Large Panel Lighting

[BobJ]

We're erecting a rotating stage with three segment I.E three walls. The director wants the walls internally lit (LED) with translucent screening on either side so as scenes rotate the color of the walls can be changed. We have to break each wall into three 4' x 10' panels with a depth of 8" (Using 2 x 8 for the frame). However provisional experiments with a CORE PAR 40 mounted in one corner and

silk screening front and back, and then "bubble" bath curtain ,we can't

achieve the sort of distributed light we were hoping for. So the questions boils down to how can we LED light 4' x 10' x 8" panels?

[timsabre]

I would edge light all the way round with LED tape - use 5050 tape with 300 leds/metre for max brightness. Use multiple runs of tape side by side if one is not bright enough (it probably won't be). Paint the inside of the edges white,

 

You can get the tape on ebay for about £6-£8 per 5m roll. Make sure you buy enough in one go because if you go back to buy more the led colours might not match.

 

You can get DMX tape drivers on ebay, however the dimming is quite steppy at low brightness (e.g. if you need to do a smooth colour fade from red to blue you will really notice the first few steps of blue coming in). You can get better dimming but the drivers get expensive. Depends what you need to do.

[BobJ]

Well we certainly found LED tape good for smaller panels. So if the 3 or 4 tapes we would need for each of 9 panels proved too expensive we'll have to coerce the director into using smaller individual panels I guess. In the old days they would use fluorescent lights and gel the surface but nowadays that want all of the color changing etc..

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