching in multiple fixtures at a time is a breeze, and making bulk changes on the fly takes almost no effort.

The best part about their software is that it is completely free. Although you’ll need the control wing to output actual commands, you can download the software and school yourself on it at home without spending a dollar – and since it is the same language the large consoles speak, you’ll be able to sit down on one of those and know your way around just the same!

DMX at LDI 2017

Later in the day I came across another awesome product that isn’t new, I’d heard of it for a year or so, but admittedly I never took the time to explore it. The Firefly FloppyFlex LED is a strip LED with a frosted front that is extremely flexible in horizontal direction and comes with a myriad of different mounting options to create custom light builds for your sets. It reads similar to neon on frame and is reusable as it flexes right back from whatever shape you had it held in when you take it out of the clips. It comes in single colors, RGB tuneable, waterproof, and even pixel controllable varieties. With single lengths up to 15m and runs as short at 2 inches, the LED strip could be a valuable tool to help production designers and gaffers collaborate to create some really amazing stuff. Firefly quotes the LED at around $75 per foot for the DMX controllable tube, and around $100 per foot for the pixel version. I’m definitely looking forward to incorporating this into a project soon.

Firefly FloppyFlex LED at LDI 2017

As someone with admittedly little experience in lighting for live shows, I was impressed by the variety of options. The biggest takeaway from my visit to LDI this year is that every day, the worlds of lighting for live design and film are growing closer and closer. Of course films have always been implementing theatrical/show lighting for years and years, but fixtures and methods are becoming more and more affordable, quicker to set up, and thus more and more accessible for short term projects. Some of these concepts will be easy and figured out on the fly, others will require the knowledge and expertise of a programmer, but either way, expect to find remote control lighting continuing to break out on our sets in a big way in 2018.

Written By: Johnny BaumBaum – Shop Manager

John Baumgartner

In three words: Kind, Caring, Balding. With a vast knowledge of camera and lighting gear, John will help see your project through from start to finish. When not knee deep in poorly coiled stingers, John enjoys exploring Philadelphia’s extensive restaurant scene and day sailing on his glorious 13′ yacht.